If your child turns out to be a narcissist, you can’t blame it on their genes but rather on the quality of your own parenting in their earliest years of life, according to one of Australia’s foremost experts on narcissism.
First published at kidspot.com.au on October 13, 2016.
The development of narcissistic behaviours isn’t something your child is born with but is caused by parents who don’t – or are unable to – meet all of their child’s emotional needs during the early stages of their emotional development, according to esteemed psychologist Julie Hart from The Hart Centre.
“No one is ‘born’ with narcissism or comes into the world ‘narcissistically inclined’,” she tells Kidspot. “It develops in early childhood at around the ages of two, three or four, when it’s really important for children to have their emotional needs met by their parents or caregivers.”
The role of bad parenting
Meeting the emotional needs of a young child may include expressing love and showing genuine empathy during times of emotional distress, ensuring they feel physically and emotionally safe in the home, instilling confidence, showing interest in them, encouraging independence and setting clear and consistent boundaries and routines.
“It’s really crucial that we have carers who can give us these things at an early age … but so many people don’t – or haven’t – and that’s where narcissistic traits can develop from.”
At the other extreme, Julie says that children whose parents offer too much emotional support and inflate a child’s sense of importance above others are also at high risk of developing narcissistic tendencies.
“The combination of those two, I guess, is what helps us develop high self-esteem; that our needs and feelings are important, but also that other people’s needs and feelings are important as well,” Julie says.
“It’s when young children don’t have those carers who provide them with these things that narcissistic traits can develop.”
Schoolgirl taking selfie with smartphone sitting cross-legged on window sill in her room
The traits can develop in childhood. Picture: istock
Narcissism 101
Julie describes the main characteristics of narcissism as feeling superior, self-entitled, living in a fantasy world, needing to be admired, manipulative, lacking in empathy, unapologetic, detesting criticism, changeable and moody.
“Narcissists think like, ‘I’m the most important person in the world, no one else counts, I’m better than them, I cannot understand what it would be like to be someone else’.”
Depending on the severity of these traits, a narcissist’s actions and attitudes can significantly impact the people around them but will remain blissfully unaware of the chaos they may leave in their wake.
“Narcissism is on a spectrum and there’s a huge level of degrees from one extreme to the other,” Julie explains.
Extreme narcissism is a condition known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), which affects around one percent of the population. “At the disorder end of the spectrum, a narcissist is almost impossible to live with and will create enormous difficulty and havoc in everybody’s lives.”
Arrested emotional ‘development’
Julie describes the emotional development of a narcissist as being ‘arrested’ in early childhood. “Emotionally, narcissists really are like three-year-olds,” she says. “It’s almost like the narcissist’s emotional development is arrested at this age.”
She says that while three-year-olds are naturally narcissistic at this age, their further development assures it to be just a phase. For the narcissist, however, development halts and any time after that narcissism can show itself.
They may appear like spoiled brats as children but narcissistic traits will become particularly obvious in their teenage years. “The narcissists will cope by putting on a brave front, not showing any weaknesses, making themselves out to be bigger and bolder than anyone else,” she says.
“But they’re not as strong as other people – they’re going overboard in terms of strength, superiority and grandiosity to compensate for the fact that they have this low self-esteem.
Julie says self-esteem plays a fundamental role in narcissism. “If you know you’ve got low self-esteem, you might think, ‘I don’t feel as important as anybody else’ – that’s the obvious form of low self-esteem,” she says.
“The other form of low self-esteem is narcissism, which is you actually feel terrible about yourself but you create this grandiose bubble that makes you feel better about yourself.
“A person with a healthy self-esteem might consider themselves strong, stand up for themselves and refuse to be walked over but they also realise that other people count, too … That’s the difference.”
The narcissistic parent
A narcissistic parent would have a limited ability, owing to their own lack of self-awareness, to be able to meet their own child’s emotional needs. Therefore, Julie says it’s highly likely the child will develop narcissistic traits themselves or go to the other extreme and become the opposite of narcissistic – ‘co-dependent’ or a ‘sacrificial self’.
“While narcissists have this overly developed sense of entitlement, a sacrificial self has this under sense of entitlement but either way, both are formed from low self-esteem,” she explains.
“The difference is that sacrificial selves consciously feel terrible about themselves, whereas the narcissist will create a grandiose bubble of self-importance around themselves to feel better about who they are.”
Check out The Hart Centre’s 100-point Narcissist Profile to learn more.
