Young children believe what their parents tell them.
In addition to ignoring a child’s emotional needs, parents can also damage a child’s self-esteem with derogatory names and harsh criticism. So, children learn to tune into other people’s feelings and suppress their own. For example, a young child might learn to hide under the bed whenever mom and dad start arguing or a child might learn that consoling mom after that argument earns her mom’s affection. Some children become highly attuned to how their parents are behaving so they can try to avoid their wrath. Instead, their focus is on noticing and managing other people’s feelings – their safety often depends on it.
This, of course, damages a child’s self-esteem and causes them to feel unimportant and unworthy of love and attention.Īnd children in dysfunctional families don’t learn how to notice, value, and attend to their own feelings. Children experience this as my feelings don’t matter, so I don’t matter. The result is Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN). Parents who are dealing with their own problems or are taking care of (often enabling) an addicted or dysfunctional partner, don’t have the time, energy, or emotional intelligence to pay attention to, value, and support their children’s feelings. Quite simply, dysfunctional families don’t know how to deal with feelings in healthy ways. As a result, children feel highly stressed, anxious, and unlovable. In dysfunctional families, adults tend to be so preoccupied with their own problems and pain that they don’t give their children what they need and crave – consistency, safety, unconditional love. For example, children in dysfunctional families often describe feeling anxious about coming home from school because they don’t know what they will find. They feel like they have to walk on eggshells in their own home for fear of upsetting their parents or unleashing their parent's’ rage and abuse. In addition, children often experience their parents’ behavior as erratic or unpredictable. Sometimes there are overly harsh or arbitrary rules and other times there is little supervision and no rules or guidelines for the children. But in dysfunctional families, children’s needs are often neglected or disregarded and there aren’t clear rules or realistic expectations. Instead, one of the children has to take on these adult responsibilities at an early age.Ĭhildren also need structure and routine to feel safe they need to know what to expect.
Often, this doesn’t happen in dysfunctional families because parents don’t fulfill their basic responsibilities to provide for, protect, and nurture their children.
But in dysfunctional families, caregivers are neither consistent nor attuned to their children.ĭysfunctional families tend to be unpredictable, chaotic, and sometimes frightening for children.Ĭhildren feel safe when they can count on their caregivers to consistently meet their physical needs (food, shelter, protecting them from physical abuse or harm) and emotional needs (noticing their feelings, comforting them when they’re distressed). In order to thrive, physically and emotionally, children need to feel safe - and they rely on a consistent, attuned caregiver for that sense of safety. The effects of growing up in a dysfunctional family
Understanding some of the family rules that dominate dysfunctional families can help us to break free of these patterns and rebuild our self-esteem and form healthier relationships. Rigid family rules and roles develop in dysfunctional families that help maintain the dysfunctional family system and allow the addict to keep using or the abuser to keep abusing. Over time, the family begins to revolve around maintaining the status quo – the dysfunction. If you grew up in a family with a chemically dependent, mentally ill, or abusive parent, you know how hard it is - and you know that everyone in the family is affected.