Key Points
Non-narcissistic parents can take specific steps to help children develop emotional health and coping skills.
The goals are to reduce role reversal, increase assertiveness, and reduce enmeshment.
A new coping skill involves shifting children’s focus on themselves and away from the egocentric parent.
Another coping skill involves recognizing that there are two people in the relationship between the self-absorbed parent and the child.
In many families, children spend time with a narcissistic parent. This is true whether the parents are married, never married, or divorced. Self-centered parents create specific difficulties for their children—boundary violations, role reversal, enmeshment, lack of recognition of feelings/emotions, neglect, and obstacles to individuation. Difficulties can create feelings of low self-esteem, guilt, shame, depression, anxiety, and diminished sense of agency, and lead to self-destructive behaviors (Maatta et al).
Many studies focus on how to help young people deal with their narcissistic parents once they are adults (Covert, 2020; Foster, 2019; Hart, 2019; & Overt, 2019). But what about ways to help young children who are still living with their narcissistic parents?
Goals to Help Children Cope Better
Non-self-centered parents seek to help children grow in developmentally healthy ways. They want their children to have self-esteem, confidence, and the ability to share feelings and express opinions (Jabin et al., 2021; Brommelman & Sedikides, 2020).
The core pathology of narcissists is over-involvement in their wants and needs. This means that they exclude their children from being considered significant and separate people. Instead, they become emotionally involved and dependent on their children for emotional care, as if the children were there to raise them.
Related : Narcissist Parents Leave You Too Little — And Too Much Space
Here are three goals to help children cope better with self-absorbed parents. One goal is to reduce role reversal. This frees children from feeling like they have to care for and nurture their parents emotionally.
The second goal is to increase children’s sense of being individuals and reduce their involvement with a self-centered parent.
The third goal is to create experiences with another type of parenting—one that is empathetic and acknowledges their children’s individuality and their right to their feelings and opinions.
How Non-Egocentric Parents Can Help Their Children
Since narcissistic parents often marry and divorce non-egocentric spouses, non-egocentric parents are the ones who can help their children figure out how to cope and grow emotionally (Martin & Adams, 2018).
In conversations with your children, allow them to share their observations and feelings about their selfish parents. Don’t tease them. Don’t refute or correct them. Instead, listen and accept their feelings and thoughts about what it all means to them. Help them name the behaviors of the selfish parent that bothers them. Help them name their emotional reactions to this parent.
Ask children to think about their proposed solutions for dealing with their narcissistic parent. Then try role-playing different scenarios with them.
You may need professional mental health help for yourself and your child while you do this. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Don’t allow any bullying or abuse of your child by a narcissistic parent. Take appropriate steps to report such instances to law enforcement and get help with intervention if they do occur.
5 Steps to Improve Your Child’s Emotional Health
To achieve your specific goals, here are five suggestions that may reduce entanglement, increase your child’s sense of control over their life, increase their self-confidence and self-esteem, and provide new skills for dealing with interactions with a narcissistic parent.
Step One: Empathetic parents need to practice what they preach. They need to practice what they preach in their routines. They need to demonstrate how to secure their boundaries and how not to be manipulated by the selfish parent.
Step Two: To remove the selfish parent from your child’s spotlight, remind your child that the narcissistic parent is perfectly capable of taking care of himself.
Saying something like, “He took care of himself long before you were born and he can do it now,” helps your child feel less responsible for the selfish parent’s well-being. Again, the non-narcissistic parent needs to act in a way that demonstrates appropriate behavior—not submissive or submissive to the selfish parent.
Related : 5 Steps To Finally Heal (And Move On) From Your Narcissist Parent
Step Three: Help your child focus more on himself. “What should a seven-year-old (or ten-year-old or thirteen-year-old) be thinking and doing at your age?” The question to ask will bring your child back to the present.
Shouldn’t a seven-year-old be focused on school, friends, and play activities? Shouldn’t a ten-year-old also be involved in sleepovers, movies, reading, and outdoor games? Shouldn’t a fifteen-year-old be interested in the opposite sex, shopping, extracurricular activities, sports, and music, as well as studying?
Step Four: Discuss with your child the importance of recognizing that there are two people in every relationship. One person doesn’t get all the airtime and doesn’t have the right to dictate how the other person feels and acts. Children have the right to express their opinions and feelings, even if the self-centered parent doesn’t want to listen or acknowledge their opinions. Again, the non-narcissistic parent should model how-to behaviors, because children learn more from what they see than what they are told.
Help your children express their thoughts, opinions, and feelings to their self-centered parent by figuring out how to say something like:
“You’re not the boss of what I think or feel.”
“This is what I think or how I react to what you say/do/ask me to do.”
Step Five: For children who are unhappy with joint custody and who struggle with it when their parents separate, I add another step. This is for children who spend fifty percent or more of their time with a parent who is self-centered and wants to spend less time with that parent. I suggest getting them to speak up and communicate their desires to that parent. This is the exact opposite of what narcissists want. They don’t want to hear other people’s ideas. They want to be the boss of everyone.
Figuring out how to say something like, “I want to spend more time with Daddy (or Mommy). Please let me do this” will help your children develop a sense of agency, ask for what they need, and believe that they are equally important in the relationship. These five steps are intended to give children with narcissistic parents the agency they need and the resilience to become whole and confident, even when faced with the adversity that a self-centered parent who wants to ignore, scold, or manipulate them might face.
