When you talk to people who are emotionally well-balanced as well as fairly secure and confident in themselves, you’ll often find that they grew up in households where they were loved, supported, and taught valuable life lessons from their parents and caregivers.
In contrast, many of those who struggle with the demands of daily life experienced emotional invalidation or neglect growing up. An emotionally nurturing environment is key to the development of emotional intelligence, and as such, some of the key things that children who were emotionally neglected miss out on learning are as follows.
1. How to regulate challenging emotions when they arise.
Nurturing parents do their best to teach their kids emotional regulation and management from a very early age. They’ll teach them sign language so they can communicate pain and sadness before they have the words to do so, and encourage them to do things like breathing exercises, self-soothing, and distraction techniques.
Of course, there will be natural variation in how well a child (and adult) can regulate their emotions. Neurodivergence, for example, can make it biologically harder for a person’s nervous system to remain calm.
That said, naming emotions, leading by example wherever possible, and coregulating with a child lay the foundation for healthy emotional regulation throughout childhood and adolescence and well into adulthood. The adults who can’t regulate their own emotions are often those whose parents neglected to teach them regulation techniques, or whose parents struggle with emotional regulation themselves.
2. That feelings don’t necessarily reflect reality, and it’s important to verify before acting on them.
The phrase “don’t believe everything you think” is one that should be taught to every young person, as it reminds them that their negative self-talk, unfounded anxieties, etc., don’t always reflect reality, and shouldn’t influence their behavior.
Children who aren’t taught this at an early age, and who aren’t shown strategies to overcome these thoughts, can end up at the mercy of their own mental maelstroms. Unfortunately, when many of us went to our parents for guidance about these experiences in our youth, we were invalidated and simply told to “stop being ridiculous,” rather than given instructions about how to determine fiction vs. reality.
Many people never learn that discernment, and end up suffering from intrusive, harmful thoughts for the rest of their lives.
3. That their feelings aren’t less important than someone else’s
Emotionally neglected children usually get used to having their feelings invalidated by those around them. Their parents and caregivers saw the kids’ emotions through a lens of their own experience, rather than acknowledging that these little ones were experiencing big feels for the first time, which was difficult and weird for them to navigate.
Instead of acknowledging this difficulty, their immediate response may have been to brush them aside. For example, take a child who’s expressing grief because their hamster — their first pet ever — has died. Their parents might have told them not to make such a fuss: it’s just a rodent, and the child’s grief is nothing compared to how sad they were when grandma died.
The grief may be different because of life experience and closeness, but for the child, their hurt was the biggest, most awful thing they had felt thus far, and they were simply told that their feelings just didn’t matter.
This kind of emotional invalidation can leave a lasting impact, with adults learning to invalidate their own suffering because others “have it worse.” Yes, someone will always have it worse than you, but that doesn’t make your pain any less real. If that were so, then only one person, the person with the worst ever pain imaginable, would be allowed to grieve.
4. That it’s okay to express their feelings, but not to lose control over them.
Just about everyone will experience intense waves of emotion at some point, and it’s vitally important to learn how to work through them. Healthy parents teach their kids healthy ways to express their feelings, as well as how to release big bursts of emotional energy in a productive manner. By doing so, children learn how to manage their emotions in difficult circumstances and release them when they’re in the right space and frame of mind to do so.
Without these skills, they grow into adults who can’t find a balance between suppressed and uncontrollable emotions. They might push their feelings down, but then they may be quick to lose their temper and may even react violently. They’ll likely be filled with genuine remorse afterwards and, as such, strive to push those emotions further down rather than work through them, only for the cycle to repeat itself.
5. That there’s no such thing as “good” or “bad” emotions.
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” – Hamlet (Act 2, Scene 2)
Children who receive strong emotional support in their youth are taught that there’s no such thing as a “good” or “bad” feeling, but that each one can be positive or negative depending on circumstances and action. For example, anger can be intensely beneficial for motivating someone to seek justice, and joy may be hurtful if it’s inspired by someone else’s pain.
Emotionally neglected children are usually left to sort their feelings out for themselves or punished for showing certain emotions, which can lead to them adopting very black-and-white thinking when it comes to the emotions they feel.
As a result, they may experience shame if they don’t feel positive and happy all the time, with the mistaken belief that feelings like sadness, envy, and disappointment are “bad” or “wrong” and need to be ignored unless they want to become an awful, unlikeable person.
6. That talking to the right people isn’t a weakness.
When you have good, trustworthy folks in your life with whom you can open up and trust, you learn that your burdens aren’t always yours to shoulder alone. Of course, it’s important to be prudent about who you share even the details of your affairs with. But when you have true friends or adults in your life whom you can depend upon, they can help make things easier. With them, you can express things that you’re feeling with openness and honesty, and in turn, they can offer perspectives you may not have considered otherwise.
In contrast, those who are neglected in childhood, either by their parents or their social circles, often never learn how to be discerning about whom to open up to and trust. They may spill all of their personal secrets to individuals who end up betraying them, or go the opposite route and refuse to share anything with anyone — including healthcare professionals.
7. How to identify emotions and differentiate between them.
Most of us learn how to identify physical damage on a pain scale when we’re very young. As a result, we learn to differentiate whether we’re in pain or simply uncomfortable, and if we are in pain, how bad it is on a scale of one to ten.
Emotions can be much more difficult to understand and discern, particularly if it’s not a skill you naturally possess. Those who aren’t taught how to differentiate between them can struggle with overlap and confusion later in life.
A perfect example of this would be someone who feels a churning sensation in their stomach but is unable to determine whether that’s because they’re hungry, unwell, excited, or nervous about something. Without learning to identify and name emotions and how they manifest in our bodies, we can’t know what action we need to take to work through that feeling.
8. That it’s every individual’s responsibility to manage their own emotions — not everyone else’s job to do so.
This is an issue that has been growing in recent years, and usually involves someone feeling triggered in a situation due to their own perceptions or personal experiences. Instead of doing what’s needed to manage this uneasiness, they expect everyone around them to change whatever they’re doing to stop and make them more comfortable. Furthermore, they often seek to police others’ behaviors to curate an existence that encompasses their own personal preferences.
It’s a tricky one, because it’s reasonable to expect people not to talk about traumatic topics without checking first that you have bandwidth, but at the same time, we can’t expect the world to restructure itself around our individual sensitivities. Learning to remove ourselves from uncomfortable situations or employ coping strategies is a crucial life skill, but unfortunately, not everyone is taught it.
This often happens when kids who felt uneasy or upset about something weren’t comforted (or taught how to self-soothe), and as such, ended up trying to control the unsettling environment rather than learning how to manage their own feelings. It’s the emotional equivalent of expecting the heat to be turned up in a room when they feel cold, instead of putting on a sweater to regulate their own body temperature.
Final thoughts…
Although the parents of emotionally neglected kids did them a great disservice by not giving them essential skills and building blocks during their formative years, some of that damage can be either undone or mitigated in adulthood. It does take work, though.
The key is to develop self-awareness and recognize where the shortcomings are so they can be addressed and built upon in a healthy manner. Therapy may be needed to support this. With the right support, people can both heal themselves and break generational patterns so their own children don’t end up being neglected the same way they were.
