By Sadiq Ahmad
Being keen on Christopher Berry-Dee’s book Talking with Psychopaths and Savages, I have been pedantic to each character’s acts as psychological thick developments about their formative years as children. The book made me reflect on how deeply parental behaviour influences behavioural development, and how certain characteristics are absorbed long before a child is capable of understanding them.
A child does not simply listen to his parents; he watches them. During the developmental stages, the child’s mind absorbs patterns of information repeatedly given and conditioned. The family becomes the child’s first psychological environment, and parents become his earliest model of how human beings behave in respective social settings.
This is where mirroring becomes important. When a narcissistic parent treats a child as an extension of oneself, at that point the child becomes the reflection of their parent’s ego, ambitions, fears, and emotional needs. The parent does not realize that the child is learning not only what to think, but how to behave.
A parent with an inflated ego, unbeknownst to the consequences, teaches the child that superiority is desirable. A parent constantly seeking validation creates a child with the same need for validation. A parent who believes he deserves special treatment cultivates a sense of entitlement in the child, and a parent who cannot accept criticism or admit wrongdoing unintentionally teaches the child a failure to accept responsibility.
Sometimes the lesson is even more subtle.
When a child repeatedly watches a parent humiliate others, manipulate people, display callousness, or show a lack of empathy, these behaviours gradually become normal in the child’s mind. The child’s mental schemas of social beings are patterned and he/she learns that domination is strength, apology is weakness, and that other people’s feelings are less important than one’s own interests.
Adding to the dynamic, narcissistic characteristics do not emerge from one parental behaviour alone. A child who experiences emotional deprivation, constant comparison, and rejection also develops a fragile sense of self-worth and an intense dependence on external validation. Behind an apparently grandiose personality, there will sometimes be a deeply insecure self.
This is why parenting deserves more attention than simply providing education, discipline, and material comfort. Parents are also shaping their child’s social conscience, emotional boundaries, sense of responsibility, and understanding of other human beings.
Parents should therefore ask themselves a more important question: How successful will my child become?
They should understand and ask themselves: What kind of human being am I teaching my child to become? A humanly human or a raving creature?
A child should learn confidence without majestic zeal, ambition without conceit, self-respect without contempt, and strength without cruelty. He/she should learn that making a mistake requires remorse, that hurting someone requires an apology, and that success does not give him superiority over others.
Children are not exact copies of their parents. Genetics, temperament, society, education, peers, and personal choices all contribute to personality. Parents could be seen as mere players playing in the development of their children’s well-being; however, parents are among the first architects of a child’s psychological world.
They pour into their children their own values, attitudes, emotional habits, fears, expectations–and sometimes their unresolved egos. What we pour into our children during their developmental years shall eventually become the behaviour they carry into the world. That is why parenting is not merely the raising of a child; it is, in many ways, the introduction of a human being to himself or herself.
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