Moving Beyond Emotional Neglect Toward Connected Parenting

The gift of new life that needs to be nurtured is a rare one that can, unfortunately, be taken for granted. Sometimes, a parent or caregiver can fall short of even their own standards of parenting for one reason or another. This can be distressing, but the best response is to learn from those mistakes and find ways to grow in healthy parenting.

A child has many needs; emotional, physical, and spiritual. One area where parents or caregivers can fall short is in meeting the emotional needs of their child. This failure, which occurs in several ways, is called emotional neglect.

Understanding What Emotional Neglect Is

A child has many needs, including the need for someone to validate their feelings, to listen to them, and they need people around them who have appropriate expectations for them based on their age. If you are the parent or caregiver in a child’s life, they need you to walk alongside them and provide guidance on the challenges they face as they are growing up.

Emotional neglect happens in a variety of ways. At its core, it involves behaviors or acts of omission that don’t allow a child’s emotional needs to be met so that they can flourish. Emotional neglect is when a child has unnoticed or unaddressed emotional needs, and it involves unavailable, unresponsive, and limited emotional interactions between the parent/caregiver and the child.

In addition to the above, when a parent is altogether physically absent, that can also be a form of emotional neglect. When the parent or caregiver exposes the child to domestic violence, doesn’t provide them with adequate structure or support that allows them to thrive, allows or doesn’t intervene when the child engages in maladaptive behaviors or refuses to seek treatment for the child’s emotional problems, those are all different forms of emotional neglect.

Some other examples of emotional neglect may include:

• Being disengaged or uninvolved in a child’s life, lacking an interest in their activities.
• Persistently finding fault with the child.
• Offering little to no encouragement when the child fails a task.
• A lack of emotional support during a child’s difficult times or illness.
• A lack of positive feedback or praise.
• Ignoring the child’s cues for help in problem-solving tasks.
• Withholding or not showing affection, even when requested.
• Not talking to the child often, or spending little time with the child.
• Being unresponsive to the child’s feelings.
• Making the child feel they are unwanted.
• Socially isolating the child.
• Speaking to the child with a cold and unfriendly tone.
• Using verbally aggressive discipline.
• Being emotionally unavailable or absent.
• Ignoring the child.
• Dismissing the child’s emotions.
• Pushing the child past their mental and physical abilities.

A parent or caregiver may show signs of being emotionally neglectful if they persistently show apathy and indifference toward the child, act as though the child is a burden, or use the child to satisfy their personal emotional needs.

How Emotional Neglect Can Happen In Parenting

As pointed out earlier, emotional neglect can happen when a parent or caregiver doesn’t acknowledge, respond to, or meet the needs of a child. More than anything, emotional neglect is about the absence of nurture, connection, or meaningful responses to distress. As emotional neglect is more of an absence of something, it can be difficult to detect because it is subtle, unlike physical or sexual abuse. But how does emotional neglect happen?

Imagine that you’ve had a long and hard day at work. Your boss has been driving you and your team toward your targets, but they’ve left you under-resourced and with a tight deadline. Added to that, the promotion and raise you were hoping for didn’t work out because the organization is tightening its belt right now and not wanting to shuffle things around too much.

That means you’ve had to shelve plans to go on a vacation, you’ll have to wait a bit longer to repair the car, and the leak in the basement will also have to wait. You get home, and as soon as you walk in your child wants to play or tell you about their day. What do you do?

Most parents will likely reply that they’d want to sit down patiently and talk with their child. However, most parents will also admit that this best-case scenario doesn’t always happen. Fatigue and work stress can lead to a parent snapping at their child or being dismissive of their overtures to connect. Most parents know that this is not ideal, but they know they sometimes react in ways that aren’t helpful.

There are other scenarios one can describe where a child has a need or they express a desire to connect, and it’s met with a less-than-ideal response. Bedtime stories, tossing a ball in the backyard, teaching them how to ride a bike, working on a school project, talking through an argument they had with a sibling or friend – these and many other situations are ones where a child wants connection or has needs and emotions that need to be acknowledged and met.

Emotional neglect can exist on a spectrum. A parent or caregiver might meet some but not all of a child’s needs, or they may be inattentive to all of a child’s needs. Additionally, they may not attend to a child’s emotional needs intentionally or inadvertently. As such, a parent may withhold affection as a form of ‘tough love’, or because of gender stereotypes that deny certain forms of emotional expression such as boys crying. Emotional neglect can stem from:

• Ignorance.
• A lack of self-awareness.
• Past trauma or experiences of emotional neglect as a child.
• Discomfort with emotions.
• Limitations due to illness..

Often, adults who have experienced emotional neglect in childhood are more likely to repeat the patterns of neglect they were exposed to. When they see their child acting a certain way and requiring certain needs to be met, it can trigger those memories of neglect, which can lead to the child’s behavior being framed as inappropriate or unacceptable because their own childhood needs were not met.

What Emotional Neglect Does To A Child

Just as a child’s physical needs ought to be met to allow them to flourish physically, a child needs their emotional needs met so that they can thrive. When a child doesn’t have their needs met, that can affect them in profound ways. A child who is emotionally neglected may exhibit signs which include:

• Social withdrawal.
• A lack of confidence.
• Being emotionally volatile and having difficulty controlling their emotions.
• Finding it hard to make or maintain relationships with others.
• Age-inappropriate behavior.
• Mental health challenges such as depression and anxiety.

Not only does emotional neglect affect a child when they are young, but it can have lifelong effects as well. Some of the longer-term impacts of emotional neglect include a greater chance of mental health disorders such as depression, substance use disorder, and anxiety disorders.

Additionally, it may also result in an inability to trust others easily or at all, a distorted sense of self, tending toward internalizing stress, a fear of abandonment, and a lack of boundaries in relationships. It’s important to address any areas of emotional neglect, whether they are inadvertent or intentional.

Moving Toward Connected Parenting

If you’re a parent or caregiver and have come to see that your parenting contains elements of emotional abuse, what can you do? It’s important to recognize that we’re not locked into our past behaviors or our past traumas. It may be difficult to overcome our past and our habits, but it is possible to do so.

Seek accountability, not blame. Rather than address the issues, one can also respond in maladaptive ways, such as turning to substance abuse or abandoning the child entirely to avoid responsibility. It takes courage to face your areas of weakness and remedy them for the sake of your child. Some constructive ways to address any areas of emotional neglect in your parenting include:

Address your past hurts

Your emotional neglect of your child may be the result of neglect you experienced in the past.

Understand why you might be uncomfortable with displays of emotion

Perhaps it’s because of past trauma, gender stereotypes, or cultural norms that shape your expectations.

Learn how to respond appropriately to your child’s needs

Parenting just as you were parenting can be helpful, but it can also ignore the fact that the world has changed, and parenting needs to adapt with it to meet the new challenges and circumstances one’s children find themselves in. It may be helpful to attend parenting classes to learn how to better connect with your child and meet their needs effectively.

Get guidance and support

Whether through a parenting support group or counseling, find others who will help you address areas of concern in your own life that led to emotionally neglectful parenting. Your counselor can help you better embrace your role as a parent, overcoming any ungodly behaviors or patterns of thought that stand in the way of being a great parent to your child.