Give Your Kids What You Never Had: 5 Ways to Stop Childhood Emotional Neglect

You can give your kids what you never had.

Few things can make a difference in your parenting as much as healing your emotional neglect.

It’s true! To explain why we must first take a look at your own parents.

Emotional neglect (CEN) happens when your parents, even if they loved and cared about you, failed to validate your emotions enough while they were raising you.

This seemingly small failure seems so simple, and yet its effects on you, the child, were profound. In fact, they still run deep within you to this day.

When your parents did not notice, respond to, or validate your feelings enough, they sent you a powerful, subliminal message:

Your feelings do not matter.

When you received this message over and over again, your adaptive child brain knew just what to do. It walled off your emotions so that they would not burden your parents, or yourself.

This may have worked to cope in your childhood home, but as you grew into an adult, you needed access to your feelings. Now, the emotions that should be energizing, connecting, directing, and informing you are less accessible than you need them to be.

This fundamental disconnection within you affects your life in many important ways. But none of the effects are as great as the ones in your parenting.

Your CEN, invisible, unmemorable, and not your fault, quietly transfers itself from you to your children. Mostly because it’s so very hard to give your child something that you never got yourself.

There are clear ways for you to heal your emotional neglect, and as you do, you will naturally become a better parent.

How CEN Can Affect Your Parenting

• If your parents didn’t notice, respond to and validate your feelings enough, it’s hard for you to notice, respond to, and validate your child’s feelings enough.
• Emotion skills are meant to be learned in childhood. Did your parents teach you how to recognize, name, manage and express your feelings? Are you able to teach your child those skills now?
• Did you feel enough empathy and emotional support from your parents as a child? If not, you are probably quite hard on yourself to this day. How does this treatment of yourself affect your parenting?
• Did your parents see you clearly as they raised you? Do they now? If your parents have not seen and understood your true nature as a person, you may now struggle to understand yourself. And, by extension, your child.
• Did you feel fully accepted and loved when you were growing up? Do you truly accept yourself, and love yourself now? It is not your fault at all, but this may make it a struggle to fully accept your child in the way she needs it.

Believe it or not, there is a remarkable thing about childhood emotional neglect (CEN). You can begin to treat yourself in the exact opposite ways that you were treated as a child.

As you give yourself what you never got, you will then have it to give to your children.

5 Ways Healing Your Emotional Neglect Makes You a Better Parent

1. The more you begin to value and attend to your own emotions, the more attuned you will be to your child’s feelings.

When you say, “Are you angry right now?” or “You look sad,” to your child, you are automatically teaching her about her feelings. She will grow up attuned to herself.

2. As you work to learn emotion skills, you will automatically teach them to your child.

Learning to name your feelings, sit with them, manage and express them when needed are all skills your child will see and experience in her relationship with you.

3. As you treat yourself with more compassion, you can help your child have more compassion for himself.

As you learn to accept that you are human and that you, like all humans, make mistakes, you will stop being so hard on yourself.

You’ll be able to show and teach your children how to learn from their missteps, forgive themselves, and move forward, instead of harshly judging themselves.

4. Beginning to pay attention to what you feel, need, like, and dislike will set a great example for your child.

You will be showing him that you are worth paying attention to, and this will make you better able to see him clearly too. You will be teaching him to pay attention to himself, and he will see himself reflected in your eyes.

He will grow up knowing himself and feeling deep down that he matters.

5. Working to accept yourself and love who you are can set your child up to feel this way about herself.

Armed with healthy self-love, and a sense that you are good enough, your child will learn self-love too and will grow up feeling strong, and knowing, deep down, that she is lovable. You did not choose to grow up with emotional neglect. In fact, as a child, you very likely didn’t even realize it was happening to you.

But now, as an adult, you can choose to heal your emotional neglect. And when you do, you are setting yourself on a clear path to being happier and healthier and being a more connected, effective parent to your children.

Making the decision to heal your emotional neglect is like saying to many generations going back in your family line: “The buck stops here. I will not deliver this burden to my children.”

And what could be more important, or more worthwhile, than that?

To learn more about how CEN affects your parenting and other relationships, Take the Emotional Neglect Questionnaire and see Jonice Webb’s book, Running on Empty No More: Transform Your Relationships With Your Partner, Your Parents & Your Children.

A version of this article first appeared on YourTango.com. It has been reproduced here with the permission of the author.