The Parenting Style That Turns Kids Into Narcissists
The Parenting Style That Turns Kids Into Narcissists
Rearing kids to become adult narcissists seems easier today than at any other point in human history. Just give them a smartphone, a few social media accounts, and a trophy for participation. Right?
It’s a reasonable presumption, but researchers at the University of Amsterdam took a more methodical approach to determine what kind of parenting yields narcissistic kids—those who “feel superior to others, fantasize about personal success, and believe they deserve special treatment.” The team studied 565 kids and 705 parents over two years and tested two hypotheses for what makes kids narcissists: parental worship or a lack of parental warmth.
Your Kids Are not Unique
Parents who “overvalue” their kids by teaching them that they’re unique and extraordinary—which they all are, of course—encourage those kids to have an inflated view of themselves and a less charitable view of others. The kids grow up to expect the world will treat them the way their parents do. Which it inevitably doesn’t.
That’s particularly troubling because the study suggests that narcissism is growing more common. “Narcissism scores have been increasing over the past few decades among university students in the United States,” said Eddie Brummelman, lead author of the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and is the first to measure the emergence of narcissism among kids aged 7-12. “Unfortunately, little is known about why narcissism seems to be on the rise in the West.”
In an earlier study, “My Child Is God’s Gift to Humanity …,” the same research team used a questionnaire and scale to measure the distance between how much parents value their children and how the children objectively perform. They concluded, not surprisingly, that “overvalued children are not more intelligent than other children.” They used the same questionnaire and scale in this new PNAS study. Parents are asked to rate statements, such as “My child is more special than other children,” and kids evaluate such lines as “I like to think about how incredibly nice I am.” Another section, the “Parental Overclaiming Questionnaire,” asks parents to say how familiar their child is with various books and historical events, people, and places, such as D-Day, the Russian Passage, and Sherlock Holmes. Never heard of the Russian Passage? That’s because it doesn’t exist. The list—which was adapted from Edward Hirsch’s The New First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy—includes fake items to suss out parents inclined to claim that their kids know more than they possibly could.
The researchers also point to what may be the best parenting strategy for well-adjusted, non-narcissistic kids: a combination of “parental warmth” and realism about children’s abilities. Self-esteem, they write, may be the foil to narcissism, as it comes from being accepted by others and highly regarded, rather than imposing a vision of oneself on the world. “High self-esteem, unlike narcissism, predicts lower levels of anxiety and depression over time,” they write.
Unchecked, the authors posit, narcissistic people can “contribute to societal problems such as aggression and violence.” This supposition, which isn’t central to the otherwise interesting, family-focused research, has been the subject of an academic debate that has spilled into the popular press: Do millennials, raised on the Internet and social media, really make the ’70s “Me Generation” look like ascetic monks? The debate pivots on the reliability of both a generation-old personality survey and the people it’s normally given to—college students at a handful of universities.
Encourage the concept of ‘Generation We’ instead of ‘Generation Me’
Society might indeed be getting more narcissistic. But it might just as easily be getting less so, encouraging a “Generation We” over “Generation Me,” writes Jeffrey Jensen Arnett of Clark University, as the Internet makes it easier for individuals to find and help each other. While that debate continues, the value of this latest study is its attention to what parents are doing and how they might change course if they decide that they need to.
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