We know that, for the most part, parents have their children’s wellbeing at heart while raising them. Regrettably, more often than not, what they perceive to be measures taken in the child’s best interest actually ends up causing them more harm than they realize. This is the case for overprotective parents. Overprotective parents want to keep their children from being physically or emotionally hurt, by protecting their children from the harsh cruelties that reality has in store at all costs. However, their approach to said goal can sometimes be misguided and may have serious implications on the child’s development and adulthood.
With the belief that they must keep their children safe, instead of teaching them how to avoid getting hurt or how to take care of themselves when they inevitably do, parents keep their kids in a little bubble; fostering dependence on the parent and a fear of independence on their kid.
They protect their child, yes, but also deprive them of necessary stimuli and experiences.
“But how is that so bad?” some might ask, “The child is protected! It’s not like they’re missing out on anything, they’re just children. What is so horrible about keeping them safe?” The problems and consequences appear when the child has grown up and becomes an adult. Because they were never taught how to be independent or face and heal from emotional hurt, they never had the chance to learn the life skills necessary to face the real world independently.
Before I get into the consequences, allow me to mention things that overprotective parents do to protect their children. Think of Mother Gothel from Disney’s Tangled and how she treats Rapunzel in an overly controlling and overprotective way. This character is a perfect example of actions an overprotective parent will take to “keep their child safe.” They provide constant surveillance and restrictions, they want to control the child’s environment and actions, they’re over-involved in the child’s daily life and decisions, they encourage safety and dependence over autonomy and exploration and always know what’s best for their child and emphasizing this to them at every occasion. “Mother knows best” after all.
Now that we recognize what the parents do, how exactly do these actions affect their children as they grow up? What consequences do they, as adults, then have to face?
They’ll most likely have low self-esteem and self-worth. Because self-esteem is highly dependent on assessing how others regard us, the overprotectiveness exhibited by parents implies to the child they aren’t capable, competent or good enough to manage life by themselves. As they’re growing up, they’re never given the opportunity to prove to themselves that they can accomplish things by themselves, thus growing up believing they can’t. Adulthood then perpetuates this train of thought further. Since, for the most part, they were sheltered and kept separated from reality, they never acquired the skills they needed. They then compare themselves to their peers and see discrepancies in performance that then impacts their self-esteem and self-worth. However, they fail to take into account the fact that the starting lines and training regiments were never the same.
Sadly, these children are also prone to anxiety and depression as they grow up. Parents’ overprotective tendencies stem from their own anxiety because they know the world is a horrible place and so they want to protect their child from it. Because they project their own anxieties of the world onto the child as they’re growing up, the child internalizes and carries the beliefs that the world is a dangerous, horrible place that should be avoided at all costs and those anxieties towards the unknown into their teenage and adulthood. Ways parents project their anxieties would be, for example, through excessive childproofing when they’re babies to approval of who their child can be friends with as teenagers, actions which lead to social anxiety as well.
As teenagers and college students who have grown up surrounded by those anxieties, they are already accustomed to dealing with and feeling that fear of the unknown and anxiety towards the outside world. This, in turn, could lead to depression as well. Because they’ve learnt to avoid and not deal with new situations, they stay in their comfort zone even when it’s detrimental to them and their mental health. For example, they’re straight out of high school prepas at university, they don’t know anyone there, they never learned how to make friends because their parents did that for them and because they’re so anxious and accustomed to avoiding situations out of their comfort zones, they would rather self-isolate, never make friends and stay alone; which, of course, leads to or furthers their depression.
When the child grows up shielded and protected from all bad things and also having all their decisions being made for them, two things will happen: 1. they assume that the real world has to be truly horrible and 2. they will believe that they probably couldn’t manage anyway. These children then grow up to feel overwhelming shame and doubt over their actions. They might be overly sensitive and react negatively to disapproval and criticism, they might second-guess themselves constantly and judge themselves harshly when they perceive something they said or did was wrong. Since they learnt to feel worthy through discipline and obedience, then the independence and autonomy that comes with growing up feels foreign and wrong. This also leads to guilt when exercising that independence or autonomy because it feels like something they aren’t supposed to do.
We understand by now that overprotective parents value dependency over autonomy. They tend to be overly vigilant of what their child does so when the child is behaving in the “correct way,” they receive their parent’s approval. This approval will most likely be tied to the only praise and love they’ll receive from their parents. The children begin to correlate that approval of their “good” behavior with love and the way to achieve their own happiness which leads to approval-seeking and people-pleasing tendencies. As teenagers and adults, these children ensure that they are liked first before they can show their true selves. They might do this either by molding their personalities to be what the other person wants or by never saying no or placing boundaries. Then, in relationships (platonic or romantic), they resort to being “pushovers” and “people-pleasers,” to putting others’ needs above their own for fear of being alone or rejected. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t want to be liked or that you shouldn’t want others’ approval, it’s when you depend on those things from others to feel happy or loved that it becomes unhealthy.
Risk-taking behaviors are also a consequence of growing up with overprotective parents. As children who have been under constant vigilance and pressure from their parents their whole lives, once they become teenagers or adults and are presented with the freedom and personal autonomy that comes with becoming their own person, they either are 1. excessively reserved, timid and averse to risk or 2. they will go through a rebellious phase as teenagers or what I affectionately call the “late stage teenage rebellion” phase as adults. This includes any activity that will, essentially, compensate for the lack of freedom or personal autonomy they experienced as they grew up. Activities like excessive partying, alcohol and drug abuse, doing extreme sports, getting tattoos and piercings, etc. Some of these actions could result in serious physical harm while others can be cathartic and healing, but they all seem to accomplish one thing: to have the person experience the ability to control their own life and feel the freedom from their parent’s controlling grip.
Overprotective parents may often also instill a need for perfection in their children, leading to perfectionist adults. As children, they became used to their parent’s need for perfection being tied to how much affection they received. Once they grow up, they believe the only way to feel loved and cared for by their parents, or at all, is by themselves, being perfect; be that by excelling in studies or being the poster kid for “perfect, well-behaved child.” As adults, this might manifest as adopting their parent’s perfectionism but using it to exert control over their own lives. This perfectionism and need for control contributes to problems within their relationships. Since they were probably instilled from a young age that no one is good enough or trust-worthy and they can only trust themselves, and sometimes not even themselves but only their parents, they find it difficult to relent their control and connect with other people.
An insecure attachment style in relationships is also a consequence of overprotective parenting. An anxious ambivalent attachment is formed when the child is not encouraged to be curious and explore the world and instead bonds to their parents in an anxious or clingy way. These kids can’t rely on their parents for emotional stability because the parents have inconsistent, and therefore unreliable, attitudes. This develops into a preoccupied attachment style as adults where they’re more focused on pursuing a romantic relationship because they never feel fully secure in the relationships they do form. They generally assume the role of pursuer because they learned that the only way to receive affection from their parents was when they were acting desperate or had extremely negative reactions to things. They’re constantly scared that their partner will abandon them or reject them, regardless of what they do or how much they’re loved, often ignoring their partner’s reassurances in favor of believing their own anxieties.
However, if the overprotective parenting was particularly traumatic, the child might have grown to resent their parents and stay emotionally and even physically distant to protect themselves which indicates an anxious avoidant attachment style. They learned that their needs will not be met and that close relationships lead to hurt they can’t process and so they learned to be emotionally distant and simply avoid intimacy at all costs. This then translates into a dismissive attachment style in adulthood where the adult would rather avoid intimacy completely or feel uncomfortable when a relationship becomes too intimate and breaks it off. This might also manifest as having extremely high standards, due to the added perfectionism, and hoping for a fairytale perfect person and relationship, which doesn’t exist; realizing that no one is perfect and everyone has flaws is normally shocking to these adults.
The last of these consequences I’ll be mentioning is a difficulty with being authentic and honest towards, not only others, but themselves as well. When their primary preoccupation lay within avoiding discipline or punishment and receiving love and affection from their parents, 1. they learned to relent, be obedient and give up on feeling any kind of autonomy or independence or 2. they learned to lie and hide their true self from others so that they presented how their parents wanted them to, while also pursuing what they wanted. Constantly seeking that validation and appreciation from others, while hiding their true self, leads to feeling unable to express themselves authentically for fear of losing those they love or rely on. Relying on the opinions of others makes it even more difficult to feel comfortable being authentic because they fear that others will reject them in favor of the image they presented at first. This hiding of their authentic self ultimately harms them the most as they harbor and hold on to disappointment, guilt, resentment and frustration for themselves. Not to mention how other people might sense that they’re being dishonest and keep their distance, leading to feeling misunderstood and lonely.
The influence a parent has on the mind and development of the child they’re raising is truly incomparable. The effects of the actions a parent makes lasts for the child’s entire life. Overprotective parenting keeps them unhurt while they’re in their grasp, but they can’t stay in a cage forever. Those actions parents take and words they say under the guise of keeping their child safe, stay with them forever. They will be teenagers who would rather say no to going to the movies with friends than ask their parents for permission and be rejected and given a speech about how dangerous being outside after five pm is. They will be college students with no friends, staying by themselves because they would rather be alone than talk to someone and be rejected. They will be adults who can’t handle retail or food jobs because they’re terrified of being yelled at by strangers.
Everything a parent says and does to their child, stays with them for their entire lives and affects them well after the parent has already died.
I personally grew up with overprotective parents and, as I did the research for this article, I remembered the words my therapist told me on our very first session together. I was describing what I could remember of my upbringing and my parents and she said something along the lines of “Y’know, overprotective parenting is considered abuse,” and I said “Well, no I don’t consider what they did was abuse,” because I thought she had asked me. She responded, “No, no, I’m saying it is abuse.” And I sat there in the silence that followed, let that statement sink in and started crying. I didn’t fully understand the scope of the effect my parents had had on me. Not then. Not until I continued therapy. Not until I read the research. Not until I wrote about it and had to hold myself back from including my personal experience at every example.
It’s a very alienating and lonely experience to realize how much your parents’ decisions and actions messed you up. It feels like you’re supposed to love and respect your parents and owe them for taking care of you and raising you, but how can you do that when you know how many issues you have because of them and their actions?
If you find yourself relating to this, recognizing yourself or your parents within this article, you’re not alone and it’s okay to feel resentment. It’s okay to be angry and sad. You’re not irreparably broken. If you have the resources, go to therapy. Believe me when I say it will help. You’re worthy of love for simply existing, with no strings attached. And you will be okay. It’s many conflicting emotions but you do what’s best for you because, at the end of the day, you’re with yourself all the time. The least you could do is be pleasant company for yourself on this rollercoaster of life.
We are not our parents and you are your own person deserving of love, appreciation and respect.
Reference: Therapist Joanna Pantazi’s blog “8 negative effects of overprotective parents.”