What is Childhood Emotional Neglect?
/Childhood emotional neglect is what a child experiences when their caregiver is unable, or unwilling, to notice and respond to their emotional needs. This type of neglect exists on a spectrum, can be intentional or not, and is understood by many to be a form of emotional abuse. For their contributing chapter, Family Function and Dysfunction in the medical textbook Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics (2009), Dr. Stephen Ludwig and Dr. Anthony Rostain define emotional neglect as, “...a relationship pattern in which an individual’s affectional needs are consistently disregarded, ignored, invalidated, or unappreciated by a significant other. People in neglectful families are emotionally disconnected from one another, behaving as if they were living on different planets”.
It’s very common for caregivers who emotionally neglect their children, to have been emotionally neglected or abused when they were children. Dr. Ludwig and Dr. Rostain write,
“Parents may have trouble understanding their children’s needs for love, affection, closeness, and support, or they may feel too overwhelmed or powerless to meet these needs on a consistent basis. Neglectful parents usually come from families in which, as children, they were ignored or neglected by their parents. They also may lack emotionally satisfying adult relationships. Forced to rely on themselves for support, afraid of their own dependency needs, and reluctant to admit their pain, these parents are highly ambivalent about their children’s needs, particularly when their children are hurting, crying, or looking for emotional support. They may feel jealous or resentful of their children and may perceive them as excessively demanding and impossible to satisfy. They may be so preoccupied with their own needs that they never consider the children’s point of view. Alternatively, they may feel so angry and resentful about having children that they simply ignore them.”
For parents and caregivers, it’s important to understand that neglectful or abusive reactions to your child’s emotional needs are related to your own childhood wounds. As childhood trauma specialist Beth Tyson explained in a Psych Central article on childhood emotional neglect,
“Adults with unresolved trauma from their childhood will often be triggered by a child’s emotional needs… Especially if the adult experienced emotional neglect or abuse as a child. When we witness our children demanding a need to be met that was not met for us as children, it activates the old memories that the behavior is unacceptable.”
Clinical psychologist Dr. Jean Cheng spoke to this experience when she shared her self reflection as a parent in a 2022 interview with parent educator Janet Lansbury,
“...Because how can I love this child so much and yet I’m struggling so much with this child? And so we can misattribute that as believing we are not meant to be a parent when actually these feelings are not so much a reflection of how we are or who we are as parents. They’re actually more a reflection of who we were as children or rather what we had to experience as children”.
How does childhood emotional neglect show up?
For children and adults affected by childhood emotional neglect, the impact can show up in a variety of ways. According to a 2019 Healthline article, some common impacts that children experience are: “mood disorders like depression and anxiety, apathy, appearing uncaring or indifferent, developmental delays, low self-esteem, aggression, withdrawing from friends and activities, substance misuse, and avoidance of emotional closeness or intimacy”. Similarly, adults who were emotionally neglected as children may experience “higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression and anxiety, emotional unavailability, increasing likelihood for an eating disorder, avoidance of intimacy, difficulty trusting or relying on others, feeling deeply personally flawed, feeling empty, experiencing guilt and shame, and higher rates of anger and aggressive behavior”.
How do we heal from childhood emotional neglect?
If you’re reading this as an adult and thinking, “wow, this feels like me”, here are some ideas to get started in your process of healing from childhood emotional neglect:
Allow yourself to grieve the care that you needed and didn’t get. Give yourself permission to grieve the loss of these human needs for connection and care, that you did not receive as a child. While you’re giving yourself permission to grieve, Dr. Jean Cheng also shares her insight, “Part of healing your childhood wounds involves allowing yourself to grieve the loss of the ideal parents you never had.”
Interrupt shame by reminding yourself that there is absolutely nothing inherently wrong or “bad" about how you showed up as a kid. There is nothing that you needed to do to earn emotional care and connection, and the fact that you didn’t get what you needed from your caregivers is not your fault, and is not about you. It’s about your caregivers’ childhood wounds that they have not healed.
Practice self compassion by remembering, again and again, that you are a human being with a full spectrum of emotions, needs, and abilities. You have done the best you could with what information and resources you had, and now you are gaining skills and tools that your caregivers couldn’t give to you. Allow yourself to accept the reality that you, and all other humans, have emotional needs that deserve to be met even if your caregivers didn’t meet them.
You can practice “reparenting” with yourself, and “relational healing” with your loved ones. With a reparenting approach, you can learn to meet your human needs yourself, because as an adult, you can now be a safe and nurturing caregiver for your inner child. With a relational healing approach, you can learn to build connections with trustworthy and safe-enough people who are able to, and willing to, care for you in the ways that you need others to care for you. Through these relationships, you can build a secure attachment, and your inner child can experience healing through the safety, security, and emotional attunement of the relationship itself.
(More resources from Janet Lansbury’s interview with Dr. Jean Cheng- hyperlinks included for books)
Dr. Jean Cheng’s recommended books:
Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal
