Sana Khadar

This is All in the Mind from ABC Radio National.

I'm Sana Khadar.

Today, the pain of being raised by emotionally immature parents and the process for raising emotionally mature kids of your own.

One quick tip, don't trick your child and film it and put it on social media because Lindsay has some strong thoughts about some viral videos involving parents and their kids.

Yeah, and I guess we won't labor on it too much because we talked about it at length in the previous interview, but can you just describe what emotionally immature parenting looks like?

Now, obviously, emotionally immature isn't a diagnostic label.

It's an umbrella description that can include parents with narcissistic or other tricky traits, or just parents who didn't have great parenting themselves and who never learned the skills that parenting required.

They just muddled through the best or worst they could.

This broad categorisation has opened Lindsay's book up to some criticism, that it simplifies complex dynamics, that it can pathologise parents.

Nonetheless, it is a concept that, as we mentioned, has struck a chord with so many people, which means it's worth discussing and worth interrogating.

I mean, I do wonder, like, you know, we know people are flawed.

Is having, you know, not perfect parents just kind of part and parcel of being born in the human race?

Like, I think of my parents and one in particular who was pretty authoritarian, shall we say.

But that's also sort of the culture they grew up in.

They didn't really know much better.

You know, there wasn't a lot of knowledge about social-emotional development.

And so when I look back on my childhood, I'm like, yeah...

Parts of it weren't great, but they also, they just were doing the best they could or, you know, they didn't have the tools for more.

What kind of issues arise when people who grew up with emotionally immature parents then become parents themselves?

Yeah, that makes sense.