Member-only story
What Is Toxic Parenting?
You may have heard the saying that parents are their children’s first teachers. This is true, but it’s not just what parents teach their children that matters, it’s how they teach them.
Some parents adopt a toxic parenting style that can ruin their relationship with their children and have long-term negative consequences. If you’re concerned about your own or someone else’s parenting style, read on to learn more about toxic parenting and how to avoid it.
Toxic parenting is any form of parenting that inflicts either emotional or physical damage on a child. While parents who are physically abusive with their children are easy to recognize, less obvious forms of toxic parenting include anything from ignoring a child’s feelings and personal needs, giving them too many or too few rules, or being critical and disapproving.
No matter how it happens, toxic parenting can have a profound effect on a child. Such parents fail to provide the love and support their children need to grow into emotionally healthy adults capable of forming stable relationships.
Toxic parenting is not a rare phenomenon: A study conducted in 1998 suggested that as many as one in ten parents were guilty of at least one psychologically abusive act towards their children, while a similar 2005 report from the Yale Child Studies Center put the number closer to one…
