What it means to grow up with Emotionally Immature Parents.
There may never have been any outward signs of abuse. You were fed, clothed, and taken to summer camp. Maybe your parents worked hard, sacrificed for you, and loved you in all the ways they knew how. And yet, growing up, something felt missing. You felt lonely in a way you couldn’t quite name — not because your life was bad, but because something deeper was missing.
If that resonates, you may have grown up with an emotionally immature parent. It’s more common than most people realize, and the impact runs deeper than most people understand. I see this in my therapy practice all the time. Every day, I see the impact on adults of a childhood in which they didn’t feel truly seen, heard, or cared for.
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Lindsay Gibson, clinical psychologist and author of the landmark book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Our conversation covered what emotional immaturity in a parent looks like, how it shapes the way we show up in our adult relationships, and — most importantly — how healing is possible.
What Is an Emotionally Immature Parent?
Emotional immaturity, as Dr. Gibson explains it, is present when a part of a person’s emotional development is stalled or fails to develop. Specifically, the ability to manage and integrate your emotions so they serve you rather than overwhelm you. An emotionally immature person may be highly intelligent, professionally successful, and even well-liked. But in close, intimate relationships, they struggle.
The key sign is this: rather than being emotionally available for others, they unconsciously expect others to regulate their emotions to care for them. Like a three-year-old, they need you to mirror them, bolster their self-esteem, and keep their emotional world stable. When you fail to do that, they pull away, become emotionally distant, angry, or punish — not out of malice, but because they genuinely don’t have the internal resources to both connect with you and care for themselves.
Applied to parenting, this creates a quiet but profound reversal: instead of the parent being in service of the child, the child is in service of the parent.
Dr. Gibson deliberately uses the term “emotionally immature” rather than clinical diagnoses like narcissistic or borderline personality disorder — partly because it is less stigmatizing. She didn’t want people to feel they had to pathologize their parents to acknowledge the pain they experienced growing up. Many emotionally immature parents are warm, kind, and beloved by the outside world. The immaturity shows up specifically in their lack of capacity for true emotional intimacy.
The Confusion of Being Well Cared For
One of the most painful aspects of this experience is how hard it is to name. As Dr. Gibson puts it, being well cared for in non-emotional areas creates deep confusion. There’s overwhelming physical evidence that your parents loved you — the schools, the birthday parties, the sacrifices they made. But underneath all of that is a persistent feeling of emotional loneliness, a sense that you were never quite seen.
This confusion is compounded by the fact that children aren’t born knowing what their feelings are. We learn to identify our emotions because a parent notices them and puts words to them. An emotionally immature parent, not naturally attuned to others’ inner lives, simply doesn’t do this. So the child grows up with a vague, persistent ache they can’t identify or explain — because no one ever helped them name it.
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How It Shows Up in Adult Relationships
The patterns learned in childhood don’t stay in childhood. Adult children of emotionally immature parents bring a very specific set of habits with them to their adult relationships.
They do all the emotional work. Having learned that their own needs are a burden, they become the empathetic one, the caretaker, the person always working to bring the relationship up to a better place. Relationships feel like work — because for them, they always have been work. And they feel like they are always working in the relationship.
They wait to be noticed rather than asking. If they ever received warmth from a parent, it came when the parent happened to be in a good mood — not because the child asked for it. So they learn to sit back and wait for their partner to intuit what they need. Because asking for what they need has always been risky and usually ends in disappointment.
They carry a deep, quiet longing. Underneath the self-sacrifice is a wounded part of them hoping that this relationship will finally be the one that gives them the love they never received. When it doesn’t — or when they can’t receive it, even when it’s offered — an old anger surfaces, often directed at the partner.
They wait. They have learned to persevere through long stretches without emotional reward, hoping things will shift on their own. This makes them remarkably tolerant of unsatisfying relationships — sometimes for years or decades. They have learned to endure, waiting to be noticed.
As Dr. Gibson describes it, they believe that if they want closeness, they must always put the other person first. The tragic shadow of that is becoming profoundly resentful of how much they give — without ever understanding why the dynamic keeps repeating.
Resisting seeing their own pain
One of the saddest and most difficult parts of treating an adult raised by an Emotionally Immature Parent, is the lengths they will go to, in order to deny the pain of their childhood.
In therapy I might mention how hard their childhood was, or refer to childhood abuse, and they will firmly let me know that I have the wrong idea, they were never abused. They will tell me about birthday parties, and family vacations to prove to me that they had a “happy childhood”.
It is only over time that they gradually begin to see that while they were well fed and clothed, they lacked in fundamental emotional care. On some deep fundamental level, while their parents gave them what they needed, they never felt their parents really saw them for who they were or cared for their inner needs.
The Good Enough Parent — and Why That’s Enough
One of the most reassuring moments in my conversation with Dr. Gibson was the discussion of Winnicott’s concept of the “good enough” parent (Dr. Winnicott was an early 20th-century psychoanalyst). Research suggests that a parent only needs to be emotionally attuned about 30% of the time for a child to develop securely. That’s not 100%. They don’t have to be the perfect parent. Not even close to perfect. It just means that for a few hours of the day, a child is with a parent who truly sees them and responds to their needs.
This matters for two reasons. First, it offers perspective to adults who worry they’ve damaged their own children — you don’t have to be perfect, just present enough. Second, it points toward what healing actually looks like: not a complete reinvention of yourself, but incremental growth in your capacity to be emotionally available, both to yourself and to the people you love.
How Healing Happens
Dr. Gibson is clear that the most effective healing addresses the place where the wound actually occurred: in your concept of self, and your ability to emotionally attach to others. That means therapies focused on reconnecting with your own emotional experience and building genuine emotional intimacy — with yourself first, and then with others offer the best chance of healing.
She specifically recommends Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) — which directly addresses the roots of attachment wounds — and Internal Family Systems (IFS), which helps people work with the different parts of themselves: the over-functioning adult, the wounded child, and the part that shuts down when love gets too close.
But perhaps the most powerful first step is simply getting the story straight. When your symptoms start to make sense — when you understand why you work so hard in relationships, why you can’t ask for what you need, why love sometimes feels threatening rather than comforting — something shifts. Your pain becomes real. And that understanding can restore hope and self-worth that have been missing for a very long time.
Jacob Brown is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California, specializing in helping couples to rebuild their sense of emotional intimacy and connection. This post is adapted from Episode 109 of the Sex, Love & Couples Therapy Podcast, featuring Dr. Lindsay Gibson, author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Find her books at Amazon
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