Being a parent and raising children is a great blessing and responsibility. Every set of parents has a different parenting style that they need to agree on, and there are all kinds of parenting styles, such as authoritative, permissive, helicopter, etc. A new parenting style that has emerged is eggshell parenting, and it’s a style that Christians need to take care to avoid.
What Is Eggshell Parenting?
Eggshell parenting is a style characterized by a person’s unpredictable emotional responses, frequent mood variations, and erratic behaviors. This parenting style causes children to become hypervigilant in order to protect themselves in their insecure environment.
Understanding Eggshell Parenting
Eggshell parents have several characteristics, including:
Inconsistency: Parents are inconsistent with their kids, acting one way one day and another day the next. Because their reactions are so varied, it’s hard for kids to predict how they will respond in any situation.
Emotion Invalidating: Instead of acknowledging their kids’ feelings, these parents often dismiss or ignore them altogether.
Isolation: These parents may isolate their children from others to keep them from seeking support, therefore leading to feelings of loneliness and anxiety.
Shaming and Mocking: Eggshell parents will shame and mock their children, which causes emotional harm, eroding the child’s self-esteem and confidence.
Fearing Their Parents: Children of eggshell parents learn to tiptoe or ignore their emotions for fear of upsetting their parents.
Shielding from Stress of Failure: Eggshell parents shield their kids from stress or failure, which prevents them from learning how to navigate the necessary challenges in life that help them grow.
Unpredictability: The basis of this parenting style is unpredictability. When a parent goes from calm to explosive in an instant, the child doesn’t know how to handle this unstable environment.
Why Do Parents Adopt This Style of Parenting?
There are many reasons parents adopt this style of parenting, one being that it’s generational. Often, individuals adopt this parenting style based on how they were raised by their parents and continue it for generations. Typically, whatever parenting style your parents used on you, you will do the same with your children.
Other reasons include addictions, trauma, intense stress, and mental health issues. A parent with an addiction can act in all kinds of ways. Someone who has gone through trauma and has not resolved it may need counseling to help them resolve their issues and help repair the damage to their children. People under intense stress can be moody and say things they don’t realize hurt their children. If a parent has undiagnosed mental health issues or doesn’t manage their mental health, they may not know that what they are doing and saying damages their children.
The Impact of Eggshell Parenting on Children
Some impacts of eggshell parenting on children include:
Impact of Inconsistency: There are all kinds of situations a child can grow up in that contribute to inconsistency. This could be economic instability, parental employment instability, family structure instability, residential instability, inconsistency in school and childcare situations, and instability in a parent’s mental health and responsiveness.
Things that contribute to these instabilities include financial stress, inconsistent employment, divorce, separation, remarriage, or parental conflict, housing instability and homelessness, changing schools or daycare settings, etc.
Children need a stable, predictable environment to thrive, and when they experience inconsistency in several areas of their lives, they can be prone to anxiety, insecurity, and developmental issues.
Hypervigilance: Hypervigilance refers to extreme vigilance: the state of being highly or abnormally alert to potential danger or threat. Some causes of hypervigilance include childhood trauma, unstable family environments, abuse or neglect, and other disorders such as PTSD or anxiety disorders.
Examples of a child being hypervigilant include:
Constant Scanning: Children will often scan their environment constantly, always on the lookout for danger or anything that could threaten them.
Exaggerated Sensitivity: Children are extremely sensitive to their surroundings, picking up on minor changes and noises that cause a high level of alertness.
Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior: Some hypervigilant children can be prone to obsessive disorders as they try to control the environment in an attempt to minimize perceived threats.
Difficulty Interacting: Some hypervigilant children struggle to interact with their peers because they are constantly looking for threats.
Enmeshment: In an enmeshed family relationship, there is no emotional independence or separation between the adult and the child.
Signs of enmeshment include:
-The person does not have a sense of self.
-Cannot function well alone.
-Looks to others for validation and self-esteem
-The person can’t act or think separately from their family and feels they betrayed them if they do.
Some long-term effects of enmeshment include depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and eating disorders.
Mental Health Risks
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Many mental health risks come from being raised by eggshell parenting. These risks include:
Reduced Resilience
Eggshell parents protect their children from challenges and adversity, which causes them to miss out on learning coping skills and resilience. Facing difficulties and learning to overcome them is part of life and helps a child’s personal development and growth. When they don’t have these opportunities, they can’t thrive, be successful, and adapt to different life situations.
Anxiety and Fear
If a parent regularly shows anxiety and stress to their children, it impacts their emotional development. Parents are their children’s guides, and when they show anxious and fearful behavior, their child feels the same way. This prevents children from developing a sense of security and self-assurance, causing trouble managing their emotions.
Low Self-Esteem
If children rely heavily on their parents for validation and reassurance, they can become dependent, which can dampen their sense of self-esteem. They constantly seek approval and validation from others rather than relying on their own judgments and abilities.
Limited Emotional Regulation
Lack of normal stressors in a child’s life can cause them to be unable to regulate their emotions. Exposing children to normal, everyday stressors helps them develop coping mechanisms and emotional resilience, which is important for handling situations stably. When children don’t have this, they can find it hard to handle their emotions in real-life scenarios, which causes them even more stress.
Impaired Social Skills
A characteristic of eggshell parenting is excessive protectiveness which can impair a child’s social skills. Because parents shield children from social interactions, children have problems engaging in social interactions and developing critical social skills. This can make it hard for them to develop meaningful relationships and navigate social situations when they are older.
Affecting a child’s academic performance-Another characteristic of eggshell parenting is when parents get overly involved in their child’s learning. This is detrimental to a child’s intrinsic learning and to them being responsible for their own learning. When kids are under constant pressure and intervention from their parents, they may rely more on external rewards and approval rather than enjoying learning for learning’s sake.
How to Recognize if You Are an Eggshell Parent
You’re Overly Involved
Eggshell parents are over-involved in their children’s lives. They have a reputation for deeply involving themselves in their children’s friendships and academics, monitoring every detail, sometimes excessively.
The reason parents do this may be because they want to ensure their child’s success when, in reality, they are causing immense pressure and limited autonomy for their child. Eggshell parents often have a hard time striking a balance between being supportive and controlling. This can have both positive and negative effects on their child, depending on how they manage it and their child’s needs and temperament.
You Cause Your Child to Avoid Risks and Challenges
Your overly cautious approach can discourage your children from participating in activities and avoid challenges. This causes your child to miss out on new experiences and learning opportunities because of your over-sensitivity to safety and the potential hazards of said activity or challenge. In doing this, your children miss life lessons learned from challenges and calculated risks. This causes your child to miss out on personal growth, problem-solving skills, and developing resilience.
You Have Anxiety and Worry Excessively
Heightened worry and anxiety are another characteristic of an eggshell parent. This characteristic can cause them to project their fears and anxieties onto their children. Doing this often magnifies the risks beyond what is realistic and kids feel restricted and are apprehensive in their own pursuits because their parents blur the boundaries of what is acceptable and safe.
You Cause Your Children to Lack Autonomy
Children who grow up with eggshell parents often have trouble with decision-making and problem-solving abilities. This is because they are familiar with how their parents approach dealing with situations, causing them to constantly seek intervention from their parents. This causes them to lack experience to learn from their mistakes, and they aren’t able to develop autonomy. Because of this, they have a hard time gauging risks, making choices independently, and facing challenges on their own.
Your Children Lack Emotional Dependence
Because the children of eggshell parents need constant reassurance and to be protected, they are often emotionally dependent on their parents. This dependence causes them not to be able to cope with challenging situations on their own. This can cause them trouble developing strong relationships outside of family and impact their self-confidence and self-worth. Therefore, not being able to make their own decisions or handle their emotions without their parents.
Are You an Eggshell Parent?
Here are some questions to ask yourself to decide if you are or are becoming an eggshell parent.
-Am I overly controlling?
-Do I avoid risks at all costs?
-Are my worries and anxieties affecting my child?
-Do I allow my child to explore?
-Do I foster emotional independence?
-How do I balance safety and independence?
Seeking Help
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If you are or are becoming an eggshell parent, it’s important that you seek professional help. You can do things on your own, like reflecting, acknowledging your behaviors, and practicing emotional awareness. However, since eggshell parenting can be passed down from generation to generation, you will need serious therapy to break this toxic, damaging cycle.
Creating a Stable Environment
-Even if you head toward becoming an eggshell parent, you haven’t lost everything. You can create a safe, stable environment right now. Here are some suggestions.
-Stop yelling and think about how you felt when you were yelled at as a kid. The next time you want to yell, pause and then speak to your child.
-Let your kids be kids, and try to let go of all the worry and anxiety. Most of the things you fear most are normal parts of childhood.
-Stay calm. Learn some breathing exercises and research other ways to help you keep your cool around your kids.
-Keep communication open and actively listen to your kids rather than reacting.
-Start having a predictable routine.
-Express your love verbally and physically to your children.
Eggshell parenting is a toxic and damaging parenting style that no one wants to adopt. Take some time to assess your parenting skills to see if you are using or are getting close to using this style. If you are, seek help from a professional to repair the damage and turn your relationship with your kids around. It will be the best thing you ever do.
Photo credit: ©GettyImages/Thai Liang Lim