FAMILY VIOLENCE

The 7 Types of Toxic Families

What domestic abuse looks like in parent-child relationships

1- The Enmeshed Family

Parents who are anxious can struggle with letting go and separating themselves from their children. In this type of family dynamic, boundaries are blurred or even non-existent. Parents with separation anxiety deny their children the opportunities to take risks, become independent, fail to learn from their experiences and therefore become resilient.

The messages sent to these children by these parents are;

• “I can’t survive without you”
• “Don’t grow up”
• “You can’t survive without me”
• “It's a hostile world out there”

Such parents feel the need to maintain control over their children’s lives because they do not want to feel inconsequential or replaceable. They feel they have finally found someone who will love them unconditionally and use their children to fulfil their own need to be wanted due to the dissatisfaction with their past or current relationships. In contrast, healthy parents do not feel like their children are the only source of happiness and fulfilment they have.

Enmeshment is a toxic family dynamic because it usually occurs under the pretence of love. Healthy families encourage their children to become independent. Children who grow up in an enmeshed family develop an identity that is tailored to suit the parents’ needs, which override their own need to separate and individuate. They often have identity disturbance and find it difficult to differentiate between their feelings and the feelings of people close to them. Also, as a result of growing up without firm boundaries, they struggle to set them as adults.

2- The Emotionally Unavailable Family

In this type of family, the parents are either emotionally or physically absent from their children’s lives. They may be way too focused on work to develop a relationship with their children or have other issues going on in their lives that they prioritise over them. This means they do not provide enough emotional guidance and support, which leads the children having to learn how to take care of themselves.

Later on in life, such children tend to become emotionally distant in their adult relationships. This is because they do not want to be vulnerable as they have learnt that their needs wouldn’t be taken care of from an early age and therefore they need to suppress their needs and repress their emotions. They may also have low self-esteem and fear abandonment as they do not believe people will not walk away from them just like their parents did when they were little.

It is crucial for parents to acknowledge their children’s needs through a process called mirroring to help them develop a sense of self-worth. This is only possible if feel wanted by their parents.

Through mirroring, parents need to applaud, encourage and reassure their children whilst showing them affection and support. This helps them learn how to regulate their emotions and prevents them from needing constant reassurance due to low self-esteem later on in life.

The Still Face Experiment demonstrates the importance of mirroring:

A mother and her baby participate in the experiment, and she is asked to remain indifferent to the baby’s attempt to engage her. This results in the baby becoming increasingly upset about being ignored and desperately trying to get her attention. It shows that parents play an important role in helping their children regulate their emotions.

Additionally, children develop prosocial emotions including empathy through mirroring their caregivers. If the caregivers are responsive to their needs, their brains gradually learn to trust and relate to others and form secure attachments. If there isn’t enough mirroring in a parent-child relationship, this often leads to mental health issues later on in life. I have discussed why people who lack empathy are actually more sensitive to trauma as their brains are underdeveloped below:

3 — The Substance Abuse Family

Children with parents who struggle with addiction are at an increased risk for maltreatment. The chaotic lifestyle of such parents may lead to emotional and physical neglect as these parents often struggle to take care of themselves. They may forget about picking up the kids from school or fixing lunch or dinner when they are using and this unreliability leads to their children developing issues with trust. Such children see their parents as inconsistent and therefore feel that no one is going to show up for them and they have to take care of their own needs.

Additionally, children may feel guilty and blame themselves for their parents’ addiction because they are powerless to stop what’s going on and are unable to help better the situation. They may feel unsafe around their parents when they are using, which eventually causes them to become mentally and emotionally unstable. Low self-esteem and issues with trust to due a lack of responsiveness from their caregivers can easily develop into dysfunctional attachments later on in life.

4 — The Picture-Perfect Family

This type of family is highly narcissistic and therefore all about appearances. They present a facade that is an unrealistic picture of perfection by sweeping conflict under the rug and not disclosing problems. Outwardly, the members of the family seem to be well-functioning even though there is a lot of dysfunction within the house. Issues such as a divorce, affair, or financial struggles are often concealed from others for the sake of appearances and the children are forced to take part in the lie.

Such families do not value authenticity at all and prefer to perform to maintain the facade of perfection they showcase to everyone. They do not want other people to criticise them or find faults within the family.

These parents are psychologically abusive towards their children by demanding unrealistic standards from them. Consequently, their children grow up to believe that love is conditional and feel cared for or appreciated only if they achieve the goals their parents set for them. They also become sensitive to criticism as they believe they will be judged very harshly by others if they are not perfect at all times.

5- The Authoritarian Family

Authoritarian parents place more importance on obedience and discipline, as opposed to nurturing their children. They have high expectations, yet refrain from giving positive feedback. They prefer to use punishments for misbehaviour to teach their children how to behave. Because they have low tolerance, they often punish mistakes severely by the use of corporal punishment.

Such parents are the most controlling out of all types. They set all the rules in the house and do not accept feedback from their children. Their attitude is “It’s my way or the highway” and they want their children to be obedient to them at all times. This is mostly because they don’t trust their children to make good choices.

For authoritarian parents, mistakes are unacceptable, which leads them to hover over their children to “help” them not fail. This ensures the children don’t learn how to cope with failures later on in life. They become indecisive as they are terrified of making a mistake because their parents controlled their decisions throughout their childhood and didn’t get the chance to face natural consequences for their own choices.

These parents also criticise their children a lot and use shame as a tactic to force them into following the rules. They firmly believe this will motivate children to do better than positive reinforcement. Consequently, such children often have low self-esteem when they grow up as well as being prone to anxiety and depression.

6- The Parentifying Family

Within such families, a child assumes the role of the parent, because they notice the lack of stability and emotional immaturity from their parent. Many do this in order to protect a younger sibling and in most cases, they end up feeling as if they failed to live up to the expectations of the parents. This is because it is impossible for a child to perfectly fill the role of a parent.

Such children also feel guilty when moving out as they feel like a parent abandoning their children. They often become very responsible, but also reluctant to rely on others and be vulnerable emotionally. In adult relationships, they find it hard to express their own emotional needs and may take on the blame for everything.

There are two types of parentification:

• Emotional parentification: This is also called emotional incest and it is when the child supports the parent emotionally as the parent shares the intimate details of their life including the child is too young to process.
• Instrumental parentification: This is when the child is forced to help excessively with cooking, cleaning and housework in general. They may feel like an unpaid servant in the house.

Parentification is essentially a boundary violation. Children who are parentified are forced to grow up faster than they should as they have no one to rely on for guidance or support. They learn early on to accept that their needs will not be met and as a result, they start denying their own needs to avoid disappointing their parents. They also do not learn how to say “no” or to recognize when to stop giving.

7 — The Competitive Family

The emotion behind this family dynamic is envy, which in some cases parents do feel towards their children. Parents who feel unfulfilled with their lives can feel threatened by seeing what their children have accomplished, leading them to perceive their children as competitors. They also may feel resentful that opportunities they did not have when they were younger are available to their children.

These parents want their children to succeed at times but feel intimidated seeing their children more successful than they were or are. This makes it difficult for them to show support and encouragement. Instead, they are prone to giving backhanded compliments and are highly critical of their children. Such behaviour is the result of their own upbringing, where they were never given positive feedback.

Children who grow up with such parents end up feeling guilty and even ashamed when they accomplish something. This may lead to self-sabotage and under-achieving on purpose as they don’t want to have problems with their parents.

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