What is bad parenting? There are some things that are generally considered “bad” by anyone. Physical abuse, neglect, emotional abuse, and sexual abuse are the most serious and damaging behavior traits that most of us equate with bad parenting.
Bad parenting makes a child more prone to criminal behaviors. Neglected children and those who are exposed to abuse are more likely to be prosecuted for juvenile delinquency. Other common effects of bad parenting include failure to thrive and poor growth and development both physically and mentally.
Uninvolved parenting, sometimes referred to as neglectful parenting, is a style characterized by a lack of responsiveness to a child's needs. Uninvolved parents make few to no demands of their children and they are often indifferent, dismissive, or even completely neglectful.
Toxic parents create a negative and toxic home environment. They use fear, guilt, and humiliation as tools to get what they want and ensure compliance from their children. They are often neglectful, emotionally unavailable, and abusive in some cases. They put their own needs before the needs of their children.
Parental gaslighting is a subtle and covert form of emotional abuse. These parents manipulate to undermine the child's sense of reality and mental stability. Some well-meaning parents may gaslight their children in an attempt to protect them.
Child emotional neglect (CEN) is the parent's failure to meet their child's emotional needs during the early years. It involves unresponsive, unavailable, and limited emotional interactions between that person and the child. Children's emotional needs for affection, support, attention, or competence are ignored.
Emotionally absent or cold mothers can be unresponsive to their children's needs. They may act distracted and uninterested during interactions, or they could actively reject any attempts of the child to get close. They may continue acting this way with adult children.
In physical neglect, parents or caregivers may fail to provide adequate food, clothing, shelter, supervision, and protection from potential harm. In emotional neglect, parents or caregivers may fail to provide affection or love or other kinds of emotional support.
Ineffective parenting is when you fail to produce certain desired behaviours in your child and where both parent and child can feel intolerable stress in the process. And it's this aspect of parenting that can endanger a child's wellbeing and mental health in later life not to mention your own.
These parenting styles have been found to apply across cultures and classes, but research has shown that in all cultures parents with lower SES are more likely to use 'authoritarian' parenting styles than those in higher SES brackets (Hoff et al., 2002).
Lack of trust
With an emotionally unreliable mother or one who is combative or hypercritical, the daughter learns that relationships are unstable and dangerous, and that trust is ephemeral and can't be relied on. Unloved daughters have trouble trusting in all relationships but especially friendship.
Detached: The parent exhibits distant, cool, and mechanical behaviors, suggesting that they're avoiding emotional connection.
An emotionally absent mother is not fully present and especially not to the emotional life of the child. She may be depressed, stretched too thin and exhausted, or perhaps a bit numb. Many of these mothers were severely undermothered themselves and have no idea what a close parent-child relationship looks like.
Emotional or psychological child abuse is a pattern of behavior that impairs a child's emotional development or sense of self-worth. This may include constant criticism, threats, or rejection, as well as withholding love, support, or guidance.
Some of the common signs of a toxic parent or parents include: Highly negatively reactive. Toxic parents are emotionally out of control. They tend to dramatize even minor issues and see any possible slight as a reason to become hostile, angry, verbally abusive, or destructive.
According to experts, a major key to distinguishing the two is looking at how long the strife lasts. If things are nasty between you in many different areas of the relationship for years at a time, the relationship itself might be toxic. But if there's only one, sudden issue, that's probably more benign.
In most cases, manipulative parents refer to parents who use covert psychological methods to control the child's activities and behavior in such a way as to prevent the child from becoming an independent adult apart from their control.