How to become emotionally mature – at any age: ‘We often don’t realise the hurt we’re causing’ | Life and style

Around the time of the pandemic, a self-help book with a somewhat unglamorous but functional title – Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents – took off on social media. It had been published five years earlier, but in 2020, when more people had time to reflect on life, it was rediscovered, its success fuelled by readers who recognised their own childhood in its pages and their experience with parents who had uncontrolled emotional outbursts, or were self-absorbed, unavailable or lacking empathy. In the view of its author, Lindsay C Gibson, these were parents whose own emotional developmental stage was closer to that of, say, a four- or five-year-old. Their own children had overtaken them, and were now recognising it.

Gibson’s latest book, How to Raise an Emotionally Mature Child, is a guide for those of us who don’t want our children to experience the same kind of childhood we did. Perhaps you’ve realised – the self-awareness is key – that you’re lacking enough maturity of your own, and feel clueless about what you should be doing. “If you have an emotionally immature parent, it doesn’t mean that you’re doomed,” says Gibson, via video call from her home in coastal Virginia. “However, you’ve probably learned emotionally immature attitudes and behaviours that may pop out at times. The difference is that if you have adequate emotional maturity, you’re going to notice it and it’s going to bother you.”

Perhaps the most important attitude parents could start with, says Gibson, is the idea that your child is “real inside”. It will probably be obvious to other parents, but from my own experience of often viewing my children as objects to be fed, clothed and ferried around, this was a sharp reminder. “They are sensitive, sentient; they feel things just as acutely as an adult does,” she says. We may treat our children in ways we wouldn’t dream of treating a cherished friend. “We tend to think that children don’t experience humiliation or embarrassment, that children don’t have a natural sense of dignity, that we can say and do what we want with them and they’ll still love us. But what we do to them is going to register emotionally. They don’t have the language or the experience to express that, so it’s easy to miss. We often don’t realise the hurt we’re causing.”

Gibson covers each age and stage of a child’s life, from babies to teenagers. Her advice includes taking anxieties seriously, encouraging autonomy in a supportive way and identifying emotions. A large part of it comes from understanding what children are capable of, developmentally, at each stage and what is beyond them. This, I’ve realised, almost instantly alleviates a lot of my own parental frustration. I can already see how many mistakes I’ve made. Is it too late, by the time a child reaches adolescence, if you haven’t laid that groundwork? Definitely not, says Gibson. “Is it too late for a person to ever start responding positively to being treated with respect and love? We know of people in prison who have crossed paths with emotionally mature people who have helped them, and they’ve been able to change. So no, it’s never too late, but you do have to keep in mind that people form a model of the world – what other people are like, what you can expect from the world and other people – early in life, and part of our job as a parent is to help them build that model. That can be hard to change, but it is possible. But there is a backlog of old learning that will always have to be dealt with.”

In babyhood, for instance, much has been made of the importance of the parental bond, usually maternal, that is supposed to kick in instinctively, which puts a huge amount of pressure on mothers who don’t experience that or who have postnatal depression. Does that damage a child’s chance at emotional maturity for ever? “No, absolutely not,” says Gibson. It can be helpful to explain it later, though, whether it’s something beyond your control, such as depression, poverty, your own upbringing, or just the inevitable mistakes in your parenting.

Gibson points to the story she includes in her book about a mother who apologised to her child, then seven, for being too harsh while potty training her as a toddler. “She said: ‘I’m so sorry that I was so strict with you, and I made you feel bad in a way that wasn’t necessary.’” The girl, says Gibson, broke down, sobbing. “When the parent goes back in and says you may have had this negative experience because of something that was going on with me, think what that does to the concept the child has of themselves. ‘Oh, it wasn’t because I’m a messy, dirty child.’ Or: ‘It wasn’t because I’m not a very interesting person that Mom didn’t respond [to me] more.’ No, it’s: ‘Oh, that’s what happened.’ Those efforts to make repairs really change the child’s narrative about themselves.”

Gibson did it with her own son when he was about 18 and getting ready to go to university. “I sat him down and I said: ‘I want to apologise for some of the things I did. I didn’t know what the right thing was, and I think I was too hard on you, I shouldn’t have done it that way.’ I’m hoping that changed a narrative for him. When he looks back on his life, he can say: ‘I had this experience, but Mom made a mistake. That’s what that was.’ Not: ‘I had this experience, and it proves that I’m an undesirable person.’”

It is not about being a perfect parent or putting a child’s needs first at all times, stresses Gibson, nor about being the epitome of emotional maturity ourselves – it’s a spectrum, and we can all slide down to toddlerdom at times of stress, illness or tiredness. Rather, it’s about being more mindful of how we relate to our children. I know I’m quick to snap at mine when I’m stressed. If I’m making dinner or working, and my son wants to talk about a video game I have no interest in, do I have to drop everything and give him my full attention? No, says Gibson. “We want to find a style of parenting that doesn’t exhaust you, and that scenario would be exhausting. You can’t do 50 things at once. If you notice that your child is trying to engage you, and you say: ‘I really want to hear about this, but I can’t give this the attention it deserves. Can we talk about it later?’ how long did that take, 10 seconds? He feels acknowledged, he knows you noticed that he was excited. Let’s say you blew him off. Maybe he doesn’t learn: ‘It’s best not to talk to Mom when she’s up to her ears.’ Maybe he generalises and says: ‘Maybe it’s best not to bring joyful things to Mom.’” An emotionally attuned parent might still snap in the moment, but would notice their child’s pained look and later apologise. “You can come back and you can repair it,” says Gibson, who likes the paediatrician Donald Winnicott’s idea of the “good enough” parent.

Gibson’s parenting style undoubtedly does take a bit of extra time, thought and effort, though of course the payoffs – raising, one hopes, a happy and decent member of society and one you can have a lifelong relationship with – are worth it. Children need guidance and limits, says Gibson (this isn’t about permissive parenting) and their difficult behaviour may be where a parent finds their own emotional maturity tested. “You have an opportunity there to teach and guide them. What was the mistake? What are we going to do now to make it better? What have you learned from this? But if you give them a smack or yell at them just to make the immediate behaviour stop, they feel humiliated.”

How do you set limits with children – particularly teenagers – without being authoritarian? It’s about the explanation, she says, but it’s worth recognising that teenagers “don’t really care what your concerns are. They won’t say: ‘Mom, you’re right, that midnight beach party probably isn’t a good idea.’ But that type of interaction is going in at a subliminal level because you’re not being autocratic. You’re saying: ‘I can’t let you do that, because can you imagine what could happen at a beach party at midnight? You’re probably getting drunk. What happens when somebody gets into some situation that they didn’t imagine, and they’re stranded?’” The teenager couldn’t really care less about your reasoning, says Gibson with a laugh, but it’s the tone of the interaction that matters. She says her adult son works in a managerial position, and was telling Gibson and her husband that he noticed their words coming out of his mouth. “He said: ‘I caught myself saying to my team: we have to be accountable and responsible.’ But do you think that mattered to him when he was 16? No, but it does seep in.”

Gibson studied art and English literature at college, though she later realised analysing narratives and characters’ motivations was what she was really interested in, and discovered clinical psychology. In the 90s, working in private practice, Gibson started developing her broad idea of emotional maturity (or rather, immaturity), after seeing the fallout among her patients – adults who had problems developing healthy relationships, or were plagued with guilt, or whose perfectionism was a source of stress. “I’ve had to be on the listening end of the suffering that the emotionally immature people were causing,” she says. “It became fascinating to me that this person is interacting with someone who emotionally, I can tell from my training, is functioning like a six-year-old. And yet, do they think there’s anything wrong with how they’re treating their child? No, they have no self-reflection to speak of, and they project blame on to everybody else.”

Gibson’s idea of emotional immaturity is not an official diagnosis. It has been criticised for being too broad, for shifting blame on to parents, and for tempting readers to pathologise fairly benign, if irritating, traits alongside more obviously abusive ones. But it has also clearly deeply resonated with people who recognise the deficiencies of their parents, the effect it had on them growing up and the present struggles they are dealing with.

If you didn’t grow up with emotionally mature parents, how do you know if your child is developing as they ideally should? “The first thing I would say is: do they still have their light? Are they showing joy? Maturity is a happy thing – it is a person whose psychology is able to bring them joy and energy. So we want to see that energy, and that investment from them in things they’re interested in. That is as important as self-control. They’re becoming able to think about other people, to have empathy, to think about how they’re affecting other people. Along with that comes some sense of conscience and ethics. An increasing ability to read a situation and restrain themselves from an impulsive reaction and just give it a moment’s thought.”

Being able to look at their own actions is important, says Gibson. “Not in an over critical way – we don’t want them to be so hard on themselves that they make themselves anxious and depressed – but we do want them to be able to reconsider their behaviour. If your child can come back and apologise, they are well on the way toward emotional maturity, because that means they’ve got self-reflection, empathy, consideration and they’re not so threatened and defensive that they aren’t able to do this important emotional repair work with you.” They will be able to do it with other people later in life.

We would all do well to have more emotionally healthy people in the world. “History is full of egocentric people who do whatever feels best to them in the moment, to amass as much as they can without regard for anybody else,” she says. In current world politics, no names needed: “You can see that pattern of impulsivity, disregard for other people, the sense that they can do no wrong and stuff is everybody else’s fault – which totally frees you up to react in whatever way you want to.”

In terms of material success, emotional immaturity can be an asset. “We’re in a system that’s rigged toward people who are willing to take advantage of other people, to look out for their own interests and amass as much as they can for themselves.” Gibson is optimistic, though, that a better society, built by more emotionally healthy people, is possible. “That’s what keeps moving us forward in terms of survival, because these characteristics help us work together well, think clearly under stress, understand cause and effect. One of the things that capitalist society cannot believe is that people helping each other, raising up and respecting other people are a collaborative system that works really well. People are happy, they produce more, they’re invested more. It’s sad that that’s not seen as a strength.”

Her personal mission, she says, “is to make this concept of emotional immaturity so commonplace that people spot it, and then they don’t fall under the spell of the egocentric person who’s trying to tell them how to be and how to best serve them”. For those of us who recognise our shortcomings, it’s never too late to get our own emotions up to speed. And if you’re helping to raise a child in any way, you can shape their emotional lives whether they are a crying baby, a challenging primary school child or a truculent teenager – for the good of them, and us all.

How to Raise an Emotionally Mature Child by Dr Lindsay Gibson (Vermilion, £18.99) is out on 21 May. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.