16 Characteristics Of Highly Toxic Parents

This is something I wager we just don’t talk about enough because it’s frequently considered “in poor taste” to speak badly of one’s own parents. In some ways, parents are revered to the point where we flippantly make blanket statements like “all parents want the best for their children” or “they did the best they could.”

Sometimes, it’s true that the parents in question really did try their best or want the best for their kids. That’s not enough, however, to protect their children or give them the mental and emotional care they need. And sadly, lots of parents can fall into toxic habits with their kids without ever realizing there’s a problem.

As with any other list of toxic traits, this one is not all-inclusive. And few people will exhibit all of these characteristics. It’s still worth talking about these traits because the stakes are so damn high. The children of toxic parents suffer ... often even as adults. They might grow up to select toxic partners or become a toxic partner (or parent) themselves. They may struggle with their sense of self-worth and mental health for as long as they live. Others may find themselves unable to feel fully alive.

And while a person might be able to get away from a toxic friend, partner, or boss  —  often with some degree of difficulty  —  it’s harder to escape the clutches of a toxic parent or guardian.

What does it mean to be toxic?

For starters, it’s important to know that toxic isn’t a clinical term, meaning it might be hard to find the right resources for you if you want to dive deeper on this subject.

For example, you might really be dealing with an emotionally immature parent, an enmeshed parent, a parent struggling with substance abuse, or one with narcissistic personality traits. If this list resonates with your experience, it’s worth researching those terms a little deeper to find the best resources to fit your relationship dynamic.

Characteristics Of Highly Toxic Parents

1. They expect their kids to agree with them about (practically) everything.

Some children grow up with parents who will not allow them to express different thoughts or opinions. If you disagree with such a parent, they might accuse you of being headstrong, rebellious, stupid, or worse. It can trigger anger, yelling, the silent treatment, or whatever your parent’s brand of “I’m mad at you” looks like.

“If somebody has traits of narcissism, this is a very rigid thinking style. It’s also a style of parenting that really doesn’t recognize the needs of other people, hence expecting their kids to agree with them about everything,” says licensed marriage and family therapist Lauren Maher. “There’s no room for anyone else’s personality growth or development with this kind of parenting. I think a lot of times with a narcissistic parent, they sort of have an unspoken assumption that their child is supposed to go out into the world almost as a miniature version of them and they can become quite dysregulated or angry or upset when that’s not happening.”

In your early childhood, there may have been less (or no) conflict because you weren’t yet individuated from your parents, Maher explains. But as adolescence and early adulthood bring with them your own thoughts, opinions, and beliefs, friction probably increased. Ultimately, this is “toxic” parenting because the child is not permitted to think for themselves. Such kids are typically expected to accept their parents’ words as fact and behave more like a soldier or a robot than a human being.

2. They don’t see their children as autonomous individuals.

“One of the attributes of unhealthy parenting is being overly enmeshed with their child,” Maher says. “It’s a lack of understanding of where I end and you begin.”

For many toxic parents, their child is merely an extension of themselves, and little more than that. They might even fear the day their kid attempts to be more autonomous and spend years trying to prevent them from fully expressing their thoughts and feelings as their own person.

Parents like this often fall into the “children should be seen and not heard” camp. Age-appropriate behavior like temper tantrums, bad moods, whining, and crying aren’t properly addressed with love and understanding because these parents don’t care why their kid is acting out. All they care about is that the unwanted behavior stops.

The irony of such parents is that they frequently succumb to their own intense emotions. If they feel angry or upset, they rarely think twice about throwing a fit or letting someone else really have it. These types of parents are often caught up in the idea that successful parenting creates obedient children who never “mess up” or embarrass them.

3. They don’t believe in a child’s privacy.

Especially as a kid grows older, some parents really struggle to give them space. They might read through their kids’ diaries or rummage through their backpacks to look through their notes. Children who wish to lock their doors or work on a project alone might be regarded with suspicion. Such parents will often justify dismissing their kid’s requests for privacy by insisting it’s their house, their rules. Kids don’t need privacy, they reason, unless they are up to no good.

Maher says parents who don’t value their children’s privacy are showing signs of enmeshment. “In really extreme cases, you'll see parents taking the doors completely off of their kids' bedrooms, things like that. This is also, to me, such a manifestation of entitlement. People just feel entitled to someone's entire emotional and physical landscape in an inappropriate and also kind of dominating way.”

In adulthood, privacy comes more naturally when you live under different roofs; these parents then become the kind that don’t respect boundaries, says Zoe Spears, LMFT and founder of Connected Therapy of California. This can look like your family showing up at your house unannounced even though you’ve asked them not to, calling repeatedly when you don’t answer, and generally expecting you to make yourself available to them whenever they want.

4. They discipline out of anger or fear.

The whole purpose of discipline in parenting is to teach your child how to better navigate the world in a responsible way. But a toxic parent loses sight of the whole point. Instead, they end up disciplining their kids as a knee-jerk reaction to their own emotions. The toxic parent might feel angry, annoyed, disappointed, embarrassed, or even scared when their child behaves a certain way. They feel compelled to “nip things in the bud” instead of understanding the big picture and what’s actually going on with their kids.

Spanking, berating, ridiculing  —  a toxic parent may label such tactics “discipline.” Their children might fear them, resent them, or feel utterly worthless, yet a toxic parent often won’t care or really see the problem.

So, where does this stem from? It could be two-fold, Maher says. “One is their own family legacy; they may also be following what was modeled to them. If we're looking at more narcissistic or personality disordered or immature individuals, these are people that are quite dysregulated. And so instead of turning inwards for more self-regulation, that's usually projected outwards onto someone else as a way to try to regulate things.”

5. They’re often more judgmental of their own kids than anyone else’s.

Some of you grew up with parents who were constantly asking why you couldn’t be more like Jill or Johnny across the street. Perhaps it felt like they had something good to say about every single one of your classmates, but when it came to the way they spoke about you, all they ever did was complain or make hardly helpful suggestions about what you might improve.

Narcissistic parents often make unfair comparisons to “invoke a sense of shame or guilt or feeling less than someone else,” Maher says. “You can also see this with people that are communal narcissists where they really like to be seen as these sort of pillars of the community. And so they oftentimes offer a lot of praise and accolades to other people or other people's kids, but then at home they can be complete tyrant, but they like to be seen as being very magnanimous and supportive to the outside community.”

6. They want their children to follow in their footsteps or live out their unfulfilled dreams.

Many healthy parents live just a bit vicariously through their children. Who doesn’t want their child to have a better life than they did? That drive becomes problematic when parents don’t know how to set boundaries and recognize that their child is a fully autonomous person, distinct from them. Toxic parents often expect their kids to fulfill their unfulfilled dreams or make choices that make them happy, with little concern for what their children actually want.

They might push their kids into specific careers, or pressure them to get married and have children  —  anything they would have wanted for themselves or that feeds into their sense of grandiosity, Maher says.

Such parents might say their children owe them certain choices or outcomes because they have sacrificed so much for their kids. It’s manipulation that ignores the fact that the children never asked to be brought into a situation where they would be expected to please their parents in every possible way.

It’s important to note that there can be cultural differences and differing pressures across families. If your parents immigrated to give you a better life, you might feel even more indebted to them and their vision for your life. In these situations, it’s important to ask yourself if the behavior is intentional, but more important to examine what impact it’s having on you, says Spears.

“Whether or not it's intentional, I don't want to say it's irrelevant, but what I think is more important to focus on is how is that actually impacting the child and the relationship they have with their family?”

7. They’re uncomfortable when their kid is happy.

As much as people love to say that all parents want the best for their children, many of us know that simply isn’t true. Some toxic parents aren’t happy when their kids are happy; they may be jealous or resentful of their own children. They might be quite cruel to their face or make offhand remarks meant to chip away at a child’s sense of self-worth. This type of toxic parent can’t just be proud of their kid. They feel they must find a way to tear them down.

Spears says to ask yourself: When you share something you’re excited for, does your parent put you down? Do they diminish or minimize your accomplishments, the things you’re excited about? Do you downplay these things yourself when talking to your parent, in order to prevent them from minimizing or critiquing it?

“They don't want to be overshadowed in any way,” Maher says. “So sometimes you feel a limit of you could do well, but not too well. ‘Don't take the focus away from me.’”

When a parent sees their child as an extension of themselves, but the parent hasn’t processed their own trauma, it can be hard to see the child not grappling with those same thoughts and feelings, she says. “They haven't dealt with their own unprocessed material. It's uncomfortable for them to see other people doing well in the world and seeing other people free of those painful emotions.”

8. Everything is about them and their feelings.

If there’s one trait that most toxic parents share, it’s this one. Toxic parents struggle to separate themselves and their feelings from parenting. They can’t grasp that the role of a parent is one of service  —  your job is to give your kid(s) the best possible chance to grow and develop into a well-rounded and healthy human being.

Toxic parents seem to think, Oh, the kids are fine. They wave their hand and say something about how kids are resilient and don’t need much,  only to turn around and complain that their kids don’t give them the love or respect that they should.

If you have an emotionally immature parent, this behavior is likely because they’re still child-like in their ability to regulate their feelings, Maher explains. “You've never grown up. You're taking a much more childlike approach throughout your life, which is very entitled, self-involved, expecting the world to revolve around you. Narcissists, a lot of times they are really mired in a sense of shame, which is across the board a really difficult emotion to hold. And I think out of that shame, we can see a lot of other things arise like anger, rage, a lot of other emotions coming out of that. If we're looking at a parent who has complex trauma, they may be reenacting stuff from their own childhood.”

9. They keep score.

Some parents remember every little “wrong” thing their child does. Your parent never hesitates to remind you how difficult you were as a child, and now if you choose to do Christmas with the in-laws instead of your family, you know you’ll hear about it for months or even years to come. They may have said things like, “I didn’t get to pursue my dreams because I was caring for you,” in a way that implies you owe them something.

“There can be times where the parent has some sort of idea that the child should not have their own life. ‘You didn't drop everything and come and take care of me when I wasn't feeling well that one time.’ I see a lot in my practice of some parents that, they sort of refuse to take care of themselves in certain ways or have their own agency about certain things and they just expect their children to do everything rather than coming up with solutions on their own,” Maher says.

A parent who keeps score makes you feel like they operate from “a pit of grievance” rather than goodwill, Maher says, and you never really know when the pit is going to open up.

10. Their kids aren’t allowed to ask questions or express their honest feelings.

When their kids express their honest feelings, toxic parents often reply that they shouldn’t feel that way or are being oversensitive. Asking questions might earn you a verbal lashing. Again and again, their children get the message that they are wrong for having their own thoughts and feelings. It’s incredibly difficult to grow when your parents constantly tell you that your natural reactions are all bad.

This is a narcissistic parent red flag. “Questions are often perceived as someone questioning their authority. That is a direct challenge to somebody that has a more rigid, antagonistic, or grandiose thinking style. If this is a person that's oriented towards domination and power and control, there's no room for that in that equation.”

11. They use guilt to get their way.

In a healthy parent-child relationship, both parties can express hurt, frustration, and disappointment without making demands or insisting that the other person overlook their own wants and needs just to make one party happy.

Toxic parents will resort to guilt and manipulation to get you to change your mind. Sometimes, the manipulation will be very subtle, and sometimes, it will be blatant. The stress is usually the same either way, when you’re a child (even a grown child) who simply doesn’t want to disappoint their mom or dad.

“Using guilt, manipulation, shame — it's doing everything but actually sitting and getting on the level of true emotional needs and communication. It's a very lazy way to go about getting what you want because it doesn't require sitting down and being actually attuned to someone,” Maher says.

Parents like this also use it because, frankly, it often works. “Feeling the disapproval of a parent is very difficult for a lot of us to hold. And so I think sometimes these parents come to learn over time that this is a tactic that works a lot of the time. So it's almost used as a shortcut to get what they want rather than doing real work, which is being empathic, stating needs, and holding other people's opinions and realities.”

12. They withhold love and affection as a form of punishment.

Many parents get confused or worried about what might be seen as “overly indulgent” parenting. They might wonder when it’s okay to hug or soothe a child who’s been acting out. A toxic parent, however, often has no impulse to soothe their “misbehaving” child. Instead, they frequently resort to withholding their love as a means of “discipline.”

“This becomes toxic behavior when it's more about control than anything else,” says Sejginha Williams-Abaku, LMFT and founder of Personal Life Wellness Marriage and Family Therapy. “And the way that we would tell that it's about control is when the young child or adult child does something that the parent loves, they give more attention. And when they do something that the parent disagrees with, they get the silent treatment, or the parent ignores them or there's a disconnection.”

Some parents do it because their parents did it to them, she says, while others just do it because it works to get the behavior they want out of their kid. Either way, “it creates a power dynamic in the relationship where the child, whether adult or a minor, feels like they have to comply with what the parent wants mentally, emotionally, physically, and behaviorally in order not to be rejected or abandoned by that parent.”

13. They make mountains out of molehills.

Some toxic parents cannot discern a big problem from a small one. In their eyes, every little act of disobedience, every poor grade, and every dirty sock on the floor is the end of the world. Such toxic parents typically don’t know how to pick their battles, so they just harp on every little thing  —  often raising anxious children who are petrified to fail, or impulsive kids who don’t care about anything since they’re always in some sort of trouble. Their kids often grow up with an impending sense of doom they just can’t shake.

These parents are often extremely dysregulated themselves, says Williams-Abaku, and wind up passed that nervous system frenzy down to their kids.

“Instead of giving space to working through their own trauma or their own past negative experiences, they hyperfocus on the child. Usually this is trauma related, and having difficulty with distress tolerance and being able to regulate themselves and self-soothe. So instead they are hyperreactive or overreactive to things that are just phase-of-life issues.”

14. They expect the worst of their own kids.

Everybody knows that teenagers are not typically the most responsible or wisest people around. That’s no insult to teens, however. It’s just that developmentally, and even culturally, they don’t usually have the tools they need to make their best decisions. Healthy parents recognize that the teenage years can be hard, and they strive for a healthy balance of understanding and expectations along with age- and individually appropriate responsibilities.

Toxic parents are different. They tend to flip out during the teen years and expect the worst. Some toxic parents have the tendency to expect the worst at a younger age, too.

“This is also in connection to feeling as if the child's behavior can either make or break the parent's image. So as an adult, they may start to see the child as a competitor. So the reason why this usually happens is they start experiencing anxiety or hypervigilance around their child's behavior, and they start to want to protect themselves from disappointment. So it becomes easier to perceive the child in a negative light than to hold space for both,” says Williams-Abaku.

15. They expect their children to “perform.”

On the opposite side of low expectations is the toxic parent who expects way too much from their kids. Parents who expect too much often do so because they have the idea that children are supposed to make their parents look good, or basically, “perform” for them. This type of toxic parent often cares excessively about appearances. They don’t care so much about what their kid has learned or whether they are a happy, well-adjusted child. They want to know their kid will impress others.

Parents like this might be fixated on things like grades, physical beauty, career status, or popularity. “This is also in line with narcissistic parenting. Because that parent views the child as an extension of them, and the job is really to reinforce that parent's image, the child's success or failure is experienced by the parent as being their own, and that leads to conditional love that's based upon the child's achievement,” Williams-Abaku says.

16. They take no blame and make zero apologies.

Some parents have never apologized to their children for the things that they get wrong, and they refuse to believe that kids might ever deserve an apology from a parent. Parents like this often have a toxic understanding of parenthood, treating it as the default position of always being right because they are always in charge.

And yet, when things go wrong, these parents are the first to blame outside forces. If their kids attend therapy, they might sarcastically ask what they’re going to be blamed for this time. They often see themselves as martyrs. This sort of toxic parent often has “no idea” why their kids won’t talk to them as they grow up. They may suspect it’s some outside influence and never even consider anything they’ve done wrong. But how could they? Parents like these simply don’t believe they’ve done anything wrong in the first place.

“Defensiveness is self-protective. And [narcissistic parents] experience a lot of shame or shame sensitivity, and that leads them to have an inability or difficulty with taking accountability. Because for them, taking accountability would mean humiliation,” says Williams-Abaku. “In order to avoid shame, they will have difficulty taking accountability. And an apology, it really requires the capacity for duality, holding space for ‘I love my child’ and ‘I caused harm’ versus ‘I love you so I never do anything to hurt you.’”

Resources For Adult Children With Toxic Parents

If this list resonated with you, all three experts encourage you to find support groups and resources that will help you grow your understanding, and therefore your peace. That may mean working with a mental health professional who specializes in family dynamics. For now, it can start with a little deeper reading. These are the resources our experts recommend:

Whatever type of toxic parent you’re dealing with, and whether the behavior is intentional or not, what matters most is the impact of their behavior on the people around them — including their children, these experts say. If you feel anxious around your parent and like you can’t be yourself with them, it’s worth digging into why and what resources are available to help you find peace.