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Is Modern Parenting Creating Narcissists?

Is Modern Parenting Creating Narcissists? 2

I highly recommend
this article
by Mark Manson on Narcissism. Reading through it, I see so many personality
traits that I’ve identified as other disorders. But perhaps, under this
model, they are actually narcissism.

He has a great self-assessment in there that’s gold on its own.

I see similarities to what I’ve been talking about with fragile young people
who feel as if, and are constantly told, that they’re always prosecuted in
some way. Always victimized. Always put down. Always opposed. And that this
is somehow personal against them.

Here’s a crazy idea. What if, under this model, we’re actually creating
small-n narcissists who think the world revolves around them? What if we’re
creating a cyclical loop of people who:

  1. Only think about themselves and the problems they’re enduring.

  2. Because they only think about themselves, they can’t gain the
    perspective that EVERYONE is ALWAYS being pushed down by life…on a regular basis.

So basically, they see social media and it shows people not facing
difficulties. And then they face difficulties. So they assume it’s
all a conspiracy against them.

I think modern parenting (whatever that is) is guilty here because rather
than tell them to brush it off because it’s happening to everyone, they
instead indulge their every complaint. They talk about how it makes them
feel. They validate that they should be feeling that way.

I feel like the immigrant style of parenting, or perhaps a Stoicism-based
style of parenting, would instead say that they need to get out more because
everyone’s life sucks if you choose to see it that way.

There’s always a reason to be offended, sad, or beaten-down. Everyone is
jostling to get ahead, to keep you behind, to silence you, to lessen you,
and to put themselves above you.

That’s life, and that’s what we deal with. And how we feel simply comes down
to what we do with this information.

If we chose to count the slights and offenses, and feel each one like an
attack on our identity, we will be brittle and sad. And if we chose to see
those as a free gym membership, then we get stronger from it. Hell we can
even be thankful for those lessons and reps.

Anyway, back to the point, it could be that this fragility-based parenting
is basically creating an army of narcissists who see everything only as it
relates to them.

And to be clear, I don’t really blame the parents (or the kids). They’re
part of a zeitgeist. This is the fashion in parenting right now, and they’re
following this trend because it’s supposed to be medicine.

But I’m becoming increasingly worried it’s actually poison.

May 23, 2025

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