Narcissistic Kids

So here are some points that may help you avoid raising a narcissistic child:

1. Providing love and affection, but avoid overindulging or spoiling our children. It's important for our children to receive love and affection, yet it's also important to set boundaries, teaching them how to react to and how to say 'No.' To give our children this balance we need to have it ourselves.
2. Encouraging our children to be empathetic and considerate of others. Helping our children to understand that we all have different needs, that we feel things in different ways and encourage them to be understanding and compassionate towards others is clearly important. We can only teach them this balance if we have attained it ourselves.
3. Fostering a sense of self-esteem and self-worth in our children, while avoiding boosting their ego excessively. We need to help our children develop a healthy sense of self-worth, but we need to  avoid overly praising them or making them feel like they are better than others. Again, to achieve this balance we need to have worked this out and be able to demonstrate it for ourselves.
4. Encouraging our children to be self-sufficient and independent. Helping our children to develop skills and abilities that allow them to be self-sufficient is such a gift and encouraging them to take on tasks and responsibilities is a great way of doing this. However, we need to have the right balance of responsibility and independence within ourselves, in order to be able to pass this skill onto our children.
5. Teaching our children to respect authority and follow rules. It's important to teach our children when to question authority and how to know when to question the rules. This will help them understand that they are not the centre of the universe, that they must consider the needs and feelings of others. And while a lot of this will reflect our own values and personality traits, we can only demonstrate what we feel is the right balance, if this question is resolved within us.
6. Set clear boundaries and know the consequences for unacceptable behaviour. Establishing clear boundaries and consequences for our children's  behaviour, while consistently enforce them to teaches our children that their actions have consequences. This is something many of us, as parents struggle with and is another reflection of our own internal values and beliefs.
7. Encouraging our children to engage in activities that are not solely focused on themselves. Encouraging our children to participate in activities that involve helping others or working as part of a team, rather than activities that are solely focused on their own achievements has obvious benefits, yet also the extent to which we encourage this reflects how much we value and are comfortable with it ourselves.

It's important to remember that raising children is a challenging but rewarding task, and every child is different. It's okay to make mistakes as a parent, but it's also important to be mindful of the ways in which we can support our child's healthy development.

You will have noticed that every suggestion comes with the adage that we first need to have this balance resolved within ourselves.

We can't tell our kids to be what we're not and expect them to take us seriously.

That's like offering to teach someone how to drive a car, without having a clue yourself - that's laughable!

Yet we often tell our kids to be strong and know when to say 'No', when they see us being dominated and controlled by our own partners at home.

We need to be congruent with what we say and what we do, because our children copy what we DO not what we SAY.

And THAT is what we ultimately have control over - how we resolve these issues within ourselves. And we do this through our own awareness and development.