When Narcissistic Parents Discard Their Children: The Quiet Violence of Emotional Estrangement

Thursday, September 19, 2024. Thanks to Anna from UT Austin Texas, who helped me to make this better.

I once had a client—let’s call her Mary—who said, “My mother only loves me when I make her proud. When I don’t, she disappears.”

It was said plainly, but with the quiet authority of someone who’s been mourning a parent still very much alive.

That is the essence of narcissistic parenting—a relationship calibrated around admiration, not affection. And it leads to one of the hardest questions adult children ever ask:

How easily do narcissistic parents discard their children?

The answer, backed by decades of research and thousands of family stories, is heartbreakingly simple: quite easily, once the emotional transaction fails.

Emotional Estrangement: The Unspoken Family Break

Estrangement rarely happens all at once. It’s a slow unwinding—a parent’s warmth withdrawing like the tide.

A landmark study by Schoppe-Sullivan et al. (2022) in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that estrangement between parents and adult children usually evolves from years of emotional asymmetry. When one party constantly gives empathy and the other hoards it, connection eventually collapses.

When narcissism is part of the equation, that collapse isn’t accidental—it’s protective. The narcissistic parent cuts off the relationship to avoid the humiliation of vulnerability.

Love, in these families, was never unconditional; it was a performance that ended when admiration stopped.

Why Narcissistic Parents Discard Their Children

Objectification Disguised as Devotion
Narcissistic parents treat their children as extensions of themselves. When the child reflects well on them, love flows; when they don’t, it withers. In a foundational study, Brummelman et al. (2015) found that narcissistic parents tend to overvalue their children—praising them as superior rather than worthy—setting the stage for conditional affection. A later longitudinal study (Brummelman et al., 2020) confirmed that this pattern predicts narcissistic traits in the next generation.

Empathy Deficits.
A meta-analysis by Czarna et al. (2019) in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin showed that narcissism is consistently linked with lower empathy and reduced capacity for emotional resonance. When their children suffer, narcissistic parents interpret it as defiance, not distress.

Punishment Through Withdrawal
As psychiatrist Glen Gabbard (2014) observed, emotional cutoff is often a narcissistic defense against shame. By rejecting the child first, the parent preserves the illusion of control.

The Culture That Rewards the Discard

In The Culture of Narcissism (Lasch, 1979), historian Christopher Lasch warned that American life was shifting toward performance over authenticity. Decades later, social psychologists Twenge and Campbell (2009) confirmed that narcissistic traits have increased across generations, fueled by self-promotion and digital validation.

Recent studies have brought this insight into the family home. Mierzejewska et al. (2023) found that parental narcissism predicts “sharenting”—the excessive display of children online to enhance personal status.

Similarly, Kim and Rapee (2024) reported that adolescents raised by parents obsessed with image management exhibit higher emotional invalidation and lower self-worth.

In a world where parenting is sometimes performed for an audience, children risk becoming props. When they refuse to play their role, they’re deleted from the family narrative.

The Damage That Lingers

Children of narcissists often grow up fluent in emotional triage—skilled at reading others’ moods but illiterate in their own needs. Research by Lyons-Ruth and Brumariu (2020) links early emotional unavailability to lifelong attachment anxiety, depression, and hypervigilance.

As I describe in Healing from Narcissistic Abuse, therapy often begins by challenging the belief that “if I were better, they’d love me.” The truth is harder and kinder: the parent’s limitations are not the child’s fault.

The Narcissism That Repeats Itself

Narcissism has an inheritance—not genetic, but emotional. Children raised on conditional love often internalize the same fragile self-worth they learned to perform for.

In Brummelman’s (2015) work, children praised for being “special” rather than for effort later showed inflated self-views and defensive self-esteem—early scaffolding for narcissism. Attachment research shows that such patterns also alter stress responses and emotion regulation systems across generations.

Breaking that cycle requires something radical: replacing admiration with empathy.

Can Narcissistic Parents Change?

Occasionally. But as Kaufman et al. (2017) found in Journal of Personality Disorders, narcissists often use therapy for impression management, not introspection.

Still, with sustained accountability and a willingness to tolerate shame, some can change. For adult children, however, healing doesn’t depend on the parent’s transformation. It depends on reclaiming the right to define safety.

If that means no contact, it isn’t cruelty—it’s oxygen.

Final Thoughts

Narcissistic parents discard their children not because those children are unlovable, but because their love was never built to last.

It was conditional by design, reinforced by a culture that rewards the curated self over the connected one.

The child’s freedom begins the moment they refuse to perform. Once you stop auditioning for love, you discover the kind that doesn’t require applause.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Brummelman, E., Thomaes, S., Orobio de Castro, B., Overbeek, G., & Bushman, B. J. (2015). Origins of narcissism in children. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(12), 3659–3662.

Brummelman, E., Thomaes, S., Nelemans, S. A., Orobio de Castro, B., & Bushman, B. J. (2020). Parents’ praise and children’s narcissism: A longitudinal study. Child Development, 91(6), 2129–2144.

Czarna, A. Z., Wróbel, M., Dufner, M., & Zeigler-Hill, V. (2019). Narcissism and empathy: Meta-analytic evidence for the relationship and its moderators. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 45(3), 279–292.

Gabbard, G. O. (2014). Psychodynamic psychiatry in clinical practice (5th ed.). American Psychiatric Publishing.

Kaufman, S. B., Weiss, B., Miller, J. D., & Campbell, W. K. (2017). The distinctiveness of pathological narcissism. Journal of Personality Disorders, 31(4), 437–458.

Kim, J., & Rapee, R. M. (2024). Parental image management and adolescent emotional functioning: A longitudinal study. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 41(2), 356–375.

Lasch, C. (1979). The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. Norton.

Lyons-Ruth, K., & Brumariu, L. E. (2020). Attachment, trauma, and the development of emotion regulation. Current Opinion in Psychology, 37, 127–132.

Mierzejewska, K., Dobrowolski, P., & Sorokowski, P. (2023). Sharing children online: Parental narcissism and the digital display of family life. Computers in Human Behavior, 148, 107932.

Schoppe-Sullivan, S. J., Kamp Dush, C. M., Sullivan, J., & Goldberg, A. E. (2022). Estrangement between parents and adult children in the United States. Journal of Marriage and Family, 84(2), 447–462.

Twenge, J. M., & Campbell, W. K. (2009). The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. Free Press.