In addition to love, all children from birth to adulthood feel the need for stability, structure, empathy, strong boundaries and a person who will be an adult next to them. On this difficult path of growing up parent-child relationships require an incredible amount of awareness from parents. The English have a wonderful proverb that encourages adults not to parent children, but to parent themselves, because kids will grow up and still be like their parents, but there is a flipside, and it’s not restricted to moving attention into the upbringing of the child or yourself, it is at the boundary of interaction between an adult and a child, and I would like to point your attention to this in the context of the development of personality with a tendency to narcissistic disorders.

So, these are parent’s mindsets that shape narcissistic children:

— My child is special and deserves to have everything, to have every experience and to benefit from it.

This is a narcissistic claim to entitlement. It is normal that my child is special to me, and it is natural, but you can not expect from society to consider my child special, because he will grow up and will be doomed to endless disappointments in life and interpersonal problems in relationships with people because of the constant expectations of recognition as special.

— My child should never suffer. The experience of failure is always negative, so it should be avoided.

It is known that in the presence of parental support, it is not successes, but obstacles and failures that mainly form human character. Parents often feel as if the failure happened to them and not to the child, and this kind of over-identification with the child does not allow to adequately support him, acknowledging that he can suffer from pain. Therefore, it is important to create such conditions for children in which they would be able, with support, to master feelings of frustration, loss, disappointment, loneliness, boredom, envy, guilt and anger, and only a parent who is free from the feeling of guilt for the child’s failures is able to do this.

— Children need freedom of expression. They have a pure spirit and they will become good people without the intervention of adults. There is no need to resort to authoritarian methods of parenting children with problematic behavior, because this can cause a feeling of shame in the child.

To successfully pass the stage of early childhood narcissism, children need parental help. They need help to get rid of the natural at some stage of infantile feeling of grandiosity and omnipotence in contact with society and at the same time learn to cope with their shame. It is necessary to teach children to distinguish good from bad, but for this parents themselves should be a kind of people that children can admire, children need objects of idealization.

— The formation of self-esteem consists in repeating to children how special they are. Children should not achieve anything to believe in themselves, and they should be protected from the harmful effects of competition.

It is very important to encourage children to make efforts so that they can discover their own opportunities and gain experiences that will become part of their self-image. Create an environment in which children will be able to appreciate with your help their efforts and opportunities, and when necessary, to cope with their own disappointment. Self-esteem should be formed adequately.

All this together will help you to teach your children knowledge about themselves, about others, to feel the boundaries, both their own and others’, to respect the world, as well as to find inner support in life.

The author of the above studies, American psychotherapist Sandy Hotchkiss, in total identifies 7 such mindsets, I decided to point your attention to the main 4, for those interested to learn more, may Google help you.