Every childhood has its ups and downs; it has good memories and bad ones. No parent is perfect, and mistakes are always going to happen; tempers are going to rise, and stress can lead to some poor behavioral decisions. However, it’s all about what you do with your mistakes afterwards; will you, the parent, apologize and work to do better next time? Will you explain it away, or even acknowledge it?
There are some parents, though, who continue to let their anger get the best of them or who are emotionally immature, meaning they "handle" tough situations and stress in really detrimental ways. These parents can create an environment so unstable that their kids feel like they’re walking on eggshells—and that’s a hard environment for children to properly develop in.
Guardians or caregivers who make their offspring feel like that—as if they’re handling an atomic bomb that can go off with the slightest misstep—are often called eggshell parents. They’re so sensitive, you have to be oh-so-gentle around them. And even then, you might set them off and get the silent treatment for several days.
To help us dive into that topic more, Parade spoke to Dr. Kim Sage, PsyD, MA, a licensed clinical psychologist in California, who coined the term. We also spoke to Dr. Robyn Koslowitz, who is a clinical psychologist, trauma expert and author of Post-Traumatic Parenting: Break the Cycle and Become the Parent You Always Wanted to Be.
With their help, we untangle what it means to be an eggshell parent, including nine signs that you were raised by one. Plus, the long-term effects of having an eggshell parent and how to heal.
Related: If You Can’t Relax When Someone Is Upset With You, a Psychotherapist Says You Probably Possess These 9 Traits
What Is an ‘Eggshell Parent’?
If you grew up with a parent who was volatile or whom you knew you couldn’t say certain things to because they couldn’t handle it, you might have had an “eggshell parent.”“An eggshell parent is a parent (or caregiver) who chronically engages in chaotic, toxic, immature and/or unsafe, inconsistent and unpredictable moods, emotions and/or behaviors,” Dr. Sage explains. “Essentially, to live with a caregiver whose moods, emotions and/or actions determine the temperature of our home (and our lives!).”
Dr. Koslowitz shares the same sentiment, explaining that an eggshell parent has emotions that “feel so big, so reactive or so unpredictable that the child learns to manage the room.” This essentially leads to “a child who feels responsible for managing a parent’s emotions...” she notes.She explains that the proper dynamic in a healthy family includes a parent that is “the emotional container." They’re there to “contain” a child’s emotions when they get too big. This includes helping the child regulate their emotions by soothing them, helping them take big breaths and overall just calming them down. But in situations where there are eggshell parents, “the roles are flipped,” she states.“The child becomes the container for the parent, which is developmentally backwards,” she tells Parade.
Dr. Sage coined the term after “reading every book [she] could find about parents who were highly mentally, physically and/or emotionally immature, unpredictable and inconsistent.” She was trying to make sense of not only her own experience growing up, but her patients’ as well.Essentially, she came up with the term “eggshell parents” after researching those “who made their children feel like they had to walk on eggshells around them, never knowing what to expect and always walking on their emotional tippy toes, ‘prepared for the worst case scenario—around everyone, and in every situation.’"She looked at patterns her patients had and wanted to find ways to understand them and help them—and herself—heal “from a lifetime of invalidation.”For whatever reason, eggshell parents have “a difficult time managing their emotions (which often spill out too often, too much and unpredictably around and over their children), and they struggle with providing mental, emotional and/or behavioral consistency for their children,” she shares.
Eggshell parent examples
Dr. Koslowitz shares that, in terms of attachment, “kids do best when they feel safe, seen, soothed and secure.” However, she adds that “eggshell parenting disrupts [this] because the child cannot reliably predict what the parent will do with the child’s feelings.”So, for example, if a child is furious, they never learn how to calm down from that if they have an eggshell parent. Instead, they learn to “stuff down” their own anger so that they don’t set their parent's anger off, she explains. This makes a child uncomfortable sitting with their own emotions, unable to regulate them. “If you ever heard the words ‘Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about,’ you may have been raised by an eggshell parent,” she notes. Dr. Sage gives some examples that basically include a very unpredictable and explosive caregiver who could be proud of their eight-year-old in the morning and call them selfish in the afternoon.Other examples of eggshell parents include:
A parent who packs their kid’s lunch and greets them nicely after school, but then they might decide to give you the cold shoulder that evening, and for the next few days. Why? “Because you did something to upset them, or they were just upset in general, so they stopped talking to everyone in the house (but you have no idea why they are not speaking to you, so you have to guess, or assume you did something wrong),” Dr. Sage explains. A parent who is “highly sensitive to any signs of rejection,” she states. They might struggle with managing their feelings, “so any perception of rejection can trigger them to shame, blame, punish, etc their child at any moment in time,” leading to walking on eggshells. A parent whose child learns at a young age exactly how to say something “the right way” so it does not turn into an explosion, Dr. Koslowitz shares.A parent who has meltdowns over minor issues, mistakes or messes, she explains. They will then later insist the child is “too sensitive” for being scared at said meltdown.A parent who takes things like a child’s normal emotions personally, she says. They might think a toddler’s tantrum means that the child doesn’t love them, or someone who “retaliates with guilt, anger or withdrawal.”Related: 9 Signs Your Adult Child Tolerates You But Doesn’t Love You, Psychologists Warn
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On the more extreme spectrum of why someone turned out to be an eggshell parent, someone could have untreated and undiagnosed Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), Dr. Sage mentions. She also shares that, in addition to personality disorders, this can “most often” be a result of “untreated trauma and generational trauma… anger issues, mood dysregulation issues, mental health struggles, impulsivity or substance abuse.” A lot of times, too, as Dr. Koslowitz shares, a lot of these “eggshell parents” aren’t actively trying to be harmful. “I firmly believe that most parents do the best they can with the tools they have,” she explains. “Sometimes those tools are inadequate. And now that we understand trauma better, it’s less and less OK to stay unskilled. Basically: ‘Deal with the trauma so your kids don’t have to.’”She uses a metaphor from her book, Post-Traumatic Parenting, called the “trauma app,” which is your brain’s “old survival program” that “auto-launches under stress and takes over your tone, urgency and reactions before your wise adult self can come online.” If you’ve ever had a screaming fight with your partner and felt bad about it later, you probably know what she’s talking about. So with therapy and just understanding what is right and wrong when it comes to parenting, you can override that decrepit app your body and brain defaults to.“It’s not you, it’s your trauma. But it’s also your job to figure out how to carry your trauma in a more adaptive fashion,” she states.Related: If You Learned These 7 ‘Rules’ Growing Up, You May Have Been Raised by Emotionally Immature Parents
9 Signs You Were Raised by an ‘Eggshell Parent,’ According to Psychologists
Maybe you don’t see yourself as a people-pleaser, but if you find that you’re automatically defaulting to that—or fawning, which is a trauma response—then this might be because you grew up with an eggshell parent.“If calming someone down was how you stayed safe, you will grow up thinking appeasing is love,” Dr. Koslowitz explains about this sign. “You become excellent at reading people and terrible at stating needs.”
2. Emotion-phobia
If you grew up with parents who blew a gasket at the slightest inconvenience or emotion that wasn’t their own, you most likely learned to turn your feelings off and not share them, especially if they were “negative.” And that is a habit that will follow you into adulthood. “When emotions set a parent off, you learn emotions are dangerous,” Dr. Koslowitz shares. “You may fear anger, sadness or disappointment in yourself, because feelings used to cost you.”On the flipside, you might also be “easily triggered by other people’s moods, emotions, or actions,” Dr. Sage says. “[This is] a result of being chronically hypervigilant in all relationships, learning in childhood that every verbal or non-verbal signal means something, and most often it means ‘threat’,” she explains, saying that the threat can be a parent’s mood, punishment, irritation, etc. “So a child learns that they are not able to safely experience their emotions as separate from other people and other people's emotions take precedence over their own…”
In line with being a people-pleaser, even if by accident, Dr. Sage shares that children who had eggshell parents are really great at taking care of other people, while also just ignoring their own.“Eggshell children are taught to outsource their own sense of safety (as opposed to insourcing), which can only be experienced when other people are happy, okay, satisfied, emotionally stable, etc.,” she tells Parade. “We cannot take care of our needs at the same time, so we stop learning how to even identify what we feel, honor or validate what we feel or need, etc. We learn we don't matter. Caretaking makes us matter; it makes us feel worthy, seen and validated.”
4. Chronic over-explaining and rehearsing conversations
If your actions were constantly ridiculed or you were often blamed for things you didn’t do or had no control over, you most likely developed the habit of over-explaining every itty bitty thing you do. And you’re ready to do so, too.“You learned you need a legal brief to deserve basic respect,” Dr. Koslowitz shares. “Adults raised this way often pre-defend their feelings because the parents’ reactions were unpredictable.”
If you constantly had to worry about someone else’s emotions and outbursts—which were often deemed “your fault”—then it’s easiest when you don’t have to deal with anyone else but yourself. No second party, no chance at accidentally setting someone off, right?“Just like in childhood, if we went to be alone somewhere (i.e., our bedrooms), the only time we feel safe and relaxed in our nervous systems and bodies, is when no one is around who we must be hypervigilant to predict threat from,” Dr. Sage explains. “We feel safest when we are alone.”
6. Feeling like you’re ‘too much’ or ‘a burden,’ and struggle with emotions like anger
It makes sense that kids who were constantly blamed for emotional outbursts from a parent might start to feel like a burden or like they were the problem because of how they were treated (even though they weren't). “If your feelings triggered backlash, you learn your needs are the problem,” Dr. Koslowitz shares. “You minimize, apologize for existing or feel guilty for wanting care.”This can lead someone to never know how to handle their own anger, because they were shoving it down so they wouldn’t “be too much.”“In most eggshell homes, we learn that anger feels or was actually dangerous,” Dr. Sage says.She adds that those children will either avoid anger, self-silence or blow up. That’ll lead them to shame themselves for the meltdown, or for being angry at all, “because we believe all anger makes [them] just like [their] caregivers.” Or, they might even become eggshell parents themselves and repeat the pattern.
As you can imagine, when you’re “overly focused on not making mistakes,” as Dr. Sage puts it, you’ll learn to be a perfectionist, which also isn’t healthy. She says “we learn that not getting something right for our caregiver (even if it wasn't our job or we didn't do anything wrong)” will lead to fewer outbursts. This gives eggshell children a false sense of hope that “perfection holds the possibility of keeping others happy.”She shares that this makes kids in this situation “learn to over-focus on perfection in adulthood, from re-reading texts or emails excessively, playing out what to say or over-analyzing where we ‘went wrong,’ in a conversation so we can ‘do better next time’ (before, during or after an interaction).” All in hopes of not setting off their parents yet again.
8. Hypervigilance to tone and micro-shifts
Hypervigilance was mentioned already, but it is still a big sign that someone grew up with eggshell parents. “You notice tiny changes in voice, facial expression, pacing and silence, because you had to.” Dr. Koslowitz says.Dr. Sage also points to this sign, saying that you’re most likely highly sensitive, empathic and responsive to others.“In our childhoods (and in most traumatic childhoods), children's brains are taught and curated to overly focus on pleasing, appeasing and accommodating the emotional needs of a parent, and so we learn to become highly sensitive and empathic to the needs of our caregivers and, eventually, to everyone else,” she says. “We were sculpted and shaped to be highly aware, alert and responsive to others in order to get our needs met, and to create whatever attachment security and safety were available.”And while you did need to be empathic to notice what your parent wanted (or didn’t want) to keep the peace, Dr. Koslowitz expertly points out: “You call it empathy, but it started as scanning for danger.”
9. Somatic symptoms, especially after contact with that parent
If you’ve experienced trauma, you know that oftentimes your body has an involuntary reaction before your head does. Those somatic responses—reactions that relate to your body that are often distinct from your mind—can really show up for adults who were raised by eggshell parents because your brain was wired to have those reactions in response to your volatile caregiver.“Your body starts bracing before your mind even catches up,” Dr. Koslowitz explains. This can especially happen after interacting with that parent, she shares, and can manifest as “headaches, stomach pain, tight chest, fatigue” and more.“A very specific tell is: ‘I can’t pick up the phone to chat with my mom right now. I have too much to do this afternoon and it’s not a good time for a headache,’” she states.Related: People Who Grew Up With Super-Negative Parents Often Develop These 12 Traits as Adults, Psychologists Say
With a lot of these signs being trauma responses or just how our body has been engineered to react through years of mistreatment and unstable environments, it’s not a shock to know that eggshell parenting can have consequences. Dr. Sage says that, since “walking on eggshells is a type of emotional abuse in which a child's chronic stress response” is always switched on and their “ability to experience physical, mental and emotional safety and secure attachment” is basically nonexistent, kids with eggshell parents often have long-lasting effects. She and Dr. Koslowitz share that these effects can include (but are not limited to):
Low self-trust—the parent’s emotions became the “truth,” Dr. Koslowitz says.Chronic health issuesTrauma-related symptoms that are often found in those with Complex PTSD (CPTSD, which is related to repeated, generally relational trauma) and PTSD (related to single event trauma). Chronic anxiety and hypervigilance. Dr. Sage says that hypervigilance “is extremely common in both CPTSD and PTSD survivors.”Boundary confusion (guilt when you say no, resentment when you say yes)Relationship challengesRelationship patterns of over-functioning, caretaking, or avoidanceDifficulty identifying needs (you were trained to prioritize the parent’s state)Mental health struggles (i.e., anxiety, depression, trauma, etc.)Self-esteem and worthiness issuesEmotional dysregulationInternalized shame: “If I upset someone, I’m bad,” Dr. Koslowitz says.Related: Psychologists Reveal: You’ve ‘Succeeded’ as a Parent if Your Adult Child Has These 11 Subtle Habits
How To Break the Cycle of Eggshell Parenting
As with most things that have to do with trauma or emotional abuse, the first step to breaking the cycle of eggshell parenting involves “accepting and validating your experiences,” which can be “the hardest and most important part,” Dr. Sage shares.Dr. Koslowitz says that “cycle-breaking is inner work that becomes outward behavior.” She gives some steps below.
Name the pattern without shaming yourself: Tell yourself, “Awareness is not the finish line, it’s the starting line.”Regulation skills first, then discipline skills: “You cannot parent calmly with a dysregulated body,” Dr. Koslowitz shares. “If the trauma app keeps launching, start with nervous system care and support.”Practice containment: If you have children of your own, and you don’t want to continue the pattern of eggshell parenting, tell yourself, “My child can have big feelings without me having a big reaction,” Dr. Koslowitz points out.Repair quickly and specifically: “Repair is where safety gets rebuilt,” she explains. “When you blow it, [tell your child], ‘That was too big. You didn’t deserve that. I’m working on it.’”Get trauma-focused help when trauma is driving it: She says that going to therapy and getting help is best with something related to trauma. “If your reactions are outsized and sticky, it’s not a character flaw. It’s a signal,” she states. “Treat the root so your child is not raised around your untreated stress responses.”In addition to breaking the cycle—if you have your own kids or you want to be better to your partner because these behaviors are showing up in your relationships—you should know how to deal with your eggshell parent now that you’re an adult. And the most important thing to remember when doing so is that you are not them.Dr. Sage says that, for many reasons, you are not your parent, especially if you’re trying to better yourself. You have “self-awareness, [a] willingness to self-reflect, shift your behavior, own your behavior and [the] ability to make repairs" may not be skills available to your eggshell parents today," which are also not skills your parents have, she points out. So when it comes to working on or repairing your relationship with them, it’s kind of “dependent upon how willing and able they are to do these things.” “Many parent are willing and able to own their parenting and make change, but many more will not,” she explains. “Learning how to work on healing yourself while trying to find a relationship balance that works for you is your goal.”And in accepting that you are not your eggshell parents, Dr. Koslowitz shares that you should stick firm to your boundaries and not yield to them and their wishes.“You can be compassionate without being compliant,” she states.She also shares that while “their feelings are real,” they also aren’t “your job to manage,” nor should that ever have been your job.“You are allowed to set boundaries that protect your nervous system, even if those boundaries disappoint them,” she encourages.
How To Heal From Having an Eggshell Parent
Dr. Sage says that it’s important to recognize what the core wounds and issues most eggshell children have, so that you can focus on healing those through therapy and self-work. These include:
Fear: “Eggshell parents instill fear as a primary emotion dictating our responses to other people,” she explains. “Examine the role of fear in your life. [Learn] to identify how fear shows up in your life and relationships, especially when you find yourself predicting threat.” Emotional immaturity and unpredictability: She shares that it’s important to understand that a lot of your wounds came from emotional immaturity and things related to that. Creating "patterns of consistency, stability and relationship security... can be incredibly healing as you live your adult life differently than your eggshell parent.”Emotional abuse: To heal from this, Dr. Sage recommends seeking out therapy, reading books and looking up reliable resources on emotional abuse. “One of the biggest challenges for kids who grew up with eggshell parents is learning to accept and identify and validate their emotional abuse,” she states. And this is often so hard because your parents weren’t “always” bad.” There’s a lot of nuance here, which is where professional help come sin hand.Chronic toxic stress: “Addressing the impact of chronic stress on your mind, body, etc., is important to examine your symptoms and struggles, to learn to focus on yourself and your healing,” she says.Trauma: “Getting help and support can be life-changing with trauma-focused therapists, clinicians, etc.,” she states.Dr. Koslowitz also gives some key steps when healing from an eggshell parent:
Re-learn what feelings are for: “Emotions are information, not emergencies,” she states.Build needs literacy: “Practice naming wants and limits in low-stakes moments,” she shares.Work with the body: She adds that “If your body still braces, insight alone will not be enough.”Choose relationships that retrain your nervous system: Choosing “steady people” in your life is great because they “help you learn ‘I can be honest and still be safe,” she says.Grieve what you missed: “Many adults heal faster once they stop pretending it was fine,” she states.Create structured contact if needed: When it comes to speaking to or interacting with your eggshell parents, she says to set “shorter calls, planned topics, time limit[s]” and planned recovery time after.Up Next:
Related: 8 Manipulative Parenting Habits That Still Affect You as an Adult, According to Psychologists
Sources:
Kim Sage, PsyD, MA, is a licensed clinical psychologist in California and has a large social media following, through her TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. She makes content about parents with emotional immaturity, narcissistic and borderline personality disorders, autism in women and more. She also has four courses (one is free) available that revolve around identifying your childhood trauma and learning how to heal from it.Dr. Robyn Koslowitz, clinical psychologist and trauma expert. Author of Post-Traumatic Parenting: Break the Cycle and Become the Parent You Always Wanted to Be, host of the Post-Traumatic Parenting podcast, and founder of the Post-Traumatic Parenting Summit.Hence then, the article about 9 signs you grew up with an eggshell parent according to psychologists was published today ( ) and is available on Parade ( Saudi Arabia ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
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