Parents, if your child develops a full-fledged personality disorder by the time they hit their teenage years, then YES — obviously your parenting style (in theory) could have exacerbated a pre-existing propensity to develop the condition. It also could have traumatized an otherwise normal, emotionally healthy, and sensitive child [i.e. a narcissistic parent with a moderate to average IQ giving birth to a highly sensitive or gifted child and then brutally demeans, punishes, or ridicules them for being “too sensitive”]. It is not rocket science to suggest that any parent — good, bad, or indifferent — is guilty of making both positive and negative choices in their own lives that are likely to have a profound effect on children.
Educators need to be on the lookout for toxic parenting warning signs and understand that there is a difference between being abusive with your child and making communication or lifestyle choice types of mistakes with them on occasion. Such is the case of raising a little girl or boy who for whatever reason exhibits personality traits from pre-school on that indicate the child may have a mental health predisposition for manifesting Oppositional Defiant Disorder aptly nicknamed “ODD” for short (or #ODD if you are doing a Facebook or Twitter hashtag search).
Truly, there are some familial groups that are completely out of sync with one another because of a parent being functionally incapable of intellectually or emotionally understanding or validating the different lifestyle viewpoint of a child. But there are cases where a healthy and loving parent can give birth to a youngster who — for whatever biological or trauma-inspired catalyzing event — ends up functionally incapable of seeing the world from any viewpoint other than their own, distorted self-centered view.
In either case, there are no winners among toxic family members, especially children. No one succeeds when raised in a social environment that is supposed to be supportive but the people who are raised in or around it are taught the toxic belief that in order to succeed someone else has to lose.
Further, if a parent or child (or any person, for that matter) spends one moment of their precious life path time waving a blaming or shaming finger they themselves are actually acting abusively.
It does nothing for a child or parent to attach subjective rage or resentful antagonism to an otherwise objective process of trying to unravel the mystery of how a human being developed psychologically the why they have or to spend time being mad that an abusive person’s logic is (essentially) based on not having a clue.
If you were raised by a family so toxic that you would have been better off being raised by wolves, you are not alone. With one in four women being traumatized in some way by narcissistic abuse and one in six men, it is very likely that other people you know are likely to have been raised in an abusive home environment, too.
