What are Emotionally Immature Parents?

Did you grow up in a house where everything looked fine on the outside — food on the table, clean clothes, a roof over your head?

Your parents were there in a practical sense, yet emotionally you might have felt completely alone. As if no one really saw you. As if what you felt on the inside didn’t matter.

I see life as a "learning school". Maybe you do too, maybe not.
I believe that even before we’re born, we choose what we want to learn in this lifetime — including the parents who will “help” us along the way.
And honestly, what better teacher could there be than a parent who doesn’t know how to deal with their own emotions?

American psychologist Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson studied this deeply.
She calls it emotional immaturity: parents who may be physically present, but who cannot emotionally attune to their child.
She describes four main types. Of course, no one fits perfectly into one box — but the patterns are strikingly familiar.

1. Emotional Parents
They seem highly emotional, but are in fact absorbed by their own feelings.
Unpredictable, intense, sometimes dramatic.
As a child, you learn to walk on eggshells — trying to prevent outbursts or to comfort them when they fall apart.
They never learned how to regulate their own emotions.

“If my mother was angry, I never knew why. The atmosphere could change in a second, and then I had to comfort her — even though I was scared myself.”

2. Driven Parents
For them, life is about achievement, control, and constant doing.
They push their children to perform, but often miss true emotional connection.
Love feels conditional — you need to earn it.

“Why did you only get an 8 for the math test? If you’d tried harder, you’d have made it.”

3. Passive Parents
They avoid conflict and difficult emotions.
Gentle, yes — but absent when it really matters.
They don’t intervene, leaving the child to cope alone.

“Dad always said, ‘Just let it go, it’ll be okay.’ But he never stepped in when my mother got angry or when I was bullied.”

4. Rejecting Parents
Distant, critical, or authoritarian.
They value control over connection, and see vulnerability as weakness.
The result: emotional isolation.

“When I was sad, my father said, ‘Don’t be so dramatic. Crying won’t help anyway.’”

Having emotionally absent parents is confusing for any child.
You feel something is missing, but soon you start believing: it must be me.
The coping strategies you develop in that environment often stay with you into adulthood — shaping your relationships, your work, even how you parent.

In the next snippet, I’ll explore what happens to somebody who grows up with emotionally immature parents — and how these coping patterns become part of your story.