Part 3: When Your Child Shows Narcissistic Traits: What Parents Need to Know
Parents sometimes become worried when a child or teenager seems unusually self-focused, entitled, competitive, or unable to handle criticism. Maybe they struggle to apologize. Maybe losing feels unbearable. Maybe every limit turns into an argument, or they seem to have difficulty understanding how their behaviour affects other people.
It is easy to search these behaviours online and quickly land on the word narcissism.
That can be frightening for a parent. But children and teenagers are still developing. Their ability to manage emotions, take another person’s perspective, tolerate disappointment, and understand themselves is not yet finished. A child can show narcissistic traits without having Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and one difficult behaviour does not tell us who that child will become.
Too Long to Read? Here’s What I Want You to Take Away
Narcissistic traits in children do not automatically mean Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Healthy confidence is different from believing you deserve more than other people.
What matters most is whether the behaviour becomes a repeated pattern that affects relationships, empathy, accountability, or daily life.
Children can learn healthier ways of handling disappointment, criticism, empathy, and repair without being shamed or labelled.
Worried about what you are seeing in your child?
If you are unsure whether a behaviour is part of normal development or something that needs more support, counselling can help you look at the pattern in context.
Healthy Confidence Is Not the Same as Superiority
One of the most useful distinctions for parents is the difference between healthy self-esteem and feeling superior to other people. Healthy self-esteem sounds more like, I have value. I have strengths. I can make mistakes and still be okay. Narcissistic superiority sounds more like, I deserve more. I should be treated differently. I am better than other people.
A well-known study followed 565 children between the ages of seven and twelve and found that parental warmth was linked with healthier self-esteem, while parental overvaluation was linked with increases in narcissistic traits (Brummelman et al., 2015). That does not mean parents should stop praising their children.
Overvaluation is not the same as saying, “I’m proud of you,” noticing effort, or celebrating a child’s strengths. It is more about repeatedly sending the message that the child is unusually special, more deserving than others, or should receive special treatment.
Children need to know they matter without needing to believe they matter more than everyone else.
Look for a Pattern, Not a Bad Day
Children and teenagers can be selfish. They can hate losing. They can react badly to criticism. They can become dramatic, defensive, or completely convinced that something is unfair.
That does not automatically mean narcissism. The concern becomes greater when these behaviours are persistent, rigid, and begin affecting different parts of the child’s life. For example, a parent might notice that their child regularly expects rules not to apply to them, struggles to admit when they have hurt someone, becomes extremely angry or ashamed when corrected, or repeatedly uses other people to get what they want.
Research with young people has found that narcissistic traits can be studied during adolescence and young adulthood, while also showing that parenting experiences and other developmental factors need to be understood together rather than treated as a single cause (van Schie et al., 2020).
The question is not, Does my child ever act narcissistically? Most people do sometimes. A better question is whether the pattern is becoming strong enough that it interferes with friendships, family relationships, school, emotional wellbeing, or the ability to take responsibility.
Empathy and Accountability Can Be Learned
Empathy is still developing throughout childhood and adolescence. A child may be able to understand that another person is upset but still have difficulty slowing down enough to care about it in the middle of a conflict. That ability grows through relationships, modelling, and repeated practice.
A large meta-analysis found that better-quality relationships with parents and peers were linked with greater empathy in adolescents (Boele et al., 2019). This gives parents something practical to work with. After a conflict, the goal is not simply to ask, “Why did you do that?” It is to help the child understand what happened, what they were feeling, what the other person may have experienced, and what needs to happen next. That is different from shame.
“You are selfish” tells a child who they are. “What you did hurt someone, and we need to make it right” teaches responsibility.
A child can learn that making a mistake does not make them a bad person, while still learning that their behaviour has consequences.
This matters because children who feel easily ashamed may become defensive very quickly. They may blame someone else, deny what happened, or become angry because admitting fault feels too threatening.
The goal is not to remove consequences. It is to help the child tolerate them without collapsing into shame.
Parenting Matters, But It Is Not the Whole Story
Parents often worry that they somehow caused the problem. Research does suggest that some parenting patterns are associated with narcissistic traits. A systematic review of ten studies found the clearest relationship with permissive parenting, while findings across other parenting styles were more mixed (Kılıçkaya et al., 2023). Research with young people has also found associations between remembered overprotection, overvaluation, leniency, and narcissistic traits, although these findings do not establish that parenting alone causes narcissism (van Schie et al., 2020).
Parenting is only one part of development. Temperament, peers, family stress, culture, attachment, trauma, and reinforcement may all influence how a young person learns to relate to themselves and other people.
A parent can make mistakes without “creating a narcissist,” and a child can show concerning behaviours without being destined to carry them into adulthood.
If these patterns are persistent, the most useful goal is not to decide whether the child is narcissistic. It is to understand what may be driving the behaviour and what skills need to develop.
That might include emotional regulation, frustration tolerance, empathy, perspective-taking, accountability, or the ability to repair a relationship after conflict. Sometimes the whole family pattern also needs attention. Parents and children can get caught in cycles of arguing, rescuing, giving in, threatening consequences, or walking on eggshells around one another.
Counselling can help slow that cycle down.
Books I Use as Resources with Clients
Childhood Narcissism: Strategies to Raise Unselfish, Unentitled, and Empathetic Children — Mary Ann Little, PhD
Raising a Secure Child: How Circle of Security Parenting Can Help You Nurture Your Child’s Attachment, Emotional Resilience, and Freedom to Explore — Kent Hoffman, Glen Cooper, and Bert Powell
No-Drama Discipline Workbook: Exercises, Activities, and Practical Strategies to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Developing Minds — Daniel J. Siegel, MD, and Tina Payne Bryson, PhD
Read the Rest of the Narcissism Series
If this article resonated with you, you may also find the other parts of the series helpful:
Part 1: The Different Faces of Narcissism: Why It Can Be So Hard to See
Part 2: Raised by a Narcissistic Parent: When Their Needs Always Came First
Part 4: When Narcissism Runs in the Family: How Patterns Get Passed Down
Part 5: “I Think I Have Narcissistic Traits”: What Happens When You Recognize Yourself
Part 6: Breaking the Cycle: You Can Love Your Family Without Repeating Their Patterns
Want help understanding what is happening with your child?
If you are seeing repeated patterns of entitlement, defensiveness, manipulation, difficulty taking responsibility, or intense reactions to criticism, counselling can help you understand what may be underneath the behaviour and what support may help.
References
Boele, S., Van der Graaff, J., de Wied, M., Van der Valk, I. E., Crocetti, E., & Branje, S. (2019). Linking parent-child and peer relationship quality to empathy in adolescence: A multilevel meta-analysis. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 48, 1033–1055.
Brummelman, E., Thomaes, S., Nelemans, S. A., 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.
Kılıçkaya, S., Uçar, N., & Denizci Nazlıgül, M. (2023). A systematic review of the association between parenting styles and narcissism in young adults: From Baumrind’s perspective. Psychological Reports, 126(2), 620–640. https://doi.org/10.1177/00332941211041010 PubMed
van Schie, C. C., Jarman, H. L., Huxley, E., & Grenyer, B. F. S. (2020). Narcissistic traits in young people: Understanding the role of parenting and maltreatment. Borderline Personality Disorder and Emotion Dysregulation, 7, 10. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40479-020-00125-7
