Parental Mindsets for Raising Emotionally Mature Kids

Lindsay Gibson’s book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents has found its way into a lot of therapy offices, detailing what so many clients (and therapists) recognize from their own childhoods: the disorienting and formative experience of growing up without enough parental attunement. Her new book—How to Raise an Emotionally Mature Child—is addressed to parents themselves. Here’s an excerpt we think both you and your clients will find valuable.

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While all children require protection, nurturing, guidance, and limits, your child needs more than just these parental behaviors. They also need you to see them as a real human being with their own vital, subjective experience.

By noticing and resonating with your child’s interior happenings, you will treat your child in ways that will amplify their trust and connection with you. You’ll do this by showing they have a right to be taken seriously and treated as someone whose feelings matter.

Now let’s consider the parental mindsets that will help you create the kind of relationship that will nourish your child’s emotional maturity. As you try on each of the following viewpoints and look at your child through that lens, you’ll find that your parenting responses become calmer and more collaborative. You’ll notice how it shifts your attitude toward your child in a positive direction when you make a point to see them in these ways.

My Child’s Behavior Is How They Communicate Their Needs and Feelings

When children don’t have words for their feelings or don’t expect others to listen, actions become their only way of communicating their needs and distress. “Acting out” means that instead of putting feelings into words, a person enacts a kind of charade of their distress. Without sufficient emotional maturation, even adults continue to do this.

Often children don’t know what is upsetting them. Their internal reactions are telling them something that their minds don’t always understand. Unfortunately, we adults can miss these messages too, and instead label our children’s expressions as misbehavior. Adults usually think of communication as verbal, but children of all ages often use their body and behavior to communicate their feelings. By looking at behavior as communication, you will become curious about what their behavior is trying to tell you.

When you adopt this mindset, a child’s difficult behavior is transformed into an opportunity to help them understand themselves. As you try to help put their emotional experiences into words, you redirect them from acting out to talking about their needs and feelings in ways that other people can understand and respond to constructively. Once your child is better able to put their feelings into words instead of behavior, other people will be less defensive or reactive toward them.

Good “listening” interprets behavior as well as words. With children, listening must go beyond expecting them to spell it out for you. In fact, it’s not up to them to be so eloquent that they stir up the right emotional response in you. They usually can’t do that.

Think of yourself as a receptive parent who “listens” comprehensively, actively looking for meaning at an emotional level even if your child doesn’t have the words to express it. You can use your curiosity and empathy to ferret out what is being expressed indirectly and nonverbally. This kind of comprehensive listening shows real care and interest, giving your child early confidence that they can make themselves understood by others, even before they’re very good at it.

Adopting the mindset that behavior makes sense and that the child is using behavior to tell you what they need prevents frustrating standoffs on both sides. This orientation is much more productive than labeling your child’s behavior as senseless, naughty, defiant, oversensitive, or out of control, which is how an emotionally unaware parent might see it. Indeed, one of the big reasons why parents take their children to therapists is that they need help translating the child’s behavior into words and messages that they can understand. But if you understand that your child is using their behavior to communicate with you all the time, you can pay attention differently.

Some Thoughts

• You get closer to your child when you start wondering what their behavior is revealing about their inner state.
• When you think about their actions as a coded message, behavior problems become much more interesting.
• If you ask yourself the question “What are they trying to tell me?” you will feel curious and empowered rather than irritated and challenged.

My Child Is Intrinsically Driven to Grow and Mature

All people—children and adults—have an intrinsic urge to grow and mature by exploring their interests, strengthening their abilities, and expressing their individuality. Your relationship with your child will go more smoothly if, instead of seeing them as moldable clay to be formed, you see them as organically unfolding into who they were meant to be. When you support them in their urges toward growth, your child will feel more self-confident and competent. It’s always most rewarding to do things we’re interested in and good at.

Perhaps the biggest change that growth brings about is the child’s drive to develop into a separate person from you. Signs of individuation are evident when your previously dependent and companionable child seeks more independence to explore and widen their world. Growth surges make children want to stand on their own two feet as soon as they can, and if they’re emotionally secure, they don’t look backward to see how Mom or Dad is doing. They are headed for those new experiences and broader horizons.

Children are drawn to anything—and anyone—that will help them become more experienced and psychologically complex. They’re not just looking for happiness; they want meaningful challenges and tests of strength. As a parent, you’re bound to think your child is growing up too fast, but to the child, that’s their mission! They’re speeding toward competence and autonomy as fast as they can go.

You may feel little twinges of feeling left behind as your child approaches escape velocity from the parent-child orbit. This can be painful to any parent, especially if you have enjoyed that closeness and dependency with your child. But if you can accept their changes, you’ll establish the basis for a more equal relationship that will continue through adulthood. If you don’t take it personally and understand that the individuation growth process is a force of its own, it may make it easier to accept your role shift away from being the center of your child’s universe.

Too little motivation. Sometimes there might be the opposite problem. It might look to you like your child is not motivated enough to grow up or move toward productive activities on their own. Whatever their age, you might be tempted to take over and try to motivate them extrinsically through encouragement, rewards, or consequences.

But this is not sustainable. It works better to wisely assume that such children want to develop but perhaps not in the way you imagine. They may need to find their own appealing motivations.

Some Thoughts

• If you recognize your child’s individuality, they won’t have to keep proving it to you.
• Your child’s individuation is desirable, but as a parent, some feelings of loss are understandable.
• Being interested in your child’s experiences can open up a dialogue about what they like to do, what’s necessary to do, and what’s the best way to get through things that aren’t interesting or easy.

My Child Is Psychologically Real Inside, with Their Own Subjective Experience

I know this mindset may sound like the first one—recognition of individuality—but it’s a little different. When you acknowledge someone’s individuality, it can easily stop at an intellectual, categorizing level. But when you emotionally relate to them as psychologically real, your bond deepens because you pay close attention and experience them for who they are on the inside. When you appreciate the realness of your child’s inner world, it will enliven you too. Instead of just reacting to your child’s outer behavior, you can instead have vivid, meaningful encounters in which you recognize the significance of their experience as being equal to your own. Sound too abstract? It’s not. It’s a foundational, essential mode of relating that creates profound bonds—and people in relationships suffer without it.

When you treat your child’s subjective experiences as being as real as your own, it makes a huge difference to your child. It encourages them to take themselves seriously as a real self. More than anything else, your interest in their inner experiences confirms for them that they are intrinsically valuable to you. When you see them as real inside, they learn to honor the validity of their own needs and feelings. Engaging in that kind of mindful psychological awareness of each other’s inner world is a gift to both people, no matter how old they are.

Dignity and embarrassment. When we ignore our child’s subjectivity and inner realness, it’s all too easy to start treating them more as roles or possessions rather than as unique, sensitive individuals worthy of dignity. Children whose inner realness is not recognized by their parents or whose feelings are disregarded can grow up with a sense of shame just for being a person with needs and feelings. I mention this because children’s vulnerability to humiliation can easily be overlooked.

We commonly associate dignity with adult maturity, but I think children feel injuries to their dignity even more acutely than adults because their emotional sensitivity hasn’t yet been blunted. They feel it deeply when someone makes them feel unworthy, powerless, or bad about themselves or their feelings. But when you treat them with dignity and try not to embarrass them, your actions teach them how they should be treated by others.

Show delight and respect for them. Delight and joy surge in our brains’ emotional centers when we experience the aliveness and realness of another person. This pleasurable resonance with each other creates connection and delight, not only between people but among other mammals as well. When someone happily greets us—even our pet—showing delight in our existence, we feel more alive, sparking energy, optimism, and urges to play and laugh.

When you take in the stunning actuality and beauty of your child’s existence, your child feels it and knows they made you feel that way simply by being there. This goes beyond the conventionally rather flat ideal of “unconditional love” and lets your child know that not only do you love them no matter what, but they make you happy just by being around them. They don’t have to deserve, earn, or score anything. They already did it just by existing.

Of course, sometimes the stress and exhaustion of adult life can mean we do not have much energy left over for joy, play, or delight. But I’m hoping you always have room for respect and that you remain aware of your child’s inner realness. It will make a tremendous difference to your child’s capacity for self-respect, happiness, and optimism.

Some Thoughts

• When you think of it, take a moment to enjoy your child as if seeing them as a real person for the first time.
• Show your delight in your children by asking about their inner psychological experiences. They need to know you value what goes on in their inner world.
• Express curiosity about your child’s subjective experiences. It can be small and silly, like why they like potatoes more than peas or what they admire about a character in their favorite game, but this is what they’ll take away from your question: What goes on inside of me is interesting. I have substance.

My Child’s Sense of Self Is Built on Noticing Their Feelings

It’s tempting to avoid talk of murky things like “self,” and instead just focus on explicit observables like behavior and communication. But the idea of the self, as complex and difficult to define as it is, is too important not to explore.

You know you have a self, even if it’s hard to put into words. You can sense your inner beingness as you observe and interact with the world: I am self-aware of being real and having my own private experiences, like reading this book in a comfortable spot. When we talk about the self, we are referring to that awareness of feelings and the experiencing of one’s conscious inner presence, observing and living in the moment.

Our original sense of self starts with primitive body sensations, alerting us to things going on inside our body, distinct from outer events. We begin to develop a sense of self by noticing our body feelings and what they tell us about what’s good or bad for survival and maintaining healthy balance in our bodies. You can’t develop a strong and resilient sense of self unless you are familiar with your feelings and learn to understand and manage them. You help your child develop a self by responding to their feelings and teaching them how to value, listen to, and manage their emotions.

If a child is invalidated when they experience and talk about their feelings, it negatively affects the development of their sense of self. They start discounting what their inner feedback is telling them about their well-being or needs. In the absence of a strong connection to their instincts and feelings, children have to look to other people’s reactions to define themselves. Without a fully developed sense of self, people have little choice but to be overly dependent on what other people think of them, or what their peers or culture tells them is valuable.

Your child’s sense of self not only allows them to consciously know what they are experiencing, but also supports the growth of their identity across time as the purposeful main character in their life story. A solid sense of self gives them an internal point of reference from which to observe and evaluate reality more objectively. As they develop a more conscious awareness of self, they will be able to weigh information and make decisions based on both inside and outside feedback. This feeling-informed awareness also gives them the ability to estimate the emotional effects of their actions on others. Such self-awareness and emotional attunement are foundational for emotional maturity.

Consciousness. A sense of self comes into being alongside consciousness, and each feeds the other. We tend to associate consciousness with thinking and reasoning, but our emerging consciousness has its roots in our body sensations and emotions. When you notice and talk about your child’s behavior and feelings with them, you help make your child more conscious of their own motivations and needs, helping them to get to know themselves. Through your feedback, their shifting feelings and impulses gradually fall into more comprehensible patterns, and they begin to experience themselves as purposeful individuals.

Some Thoughts

• A sense of self is the foundation for both self-awareness and sensitivity to other people.
• The emerging awareness of self is the beginning of your child’s adult sense of identity.
• Sharing authentic moments of connection and talking about feelings strengthens your child’s sense of self and builds their awareness of other people’s internal states too.

As you consider these mindsets, I hope you’ll take a moment to imagine how you would feel as a child if your parents saw you in these ways. How would it affect your sense of yourself? How would you feel toward a parent who tried to understand your inner experience? Would you feel like you could safely be yourself with them? As a child, how might your parent’s interest and curiosity about you affect your self-confidence and willingness to try new things?

From the book HOW TO RAISE AN EMOTIONALLY MATURE CHILD by Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD. Copyright © 2026 by Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.