Narcissism vs Empathy in Children.

What’s normal?

I have two young sons. Both are developing their future personalities before my very eyes and everything I have experienced is telling me it’s not going to turn out well.

What do I mean? Read on.

I have two sons with widely differing personalities. One is co-operative, the other competitive. It’s the society we live in but in microcosm. However, community seems to be losing out both on the larger stage and at the stage of childhood development, no more so than under my roof. I can see why as one seems to lead on from the other, or at least reinforces it.

My fourteen year old is introverted and people pleasing. He’s happy to go along with whatever, whenever. He doesn’t expect you to ask him his opinion of anything, where we are going, what does he want to eat, and if you do he’s hard pushed to give you an answer anyway. Quiet, stoic, reserved. Just wants to be left alone to do what he wants to do, and so he is.

Already being ignored for the more attention seeking brother he develops even more introversion. He waits to be told to put his socks on, he waits for his dinner, he waits for everything. He doesn’t know how to seek attention, though he wants it on occasion, he just doesn’t push for it. It takes a wily ear to know when he wants to be heard. He wouldn’t know how to plan a day if you paid him. In fact he’d pay you not to have to make a decision. He’s not lazy he’s just always had his mother take his decision making from him.

The eight year old on the other hand is already a bully and spoiling for trouble if it looks like he will not get his way. Terribly shy at school and around strangers but among his family, especially myself and his siblings, he’s already two steps ahead of getting what he wants. He wants everyone to know that when he wants something he wants it here and now. He’s already been softening you up beforehand, so you know to be ready when called. He doesn’t like to be the centre of attention but loves it when he gets a mention for doing something good, underneath he wants to be the best and everyone to see it. He’s like butter wouldn’t melt in public, and in private a master manipulator, developing all the hallmarks of a covert narcissist.

Why do I say this? First phrase in the morning is generally “I hate you” albeit in a jovial way, followed by a punch to the privates. I have no idea where this came from but I thought it was his way of saying I love you, now I know he’s saying it in a way that means you're going to have to work for my love. If that hasn’t softened me up enough to get his screen time it will escalate to a full on wrestling match. All in a joking fashion you understand. But it dawned on me this isn’t a joke. He’s developing his personality now: putting people down, being smarter than them, making sure the attention will be ready for him when he needs it, the bullying. It’s all narcissism in its developmental phase. I can imagine being a nervous wreck when I’m older, jumping to his every need and being discarded if I start arguing or becoming un-malleable let’s say. Maybe being so passive and understanding is why I get him.

His desperate need for attention, he pushes his brother out of the way in more ways than one. Constantly asks where we are going, what are we doing, non-stop verbal communication about what’s going on to see if he agrees with it and voicing his displeasure, even if it’s something he likes. All so I can run around pleasing him and jumping through hoops to convince him, so he can play the victim and say he never wanted to do any of this in the first place, that I was making him do it. We’re going to the football pitch that you were adamant about last night! I hold my head in my hands and he knows he’s won. He’ll run four miles in a football match but will collapse at the thought of having to walk across the road to the shop.

Although I do see it and I am able to avert it at times he wouldn’t survive if I didn’t. He already needs that support, it’s just in him, it always has been. I can’t change him, I just need to enable him in a healthy way without the connotation that implies. Implementing boundaries surreptitiously for instance. Being very calm about consequences, no rewards, when to give in and when not, getting him to realise the consequence of his own actions. I have to remove barriers before they are even there. My language has had to change radically to make him think he’s not getting his own way but also to give him the opportunity to get what he needs. It’s fairly normal parenting stuff but to such a heightened state that you have to be hypervigilant but relaxed with it. I have to employ techniques recommended for adult narcissists.

One son educates himself because he likes information and knowledge for its own sake. The other learns because they want power and attention. At this early age and their life paths are already so obvious. I can already tell what they both view as success in life. Neither of them are developing healthy personality traits at the moment but then maybe nobody does. Maybe there’s no such thing. No-one starts out neurotypical, it is something we have to earn through our experiences.

I worry for the romantic relationships they will form though, mostly because mine were abject failures. One will be destroyed by narcissistic women and the other will do the destroying. One will fall over backwards to please his girlfriend thinking he shouldn’t have boundaries and that a woman telling him what to wear is just how it is. The other always out to get what he can out of the relationship, thinking the girl that does the most for him is the one he loves. You can probably work out which one will be which.

Looking into a child’s future is the bane of every parents life and I feel powerless to avert their fate (Cue exhausted parental sigh). But then maybe I have to accept they are just supposed to go through what I went through to some degree and hope that it isn’t as bad. Hopefully the little things I do now will have a bigger impact later on. They will have to experience heartache in other ways regardless the work I put in.

Fingers crossed their narcissism and empathy will not grow out of control to the point where they both become toxic in their relationships. The only examples they have to go on are from parents that live in separate households with little between them except the odd barbed comment and nothing for them to view as healthy on a regular basis. I imagine this is the same for a lot of children nowadays and its a sad reflection of society.

Yes I know, I know. This is all overly judgemental of an age where kids should be allowed to find their feet, is jumping on the band-wagon of self-diagnosing personality disorders from the web and arm chair psychoanalysis. Only it isn’t. Everyone I meet, generally narcissistic individuals, says that kids are resilient and they get over things. “They all get through a divorce fine eventually and it’s all part of the learning experience.” But with children increasingly addicted to screens, including inappropriate advertising, and YouTubers promoting the latest commercialised fad from trainers to games, in a very grandiose manner, as this is what makes good TV nowadays. We are living in an increasingly atomised society with children absorbing digital information rather than through direct experience.

Adult psychotherapy is built on our experiences as a child and where it went ‘wrong’. Read any psychoanalytic text or listen to an expert on YouTube and they are all telling us the same thing: we never really grow up and grow out of our trauma from childhood.

This can be trauma with a small ‘t’. We just generally don’t know what it is that we are supposed to be growing out of. We run away rather than face up to our fears. We can’t help it as our psyches take over and bury our real problems, they come through unconsciously. We have filters designed to protect us and get us through life.

In fact I’ve argued many times that most of us never fully individuate from our parents, or in fact grow out of our childhood disorders at all, an echo of many trauma experts I’ve researched. I think we just add to them. We are all children, just some of us have adult bodies.

Narcissists are essentially stuck in a childlike state, constantly wanting instant gratification and thinking the universe should revolve around them. They don’t know how, nor want, to grow up. If we don’t treat personality disorders at the developmental stage then they will disperse out into making our society later on.

I was the product of a severely traumatising divorce, one parent being a covert narcissist, and so I didn’t develop any boundaries thinking that I wouldn’t be loved if I did. Two horrific break-ups in my adulthood to their mothers my two sons are subjected to poor co-parenting and an abjectly depressed father fulfilling the one thing he’d promised never to do: have children in a broken home.

How do I then not raise my sons to have the same experience when they are older?

All I can do is free myself from fear. The more I work on myself, the more confidence I can project and not be hooked in to their dramas, the easier it will be for them to thrive and hopefully not repeat my mistakes. I let them see how I get through my difficulties, knowing that keeping things from them is denying them an experience from which to learn. I don’t let them into the horror of depression but I let them know that anger and sadness are healthy emotions that can be overcome. Feeling my love rather than it being lip service should fill their hearts with strength, which in the long-run will keep them stable whichever side of the narcissist/empath spectrum they fall.

Ultimately they will act and react on what I do not what I say. As long as I provide the role model they need they should turn out fine, I just wish I could do more and not think so much but oh well!

Thanks for reading.

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