The Child Victim of a Narcissistic Personality Disordered Parent

The NPD Parent

Young children of a parent who has Narcissistic Personality Disorder are genuine victims of their parent and the disorder, as much as any child who lives through life with an addicted parent, or a parent guilty of physical or sexual abuse. The narcissistic parent abuses in an intensely subtle and devious fashion: they are guilty of severe emotional and mental abuse, and no one outside of the family would ever suspect anything wrong.. These child victims quite often go unnoticed, untreated, and not helped by other adults outside of the immediate family. This is due to the nature of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).
The overriding behavioral sign of a NPD parent is their almost total lack of concern for their child. On the surface, and in public, the NPD parent is often unnoticeable as an abusive person. Inside the family, there is no doubt for the child that there is something very, very wrong. In some cases, the NPD parent will begin to ‘heat up’ and make mistakes that brings negative attention to them and begins to shine a light on their NPD, but in most cases, the NPD abuse continues for years unabated. One might consider NPD a kind of ‘spectrum’ with varying degrees of disorder and behavioral inconsistency. While some NPD adults express their disorder in a fairly mild fashion (think the beauty pageant mom or the sort of dad who pushes his child to do a sport they do not want to do), other NPD parents are very intelligent, experts at hiding their abuse, and are able to manipulate others at will (even teachers, ministers, police, lawyers, and even judges).
NPD parents, due to the disorder, have little to no regard for their child’s individuality, ambitions, or emotions. The NPD parent is quite simply all about themselves, all the time. This is a very difficult concept for most normal people to grasp; it is hard to relate to a parent who has no genuine concern for their child other than how that child can enhance the parent’s image, or how the child can be drawn from as a source of ‘narcissistic supply’. People with NPD consistently look for and ‘groom’ people with charm, false interest, and quite often lavish gifts in order to get them to commit to relationship with the NPD’d person. When they have a child, they have a built in ego supplier. An individual with NPD absolutely needs to see reactions in the people around them in order to reassure themselves of an identity. And they do not really care what kind of reaction it is, as long as they get a reaction. So the NPD parent frequently will rapidly change from the most charming, loving and giving parent on the planet to the most enraged, unfeeling, cruel parent imaginable (think of the film ‘Mommy Dearest’).

The Child's Experience of NPD Abuse

For all the complaints most parents make about spoiled children, children really do have very little power over their parents. This is even more true in the case of a child with an NPD parent, since the child intimately knows the unpredictability, implied threats and intense rages that the parent demonstrates. The child learns early in life to ‘duck and cover’ by constantly appeasing the childish whims (that change with the breeze) of the NPD parent. The child becomes terrified that if they speak to anyone outside of the family about their very ill parent, no one will listen or believe them, since the NPD parent is a master of the ‘false face’ in public. Secondarily, the child is terrified that their complaint will get back to the NPD parent, and they will pay a high penalty for this.
The NPD parent affects intense fear in the child in one of several ways. First, they may tell the child that they have ‘eyes and ears everywhere’ and the child can hide nothing from them. One father of three little girls gave them necklaces that he told them they had to wear at all times, because he had special powers and could ‘see’ everything the children did through the necklaces. They were terrified to keep them on, and terrified to take them off. Another way that NPD parents incite fear is to make either vague or direct threats to the child that the parent will abandon them, or that the parent will not be able to live if the child is not compliant to the parent’s will. Any child naturally loves and wants to please their parent; NPD parents can never be pleased and the child is never good enough. Yet other NPD parents make it clear ‘between the lines’ that if the child should ever be disloyal to the parent, grave and dangerous things will happen, up to an including harming their non-NPD parent or the child themselves.
The child victims of NPD parents are simply there to supply the parent ego boosting reassurance; the parent needs the child to adore and agree with them always, something that the child gets very skilled at doing when in the presence of the parent. Away from the parent, these children are often depressed, anxious, and morose, as if they have simply given up on being a normal child. While some school counselors or coaches may notice that the child is having difficulty, they never suspect it is due to NPD abuse, especially if they know the child’s NPD parent. Should the child tell the adult about the parent, the child will instantly be suspect as having some innate emotional or mental health problem; this plays right into the hands of the NPD parent when the school counselor calls for a meeting. The child is then caught in an impossible trap: the child gets diagnosed with the mental health problem.
The personality disordered parent can slip up sometimes, letting their real lack of character show. This might happen when the parent, intent on what they want, creates an embarrassing public scene with the child present. In fact, they will at times use their children as levers in public situations to get others to back down or give them what they want. The witnesses to such public rages will give in just to save the child the intense embarrassment that their parent is willing to put them through.
The child learns that they must set aside the things that are important to them or the things that they would like to do, because it is only what the NPD parent wants that counts. The parent always places their own desires and needs before the child, often cloaking this with the altruistic statement that the parent is just doing what is best for the child. The child has no real choice not to buy into their parent’s plan for them, even if the child has no desire or any real talent for the activity that the parent is forcing them to do. Emotional blackmail is a given. On the other hand, some NPD parents will simply ignore any achievement that the child makes on their own, and may even belittle the achievement in private while taking full credit for the child’s accomplishment in public, if the accomplishment reflects the NPD parent as parent of the year.
In private, NPD parents will present to the child as either over controlling, totally ignoring of the child, and angry at the child or overly kind, giving, and generous. These presentations can alternate in rapid fashion, leaving the child constantly emotionally ‘off balance’. This is, in essence, a form of mind control and torture well known to survivors of POW camps. So the child is faced with a very narrow choice of how to respond to the NPD parent: they can choose to submit in total compliance (and so lose their identity), wait patiently until they turn eighteen and then get as far from the parent as possible and try to find healing, or through constant exposure and training become narcissistic adults themselves. The latter child may be treated like a ‘little prince’ or ‘princess’ by the parent, at the expense of any other siblings who have chosen a different path of coping.
The normal development of children dictates that they begin to individuate and differentiate as they grow, meaning that children blossom into their unique selves. This normal progress gains momentum as the child gets older. The NPD parent begins to be very uncomfortable when the child begins to assert their individuality or independence; the parent perceives this as betrayal, disloyalty, or disobedience. Children often realize their parent’s illness fairly early in grade school when they have the chance to compare other children’s parents to their own. As the child gets older, the stress in the family system grows to intolerable levels for the child.
Some NPD parents can develop a reputation in the community as at least ‘difficult’ and at worse be considered unpredictable and dangerous. NPD’s may ‘heat up’ and can pose real danger in that they view their children (and ex) as possessions that they are privileged to ‘dispose of’ should they wish to do so. Many cases of domestic violence and murder can be trailed to an NPD individual.

Intervention

If the non-NPD parent is able gain the strength and finds assistance to extract from the relationship, the courts often support standard custody agreements, and the child, fearing the narcissistic parent, will not speak to counselors, lawyers, or judges about the situation. The disordered parent has proven over and over again the child’s whole life that they cannot be discovered for what they are, nor can they be beat or held accountable. The child has no faith that these adults can help them, and in fact, the narcissistic parent often ‘plays’ the legal system so well that lawyers and judges are ‘taken in’ and believe the non-NPD parent is simply exaggerating due to the emotions of the divorce situation. Indeed, the accounts that the non-NPD parent gives of the NPD parent often sound so ‘off the wall’ that even a judge has a hard time believing it. The child believes that there is no one in the world that can help them from the narcissistic parent, so will support the NPD publicly.
Clinical counselors are always very hesitant if not completely avoiding of treating children involved in custody cases when a parent is perceived to have NPD. Most clinicians will only very rarely publicly identify a person as having a personality disorder, lest the narcissist turn their full wrath on the counselor (meaning hauling them into court to ‘testify’ or more often, ‘harass’ them about their work, competency, etc.). Once again, the narcissistic parent does not really care about the child or the child’s needed therapeutic support, only that the narcissistic parent might be able to use the counselor against the non-NPD parent, and make themselves look better in court.
Ultimately, true intervention for the child can only come from the court system, as this is the only institution that a narcissist respects and fears. The problem, as alluded to before, is that judges often miss the fact that one of the parents they are dealing with has this personality disorder. In addition, it is often very difficult to demonstrate emotional and mental abuse, since the nature of the relationship with the NPD parent prohibits the child speaking honestly to the judge, and the non-NPD parent is most assuredly being considered biased. Since few if any counselors are willing to testify about the abuse and place themselves in the path of a narcissist, the court is left to discern these things on their own. By learning the many characteristic behavioral clues that NPD’s inevitably leave in a wide trail behind them, custody courts can begin to identify and then make valuable interventions for children with NPD parents.
If a court were to provide for a moratorium on the child’s contact with the NPD parent, it could give the child enough time to begin the healing process and gain courage to enter counseling treatment in a fashion that can be genuinely helpful. In addition, the court would need to provide greater protection for the counselor from being called into court and testifying (which effectively destroys the therapeutic relationship with the child into the future)so that they can do their job of helping the child recover and generate coping mechanisms for dealing with their NPD parent more effectively.