These parental behaviors likely destroyed your self-confidence.
Everyone has an origin story, and traits such as low self-confidence often develop for a reason—such as if your parents treated you horribly when you were younger. Here are 12 things that parents often do that might have left you with non-existent self-confidence in adulthood.
1. Constantly shouted at and harassed you.
If your parents towered over you and shouted at you to make you feel small and helpless, that likely shaped your sense of self quite significantly. It’s difficult to feel self-confident when others are literally shouting you down into submission by being larger and louder than you. And sadly, as BetterHelp highlight, low self-confidence is not the only long-term effect of yelling at a child—anxiety, aggression, and depression are among the others.
2. Put you down/insulted you.
Children and adolescents spend more time with their parents than anyone else during their formative years. As such, if your parents put you down and insulted you on a constant basis, then your sense of self-worth was shaped by their cruelty and criticism, rather than encouragement and unconditional love.
3. Nagged you incessantly.
Parents don’t often realize how damaging their incessant nagging can be, but as Marilyn Price-Mitchell Ph.D. says, “nagging is an expression of negative emotion and can have serious consequences for parent-child relationships.” If your parents constantly harangued you for hours at length about your shortcomings, focusing on everything you did wrong or disappointed them with, you may have grown up to feel like a dismal failure who can’t do anything right at all.
4. Asked you why you couldn’t be more like someone else.
Few things scream “you’re not good enough” like asking someone repeatedly why they can’t be more like another person. It’s immensely damaging to a young person’s self-confidence to continually be told that they aren’t as smart, strong, good-looking, or capable as others in their social sphere, or even within the family unit.
5. Let you know on a regular basis where you were on their “totem pole”.
Parents can damage their children permanently if they tell them that their position in the family comes well below all their aunts, uncles, siblings, and even pets, in their eyes. How can someone develop any self-confidence if they know mom and dad will always love the dog or cat more than them?
6. Said you’d never amount to anything.
A person whose parents sneered at them like they were detritus on the bottom of their shoe, implying that they’re worthless and will never amount to anything, might take that to heart and create self-fulfilling prophecies in that regard. After all, if their parents—the gods of their young lives—said so, it must be true.
7. Constantly threatened to hurt you or kick you out.
It’s almost impossible to feel strong and secure in yourself if you feel like you could either be hospitalized or homeless at any given moment. If your parents threatened you with violence on the regular, or implied that they’d kick you out for the slightest transgression, you’ve likely felt ungrounded and personally insecure ever since.
8. Made fun of your mistakes as you were growing and learning.
Children are blank slates that have to learn absolutely everything from scratch as they mature. As such, they’re going to make mistakes, and sometimes embarrassing ones at that. Parents can cause serious self-confidence issues if they perpetually bring up humiliating things their kids did as they were learning about the world around them.
9. Punished you for no good reason whatsoever.
Your self-confidence might have taken hit after hit if you discovered the injustice of being punished without cause. This might have been for things you hadn’t learned yet, things you hadn’t done (but were blamed for by your siblings), or simply because your parents had personal issues and took them out on you.
10. Invaded your privacy.
If your personal boundaries weren’t respected, or were intentionally overstepped, you might have learned that there’s no point in even having them. Maybe your parents walked into your room whenever they liked, or changed aspects of your appearance (such as your hairstyle) without your consent because they felt like they owned you.
11. Didn’t believe you when you came to them for help.
If your parents didn’t believe you when you came to them for help and comfort—such as being attacked by other people, or accused of something you didn’t do—then you learned early on that those who were supposed to care for and protect you couldn’t be counted on when you needed them.
12. Told you that they wished you’d never been born.
It’s hard to have any degree of self-confidence if you’re acutely aware that your family resents your very existence. If your parents have told you that they would have been much happier had you never been born, it’s unsurprising if your sense of self-worth is non-existent.
