Pod Insights All In The Mind Handling emotionally immature parents, raising emotionally mature kids About this episode If you've never had good parenting modelled to you, how do you raise emotionally mature kids?
Clinical psychologist Dr Lindsay Gibson has thoughts. You might remember Lindsay from our extremely popular 2021 episode titled 'The damage done by emotionally immature parents (and how to heal) https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/allinthemind/damage-done-by-emotionally-immature-parents/13331850'. This week, she's back on All in the Mind, talking about the next generation.
From the difference between consequences and punishment, to the questionable/cruel videos some parents post on social media, Lindsay has insights, tips and 'absolutes' — her rules on what to definitely not do, in order to raise emotionally mature kids.
Also, keep an eye out for next week's mailbag episode, where we ask Lindsay your questions!
Guest:
Dr Lindsay GibsonClinical psychologistAuthor, How to Raise an Emotionally Mature Child https://www.lindsaycgibson.com/books.html
Credits:
Presenter/producer: Sana QadarSenior producer: James BullenProducer: Rose KerrSound engineer: Harvey O'SullivanYou can catch up on more episodes of the All in the Mind podcast with journalist and presenter Sana Qadar, exploring the psychology of topics like stress, memory, communication and relationships on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.
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0:39 Speaker 01 It's so interesting. Like before I had a kid, I had a lot of thoughts about my parents and their parenting, or one in particular. And then I had a kid and I was like, oh my God, this is so freaking hard. I have so much more compassion and forgiveness because, oh, wow, wow, this is hard.
0:58 Speaker 02 Yes, absolutely. My mother, that was one of her favourite sayings when she got exasperated was just wait until you have children.
1:05 Speaker 01 Oh, my God, my mum too, she would say that as well. And I'm like, wow, will I end up saying that to my kid one day? Possibly.
1:14 Speaker 01 In 2015, clinical psychologist Lindsay Gibson wrote a book called Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. It didn't make much of a splash at the time, but five years later, during the pandemic, it went viral. And then a few years after that, it hit the New York Times Bestseller List. When we had you on about, I think it's, gosh, five years ago now to talk about that book, it was our highest rating episode ever and I think it remains so. Which makes me sort of wonder, like, do the vast majority of us just have bad or somewhat, you know, crappy parents? Like, what do you put the virality of the book down to?
1:51 Speaker 02 Well, I think that this is a phenomenon that's been going on in world history forever. I mean, if you look at the news or you even read fairy tales, the idea that parents can be less mature and less wise than even their children is pretty evident in the way that people comport themselves as grownups. There's a lot of impulsive, emotionally reactive behaviour that's based on being essentially very egocentric, and that's part of our world. And if it's part of your world when that's your parent as you're growing up, that has a huge
2:35 Speaker 02 impact on you and your sense of yourself.
2:39 Speaker 01 So Lindsay is now turning her attention to the next generation of parents, and she wants to help people learn how to raise emotionally mature children. She's got a few key mindsets she thinks are important for raising emotionally mature kids. And if all else fails, she has a few absolutes to remember for what not to do during your parenting journey. And I have to say, one of these absolutes inspired big feelings of my own. That one made me a little bit angry, if I'm to be honest, because I was like, wait, what? Then we are doing parenting totally wrong. You'll have to keep listening to find out what that one is, because I am positive you do this too. This is All in the Mind from ABC Radio National. I'm Sana Qadar.
3:22 Speaker 01 Today, the pain of being raised by emotionally immature parents, and the process for raising emotionally mature kids of your own. One quick tip: don't trick your child and film it and put it on social media, because Lindsay has some strong thoughts about some viral videos involving parents and their kids.
3:42 Speaker 02 It was like, you just psychologically tortured your child.
3:48 Speaker 02 So I think what happened was my book sort of put a name on something that not only people had experienced in their families, but I think there was also a sort of a recognition at a cultural level that there's an awful lot of emotional immaturity in our world and it's causing a lot of problems.
4:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I guess we won't labor on it too much because we talked about it at length in the previous interview, but can you just describe what emotionally immature parenting looks like?
4:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, the emotionally immature parent is struggling, well, I shouldn't say they're struggling because it's not really a problem for them. It's just a problem for everybody around them. But they are experiencing, shall we say, a lot of concern about their own immediate issues, and this makes them very egocentric. All roads lead to them and their issues. So everything gets turned back to them, and the child's emotional needs and sensitivities tend to be sort of run over by this parent who can't reflect on their own behavior to
5:00 Speaker 02 wonder how they're affecting their child. That lack of self-reflection makes it very hard for them to change or even to question their own behavior. They have no recourse but to get all stressed out and blame the child. A great example would be if the child was trying, let's say this is an adult child now, and the adult child is trying to tell the parent something that the parent maybe did, or a way that they treated them when they were little, and they're actually trying to build a bridge to the parent to have a better relationship. And the parent says something like, "Well, I don't know why you're so upset with me.
5:45 Speaker 02 Is that still bothering you?"
5:47 Speaker 01 Right.
5:48 Speaker 02 Because they really have poor empathy, it's hard for them to imagine other people's suffering. So they just assume that if I'm over it, you should be over it too, because for them, reality is what they are feeling. It's not a fact, and they can be really dismissive and distorting and use a lot of denial when they hear things that they don't like.
6:15 Speaker 01 Now, obviously emotionally immature isn't a diagnostic label. It's an umbrella description that can include parents with narcissistic, or other tricky traits, or just parents who didn't have great parenting themselves and who never learned the skills that parenting required. They just muddled through the best or worst they could. This broad categorization has opened Lindsay's book up to some criticism, that it simplifies complex dynamics, that it can pathologize parents. Nonetheless, it is a concept that, as we mentioned, has struck a chord with so many people, which means it's worth discussing and worth interrogating. I mean, I do wonder, like, you know, we know people are flawed.
6:59 Speaker 01 Is having, you know, not perfect parents just kind of part and parcel of being born in the human race? Like, I think of my parents, and one in particular, who was pretty authoritarian, shall we say. But that's also sort of the culture they grew up in. They didn't really know much better. You know, there wasn't a lot of knowledge about social, emotional development. And so when I look back on my childhood, I'm like, yeah, parts of it weren't great, but they also, they just were doing the best they could, or, you know, they didn't have the tools for more.
7:29 Speaker 02 I mean, nobody in the 40s, 50s was really thinking much about anything other than being a successfully functioning authority figure for your child and keeping a roof over their heads. But, you know, even though they didn't intend to cause harm, I mean, far from it, they were doing the best job they could, according to their knowledge, like you said, and according to, you know, what the cultural norms were. I mean, everybody spanked their kids, everybody yelled at their kids. It's just the way it goes. But there's lots of love, you know? There's probably lots of love going on as well. But when you have that kind of behavior
8:13 Speaker 02 that has full license to be reactive and authoritarian, it's not like it doesn't matter because they didn't intend it that way. It doesn't matter that they were not trying to be mean or aggressive. What matters is how it affected that child. And that that doesn't change according to the intent of the person who's doing the behavior.
8:38 Speaker 01 Right.
8:38 Speaker 02 So we have a lot of people living today that have had a lot of invalidating and emotionally harmful experiences from parents who love them dearly.
8:49 Speaker 01 Yes.
8:50 Speaker 02 You know, that's a factor of not knowing better and also having huge social and cultural support for being the authority figure who's not questioned.
9:00 Speaker 01 What kind of issues arise when people who grew up with emotionally immature parents then become parents themselves?
9:08 Speaker 02 Oh, that's that's an interesting question because one of the saddest things I've seen, you know, in my consulting room is someone who says, you know, I never had children because I didn't want them to have the same experience as I did. They are so afraid that they're going to find themselves acting in the same way that their parents did with their own children, and they don't want to do that to their child. Now, underneath that is a deeper reason, which is they don't feel like they would be emotionally capable of giving that child what they needed.
9:48 Speaker 02 Because with an emotionally immature parent, you kind of learn that you can't make them any better, that you you can't help them with their problems, you can't reassure them. It's it's kind of like a person who never is all right. So they're not entirely sure that they would be able to give a child what they need. The tragic part of it is if they're coming in for therapy and they're examining themselves and they're looking at their history, by definition, that means that they would probably be a better parent than what they experienced.
10:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, that that makes sense. I guess from reading the book and hearing you speak in other interviews, it feels like emotional maturity kind of boils down to capacity for self-reflection.
10:37 Speaker 02 That is, that is definitely a hallmark. Yes, self-reflection and also the ability to have your emotions but not be mastered by your emotions.
10:51 Speaker 01 So the question is, how do you foster emotional maturity in your own children? How do you act as an emotionally mature parent, especially if you might not have had that modeled to you before? And how do you maintain a good, open relationship with your kid so that hopefully they don't grow up to cut you off one day? Because estrangement is something Lindsay sees a lot of. These are the questions that Lindsay is trying to answer in her new book, How to Raise an Emotionally Mature Child.
11:20 Speaker 02 I just want there to be a feeling between parent and child where they end up being glad to see each other as adults and they have a positive relationship for the rest of their lives. And that's not going to be done in a perfect way for anybody. But I wanted parents to feel confident that if they learned about some basic child development and child emotional needs, that they could create the kind of relationship and trust that would result in that long-term, good relationship with that adult child down the road.
12:02 Speaker 01 So, one of the things you do in the book is you describe several parental mindsets for maturity, which will encourage eventual maturity in kids. And I just wanted to touch on a couple of them. Mindset one is, "My child is a unique individual with their own interests." Can you talk about why that is an important mindset to have?
12:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, and there's a reason why it's number one.
12:23 Speaker 01 Yes, I'm sure.
12:25 Speaker 02 And then, and this is just part of being human. It's just a reminder that other people are, and this is not a different mindset, but other people are real inside too, that they and your child, they have their own subjective inner world, their own experiences that are just as real to them as yours are to you.
12:49 Speaker 02 Somehow with children, we tend to feel like we can make them into something, like we can shape them. They'll want to enjoy the same things that we do. They'll be social like we are. They'll be book readers like we are. It used to be that if you were a good parent, you had an obedient child who grew up to be a success. And you know, that you get your blue ribbon and everybody's happy. Now, the demand is for you to have a real relationship with your child in which you recognize them as an individual who is not the same as you.
13:28 Speaker 01 In some sense, that feels so obvious. Of course, your child is different. But I also am keenly aware of how much some parents do not recognize this and really struggle when their kid is quite different to them. I'm thinking slightly of myself and one of my parents.
13:43 Speaker 02 Yes.
13:44 Speaker 01 When people struggle to grasp this, where does that come from? Like, is it their own upbringing? Is it traditional parenting values? Is it personality traits? What is that?
13:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, it certainly, it certainly can be something that's coming from them. But it's also very human. I mean, you know, like we have the expression, chip off the old block.
14:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:04 Speaker 02 We sort of feel like because we made these children and we're raising them and we're so close to them. I mean, partly because very early in life, that's what babies need. They need their parents to treat them as a part of themselves almost. I mean, that's how deep the love goes. So we want that. It's just that as the child begins to move through developmental phases, like in their, you know, two, three, four year olds especially, where they're beginning to try to individuate and develop a sense of self. If the parent stays in that kind of baby mode,
14:45 Speaker 02 now we're running into a developmental motivation and imperative, really. And that's going to cause conflict or it's going to cause the child to identify themselves too much with the parent.
14:57 Speaker 01 Right.
14:57 Speaker 02 That they don't learn how to develop their own separate self.
15:02 Speaker 01 A few other mindsets that Lindsay writes about include mindset number two, my child has psychological and emotional needs that must be met. Number three, my child is vulnerable and requires protection. I mean, some of these you'd hope are very obvious to all parents, but of course, we know that's not always the case. Mindset four is my child's behavior is how they communicate their feelings and needs. And one more thing related to mindsets that really stuck out to me. It's this line in the book where you say, it's about generational change. And you say, it's no longer adaptive to teach children to be unquestioningly compliant, to be obedient, or to always look to authority for direction. In the future, there may be no institutional rewards waiting for our children, no gold
15:46 Speaker 01 star or gold watch in exchange for their loyalty and good behavior. Can you talk a bit more about why you put this in and what you were getting at?
15:54 Speaker 02 Yes, well, since I'm in the United States, I'll use that as an example. That is quite literally the American dream. That you grow up, you get your education, you find your job, you build a career and you stay in it. And if you're a loyal, hardworking person, there will be a reward for you at the end. Now, this has changed so much in the past 20 or 30 years that it almost feels laughable to say it now.
16:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, and with AI changing everything, why does emotional maturity put us in better stead to deal with the upheaval heading our way?
16:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, you said it, the upheaval. That's what's coming. Change is speeding up at such a rate that what's going to really count, I think, in the world economy is going to be your ability to adapt and to respond quickly to changes and still keep your rational mind focused on where you're going and what the outcome is that you want. That is something that emotionally immature people have a hard time doing many times because they get reactive and then they panic. And then their coping abilities go down. So if you have a child who has grown up feeling
17:20 Speaker 02 secure in themselves, trusts their judgment, feels entitled to take advantage of situations for their own good, instead of always being self-sacrificing or obedient. That kid is set up to sort of surf the wave of whatever it is that's coming.
17:39 Speaker 01 You know, towards the end of the book, you kind of boil down your advice to absolutes, behaviors you absolutely should avoid in order to, you know, have an emotionally mature child and be an emotionally mature parent. There's quite a few of them. I'm wondering, first off, if you had to pick just, you know, one or two or three of the most important, what would they be?
17:58 Speaker 02 Oh, that's a great question. I want the number one, and I, and I put it as number one, is your job as a parent is to go with guidance rather than punishment. Because your job as a parent is to guide and teach your child about the right way to go and cause and effect. It doesn't work if you wait for them to make a mistake and then punish them. What they learn from punishment is that they did something bad. You're mad at them. Our relationship is on the rocks and I'm a bad person inside. That's what punishment feels like. It's shaming.
18:41 Speaker 02 But guidance says in effect, you're a good person to the kid. You're still learning. I want to explain to you why I'm worried about this and we're going to talk about it.
18:53 Speaker 01 But at what point do you do punishment? Because surely there's, at some point, you might need to if the behavior continues. I mean, this is going to be different for everyone, obviously. But are you saying never punish at all?
19:05 Speaker 02 I think people see punishment and consequences as the same thing.
19:10 Speaker 01 Right. Yes, I'm using that interchangeably. Yeah.
19:12 Speaker 02 Well, I think most of us who've, you know, grown up in this period of history would do that because that's what we've been taught is that when I do something wrong, I'm punished. Therefore, punishment is the consequence.
19:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:31 Speaker 02 Okay. But in real life, if you make a mistake or you do something at work that's irresponsible, your boss may quote unquote punish you by firing you. But really what just happened was that was the consequence of your actions. And in our own lives, we have control over a lot of that because we can anticipate consequences of our behavior. That's a big part of what we try to help our children begin to realize. So we want to get as close to adult life and how that works with our
20:10 Speaker 02 children when they're small. And your boss is not going to smack you or yell at you at the top of his lungs. He or she is probably not going to do that, but there will be consequences that you won't like.
20:29 Speaker 01 Just on the absolutes, there's a few in there that make just total sense, like no hitting, don't berate or humiliate your child, don't use your child as an emotional confidant, no tricking, fooling, shocking or scaring kids. One that stood out for me was yelling is for emergencies only, which that one made me a little bit angry, if I'm to be honest, because I was like, wait, what? Then we are doing parenting totally wrong because many mornings when we're trying to get out the door and he, our little one is dragging his feet and we've got a deadline we have to get to at work and, you know, I've got an interview I have to show up for and things are all falling apart. Yelling happens, you know, not infrequently. So what do you mean yelling is for emergencies only because
21:14 Speaker 01 in this respect I have failed as a parent?
21:17 Speaker 02 No, no, far from it. No, I mean, and I had thoughts about this when I put this one in because I thought just exactly what you're saying.
21:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
21:27 Speaker 02 Is it, you know, true that none of us, you know, have ever yelled at our kids?
21:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
21:31 Speaker 02 Of, of course. I mean, these are behaviors to avoid if you can, and hopefully often you, you can. But if things have gotten to the point where yelling has to happen, what I'm saying is if you allow yourself to yell, you will keep on yelling. It's just like if you allow yourself to spank or slap or whatever, you will just do it.
21:57 Speaker 01 Right. It's the easy immediate answer.
21:59 Speaker 02 If you don't have a kind of a rule in place that we don't handle it by yelling, then you're, well, first of all, you're dead in the water because you can't think of what else to do. Because you're so used to this other way of getting things done. But I put it in there as a, as calling it an absolute because I really believe that if we are doing behaviors that can end up backfiring on us. And emotional reactivity, which is a lot of what yelling is, often does end up backfiring on us because we lose the impact of when we need to, we may need to yell for an emergency, or we may need to raise our voice.
22:44 Speaker 02 If we're doing it as a matter of course, as a way of handling things, we are really losing an opportunity to find other ways to teach our child, whatever the lesson is that we want them to learn. So we're all gonna, you know, fall short on these things. But I do think it's worth it to sit down with yourself and game plan, okay, if the outcome I want is to not yell, what has to happen for me not to yell? And then you start game planning it. And then your child begins to learn whatever it is that you just figured out.
23:23 Speaker 01 Right.
23:23 Speaker 02 Because you've just modeled that for them.
23:26 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
23:26 Speaker 02 You can, and you can let them know, we're gonna try to get out of the house in a different way tomorrow morning.
23:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
23:33 Speaker 02 Here's what we're going to do.
23:35 Speaker 01 Right. I'm trying. I've tried that. I'm trying.
23:40 Speaker 01 I will say, after this chat with Lindsay, I did go home and try to game plan what else I could be doing in the mornings to make sure my kid gets out the door without any yelling. And we had a little list system in place for all his tasks, and it just hasn't been working. So I came up with a little game instead. And it's actually worked really well. And I haven't yelled since speaking to Lindsay. So as much as I thought this piece of advice, this absolute, was a little bit annoying and unrealistic, thinking about what I could do differently more deeply, did work.
24:17 Speaker 01 One question I'm wondering is, you know, there's so much parenting advice online. I don't know how online you are, but have you come across stuff on social media, you know, of dubious quality, where you're like, oh, God, we are getting this so wrong, or that's just terrible?
24:33 Speaker 02 Well, I'll tell you a video, I think it was on Instagram that I watched, that it was a little child, I mean, she was probably maybe two and a half, she was really, she was really little. And she came up to her father and shook her finger in his face and said, don't you ever do that to me again. And he started laughing. And she put her hands on her hips and sort of stared him down. And then she flounced off and turned around again and shook her finger at him again and said, don't you forget that blah blah. And he was rolling on the floor in laughter. Okay. So when I watched that, I
25:15 Speaker 02 thought, oh, my goodness, he is teaching her that this is getting positive responses from him. Another example is, there was a thing, I don't know if it's still a thing on social media, I hope it's died an early death, but people would tell their child some kind of bad news, or tell them they were in this big trouble and they couldn't go to the, you know, ballgame or whatever. And the child would just like dissolve in tears, and they'd be so upset, and they'd be, you know, distraught. And then they'd say, Just kidding.
25:50 Speaker 01 Yes.
25:50 Speaker 02 We're really going. And it was like, you just psychologically tortured your child.
25:56 Speaker 01 That stuff is so unbelievable to me that people would do that and then record it and put it on the internet.
26:02 Speaker 02 I, I completely agree.
26:04 Speaker 01 And that goes back to one of your absolutes, actually, which is no tricking, fooling, shocking, or scaring kids. Was that sort of based on this kind of stuff you were seeing?
26:12 Speaker 02 Yes, yes. Another one was, um, you know, those animatronic plants that, you know, the plant sits there and then you, I don't know if it's remote or whatever, but you, the plant will suddenly start moving. And they'll put that in front of a baby.
26:26 Speaker 01 Right.
26:26 Speaker 02 Okay. And the baby looks at it and the plant moves and the baby bursts into tears. I mean, it's like very reliable. It happens every shot that they show of that.
26:40 Speaker 02 And that's because that baby is working on its, its model of reality, what it knows about reality. And you've just tricked it and said, huh, you know, reality is plants can move by themselves. And the baby goes, whoa, no, you know, and they fall apart because their model of reality is so fragile. At that point. And, you know, that's again, supposed to be funny.
27:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:10 Speaker 02 But it's not funny when you understand what it is that scared the child.
27:16 Speaker 01 I went back and watched some of these videos after Lindsay mentioned this. And oh my God, it is so heartbreaking to see their little faces collapse and the fear in their eyes. When this little plant cactus starts dancing.
27:31 Speaker 01 I never thought these videos were funny when they would pop up on my feed every now and then, but after hearing Lindsay describe what's happening, they feel downright cruel.
27:44 Speaker 01 And with the dad you were talking about, who was laughing at his little girl, you know, being sassy and whatnot, what would have been a better way to react instead? Like, what would you, you know, if you could go back and talk to that parent, be like, no, no, don't laugh, but do this?
27:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, it would be, don't reinforce behavior you don't want to see a lot of.
28:02 Speaker 01 Right.
28:03 Speaker 02 So are you, do you want your daughter to scold you like that? Do you want her to treat her friends like that? Is that cute? Do you like it?
28:13 Speaker 01 Hmm.
28:13 Speaker 02 And then if he said, well, no, not really, but what else can I do? I might ask him, if you treat it very seriously and ask her, honey, you seem to be really upset with me. Tell me what's really wrong.
28:26 Speaker 01 Hmm.
28:28 Speaker 02 In other words, you don't give a reward by laughing at the behavior, but you also remember the behavior's a communication.
28:37 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
28:37 Speaker 02 So you ask her about her intent.
28:43 Speaker 01 And then to close, I just wanted to ask, can you tell me a little bit about your own parenting journey? And whether there was a period in your parenting journey that was particularly challenging?
28:52 Speaker 02 Oh, with my son?
28:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:54 Speaker 02 They're all challenging.
28:57 Speaker 02 Children are going through periods of equilibrium and disequilibrium. It's like a, this is from the Gazelle Institute. They come together. They, they're delightful little creatures. They, they stabilize. Then they undergo another period of disequilibrium where they kind of fall apart, become difficult, become very emotional. And then after, you know, around six, six months past that, that everything kind of comes back together. They reorganize. It goes like that, okay? And it goes, and, but the child is growing the whole time. So things are getting better, even as you're hitting these rough spots.
29:39 Speaker 02 But there are different challenges for every single age because the developmental needs are pushing the child into behavior that makes emotional work for the parent. So, yeah, do I remember peeling my son off the sidewalk to get him in the car because he didn't want to leave the bank one day? Yeah, absolutely.
30:02 Speaker 01 Were you yelling while you did that?
30:06 Speaker 02 I don't think I had the energy to yell. He was, I was, I was trying to pick him up like, like, you know, dead weight lifting.
30:14 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
30:15 Speaker 02 It was all I could do to get him in the car. I didn't have the, you know, wherewithal to start yelling.
30:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
30:21 Speaker 02 Um, but at whatever age, you know, whether it's a teenager who is trying out their wings and they're, and they're trying to have their, their say about things, it's all hard because you've never been through it before.
30:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
30:38 Speaker 02 And if you have more than one child, with this particular child.
30:41 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
30:42 Speaker 02 So mistakes are the order of the day with kids. The one thing that I'm very happy about in raising my child was I always knew when I felt bad about something I had done or said, and I always went back and apologized.
30:58 Speaker 01 Right. An apology goes a long way, I suppose.
31:00 Speaker 02 It, well, it does for everybody, doesn't it?
31:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:04 Speaker 02 If you want a good relationship with your child where they basically learn to trust you
31:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:11 Speaker 02 as a person in the relationship, then you can do things in a empathic and restrained way that works really well for keeping friendships because you don't make your friends feel anxious or bad about themselves or ashamed. And you end up keeping that friend for a long time, right?
31:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:31 Speaker 02 So we want to keep our children not as a friend. You know, I'm not saying your child is just like your friend. I'm saying, treat your child like a friend that you would like to keep.
31:45 Speaker 01 Right.
31:45 Speaker 02 And remember how you have the power to affect their feelings about themselves and their internal sense of goodness. You have a huge impact on that.
31:59 Speaker 01 That is Lindsay Gibson, clinical psychologist and author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents and How to Raise an Emotionally Mature Child. Now, we're going to hear from Lindsay again next week because next week it's our Mailbag episode where you have sent us so many questions for her to answer. We have tried to get through as many as we can. There's some really heartfelt ones in there, so do come back for next week's episode to hear her answers to your questions.
32:32 Speaker 01 That is it for All in the Mind this week. Thanks to senior producer James Bullen and producer Rose Kerr, as well as sound engineer Roy Huberman. I'm Sana Qadar. Thank you for listening. Catch you next week.
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