Examples Of Neglectful Parenting — How Not To Parent
By Khizra Khan / August 29, 2022
Often considered an “easier” style, neglectful parenting has begun to take a hike with parents these days. More and more examples of neglectful parenting are coming on the shores. The harsh truth is that raising children and managing life becomes difficult as the hour passes. The current generation of millennials and gen-Z are generally not interested in building a family with kids. Nonetheless, the mindset is vividly reflected in their parenting styles.
A recent study echoed that women who choose to forgo motherhood have nearly tripled since the 1970s. The birth rate worldwide has declined by more than 15 percent for women in their twenties refusing motherhood. Similarly, thirty-seven percent of men declared that they prefer being child-free in a study by Pew Research Center.
Examples of Neglectful Parenting
While you might be wondering about your parenting style, you can use this article to identify if your methods as a parent are skewed towards uninvolved/neglectful parenting or not.
1. Ignoring and feeling irritated with the thought of spending time with the child.
One of the very first examples of neglectful parenting is feeling irritated when the child asks to spend more time. The parent doesn’t want to be around the kid most of the time. It’s not just about the fact that their parent-child relationship lacks a strong bond. This also means that the parent is unsatisfied with their own life and doesn’t have the capacity to provide emotional support to their child.
In most cases, it can be challenging for a human to separate being an adult and a parent. Though both may seem interchangeable, they are not. Being an adult requires thick skin and low emotional regulation. At the same time, parenting is all about compassion, emotions, and sacrifices. I believe that uninvolved parenting is a classic example of parents who weren’t ready emotionally to take up this responsibility.
Whether they voiced their opinion, kept it inside them for the sake of the partner, or were pressured into being a parent, they turn up to be agitated by the kid later on in their life. The bond that “will” create lacking in such parenting and hence the negligence towards the child.
Such parents struggle to find the time to spend with their children. They prefer being busy with their life events than including their child in the journey. Neglectful parents choose other activities like social media, TV, or sleep to spend quality time with their children.
2. Ignores the child’s bids for interactions
The second most prominent example of neglectful parenting is when the parent starts to avoid the child’s requests to be present. It is one thing to ignore the child and be busy with your own, but rejecting the child’s request outright to interact is far worse. It takes a massive dig at the child’s self-esteem and destroys their confidence.
Again, this trait stems from the lack of compassion and bond between the child and the parent. I have observed that parents who lack patience are also the ones who end up following neglectful parenting. Raising a child requires a butt load of patience. One can’t survive being a parent if one cannot keep their anger in control and deal with the child with maximum tolerance.
When your child comes up to you and says, “hey can you come and see the Lego truck that I just made?”. Instead of appreciating your child for all their hard work, you either avoid going with them or don’t take an honest look at their work and brush it off by yeah, it’s good. In your heart, you know that you didn’t even properly look at or acknowledge the child’s efforts.
3. Least involvement with the child’s schooling
Another notable example of neglectful parenting is a lack of interest in the child’s cognitive development and education. Uninvolved parents find it irritating and frustrating to either talk about or help their child in all matters of schooling. Not just that, they are also least interested in participating actively in any of the kid’s extracurricular activities.
Children with such parents are left to figure out everything on their own.
