12 Signs Your Parents Were Too Hard On You Growing Up And It's Affecting You Now
A childhood of criticism can easily carry well into adulthood.
Jose Calsina | Shutterstock The way we're raised impacts our adult lives, in both positive and negative ways. Receiving unconditional love and support from your parents sets you up to be a confident and emotionally aware adult. Having overprotective parents often leads to being anxious and self-doubting.
If your parents had strict rules and harsh expectations, it's likely that you still feel like you're under their control, even as an adult. Once you recognize the signs your parents were too hard on you growing up and it's affecting you now, you'll be able to take steps towards healing. It might not be easy to release yourself from the grip of your parents' judgments, but it's a necessary part of the process to living a fully authentic life.
Here are 12 signs your parents were too hard on your growing up and it's affecting you now
1. You have a harsh inner voice
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Everyone has an internal dialogue in their minds. While some people's inner voice is loving and warm, reflecting that they were raised by unconditionally supportive parents, people who were raised in a judgmental home tend to be more self-critical. Being self-critical means evaluating yourself in a negative way, which does inherent damage to your self-esteem and sense of worth.
A 2020 South Korean study examined the psychological impact of an intervention called the Mindful Lovingkindness Compassion Program in deterring self-critical thoughts among university students.
The study found that self-criticism and the psychological distress it brings decreased significantly when self-compassion and mindfulness were introduced. By speaking kindly to themselves and using mindfulness techniques to recognize their pattern of self-criticism, participants experienced an increase in self-reassurance and better mental health. The study described mindfulness as the process of paying attention to the present moment, purposefully and without judging oneself.
If your parents were too hard on you growing up, being non-judgmental about yourself might come as a challenge, but it's essential to breaking the pattern of seeing yourself in such a negative light.
2. You're too scared of failure to take risks
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While acting impulsively can have poor outcomes, taking healthy risks is valuable for various reasons. The only way to grow as a person is to leave your comfort zone and challenge yourself, but if your parents were too hard on you, it's likely that you've conditioned yourself to play it safe because you're scared to do anything wrong.
If your parents had strict consequences for not meeting their standards, you probably learned to protect yourself by avoiding things you didn't think you could succeed in. As an adult, this might mean you don't push yourself to try new things, because your fear of failure is so deeply ingrained. Not taking risks can seriously stunt your self-improvement and shut you off from opportunities in your career and your personal life.
Taking small risks, like talking to someone at a party who you don't know or offering input during a work meeting, are manageable ways to dip your toes into the pool of possibility. You'll learn that you're way more capable and successful than you ever thought you were.
3. You put other people's needs first
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Your people-pleasing tendencies arose out of a need to gain your parent's approval, and now, you're an adult with an independent life who still struggles with setting boundaries and saying no.
Licensed clinical social worker Terry Gaspard pointed out, "In many cases, individuals develop a pattern of putting other people's needs before their own due to dysfunction in their family of origin." She further explained, "You may have learned to be a people-pleaser because of being fearful of losing the approval of others. Fear of rejection often lies at the root of a person's tendency to bend over backward to please others — sometimes at the expense of their happiness."
Gaspard revealed that "the first step to recovering from being a people-pleaser is self-awareness," which means thinking about your childhood and reflecting on your patterns of behavior. Gaspard shared another step toward becoming a recovered people-pleaser, which is to "set goals and make new choices to change your life, such as taking time to do the things that you enjoy rather than deferring to the needs of others."
"You are worth the effort and deserve a freer, happier life," she concluded, and she's absolutely right. No one should have to live in the shadow of other people's demands, especially when those demands mean they're neglecting to care for themselves.
4. You have a hard time making decisions
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Having a hard time making decisions is a sign your parents were too hard on you growing up and it's affecting you now. As a child, you were taught that your choices were wrong: You shouldn't play the saxophone, you should play the flute. You shouldn't have chocolate cake for your birthday, you should have vanilla.
As a result, you second-guess yourself as an adult, which means you often make decisions that aren't keeping to your truest self. Self-doubt is a difficult thing to overcome. Treat yourself with kindness and care. Remember that making a choice that doesn't work out in the long run isn't the end of the world, and it isn't a reflection on who you are as a person, either.
5. You're hyper-vigilant
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You're so accustomed to being put down and disregarded that you spend your life anticipating criticism from everyone around you. You always feel on edge, like you're waiting for the next bad thing to happen.
You struggle to accept praise and wonder what negative beliefs people really have about you. Your hyper-vigilance affects you at work and in your relationships, and you have a hard time letting your guard down and letting yourself just be.
Being raised by judgmental parents made you constantly concerned that you were doing something wrong. This feeling carried over into your adult life, and now, you feel like you have to prove your worth to people or else they'll cut you down.
6. Being vulnerable makes you nervous
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You have a hard time opening up to people, even the people you love, because in your childhood home, being vulnerable was equated with weakness or neediness. Your parents weren't willing or able to validate your emotions, and now, you're scared that sharing how you feel will push people away.
Learning how to be vulnerable is a life-long journey, one where the rewards greatly outweigh the risks. We can't become truly close to people unless we show vulnerability. While this is a scary prospect, the love and connection we receive in return for being vulnerable is a gift.
7. You have trust issues
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You might have a hard time putting your trust in other people because you expect them to be as critical as your parents were, underneath it all. You might worry that they'll let you down or hurt you, so you build walls around yourself and live an isolated and ultimately lonely life.
Relationship coach Jordan Gray noted, "Your ability to trust others correlates with your ability to trust yourself." Having parents who were too hard on you taught you that you couldn't trust yourself to take care of yourself or succeed or form strong connections with people you should have felt close to. Overcoming your lack of self-trust and learning to fully love who you are creates space for you to trust yourself and others.
"The more you start loving and accepting parts of yourself, the more other people in your life will also start to love and accept those things," Gray concluded. It might seem easier to live a life of solitude, but no person is an island. Eventually, we have to let other people ashore if we want to thrive.
8. You overextend yourself at work
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You learned to equate your self-worth with how productive you are, because your parents praised you for applying yourself in school and punished you for not meeting their expectations. As an adult, this means you push yourself past your limits to be a high-performer at your job, without taking care of yourself first.
You volunteer for every project and check emails on the weekend. You never learned to set clear boundaries around having a work-life balance, so you work until you're on the brink of total collapse. Overworking isn't healthy, physically or psychologically, and can lead to burnout. Living in a constant state of stress does active harm to your system.
You're allowed to say "no" to your boss, even if you couldn't say it to your parents. You don't have to be the best at your job. It's okay to be good enough, to do the work assigned to you and then go home, where you're free to nourish the parts of your soul that don't show up in the workplace.
9. You don't think you deserve what you have
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You feel inherently unworthy because your parents didn't foster a sense of emotional safety during childhood. You can't help but wonder if the love your spouse offers and the success you have at work is some sort of mistake, and all the good things you have will get taken away once people discover who you really are.
The truth is that you're entirely worthy of love and all the achievements you've earned, because you're you, and that's enough. You deserve happiness and joy and a sense of security. Just because your parents couldn't offer that to you doesn't mean you don't deserve it. You do. So, go ahead and claim it.
10. You focus on following the rules
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A sign your parents were too hard on you growing up is that you focus on following the rules and you're scared to step out of line. Your rigid adherence to other people's expectations is directly rooted in how your parents treated you. Having authoritarian parents who demanded that you listen to everything they said and every rule they set meant you never felt safe to mess up.
You're allowed to live life on your own terms. As long as you're not actively hurting yourself or others, you can abide by your own rules and make a routine that fulfills you.
11. You think perfection is the only option
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Your parents set impossibly high standards and displayed severe disappointment if you didn't reach them. They had a rigid sense of success, and if you fell outside of that definition, you were a failure.
As therapist Vienna Pharoan told YourTango CEO Andrea Miller on the "Getting Open" podcast, "If your worthiness, your value as a human being is tied to your ability to be perfect, to perform, to present in a certain way, to please other people... the moment you misstep, the moment that you're imperfect, the moment that you do something that doesn't set you up in this nice light, is the moment that you need to self-protect."
Pharoan concluded, "What you probably learned as a kiddo is that in order to get love, connection, presence, attention, validation, calm, peace, etcetera, in your family, in your home, you had to get the straight As, dress a certain way, score a hat trick on the field, whatever the condition was... We see conditional love play out with worthiness."
Tying your worth to being perfect sets you up to feel like everything you do is wrong, because you, like everyone else, are totally imperfect, and that's more than okay. Learning to accept your flaws and imperfections won't be easy, but it will set you free.
12. You don't show yourself compassion
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You don't know how to treat yourself with gentle understanding and you think your mistakes mean you're unlovable. You struggle to forgive yourself, which leads you to stay stuck in everything you've ever done wrong before.
You're hard on yourself as a direct result of your parents being hard on you, but you can break the cycle. You can reframe how you see yourself and talk to yourself like you'd talk to a beloved friend who's going through a hard time. You can love yourself as you are and watch your world open up as you bloom.
Alexandra Blogier, MFA, is a staff writer who covers psychology, social issues, relationships, self-help topics, and human interest stories.