Do you have the experience of dealing with narcissistic or selfish parents? We’ve put together a list of selfish parents quotes and sayings to help you deal with them, as well as try to be better parents when raising your own children.
Many people wonder if it’s possible for parents to be self-centered and selfish. But they’re human and it turns out that they can be quite flawed and even selfish.
Parenting has an important role in the development of a child’s personality. When parents force their hopes and goals on their children, they are forced to give up their personal preferences and live a life they didn’t choose.
Poor parenting can have a negative impact on a child’s relationship with their parents, especially as they get older. As a result, these quotes about selfish parents will be informative for you
Related: Identifying Toxic Parenting: 16 Types Of Toxic Parents, Signs And How To Deal
60+ Selfish Parents Quotes
1. Love and respect them but don’t get caught up in their drama. – Trialsandtests.
2. “Most adult children of toxic parents grow up feeling tremendous confusion about what love means and how it’s supposed to feel. Their parents did extremely unloving things to them in the name of love.
They came to understand love as something chaotic, dramatic, confusing, and often painful—something they had to give up their own dreams and desires for.
Obviously, that’s not what love is all about. Loving behavior doesn’t grind you down, keep you off balance, or create feelings of self-hatred. Love doesn’t hurt, it feels good. Loving behavior nourishes your emotional well-being.
When someone is being loving to you, you feel accepted, cared for, valued, and respected. Genuine love creates feelings of warmth, pleasure, safety, stability, and inner peace.” ― Susan Forward
3. “It is the selfish parents who are to blame. Pay attention, be involved in your children’s lives. They are your legacy, your only hope.” – Aaron B. Powell
4. “Good parenting gives headaches, but bad parenting gives heartaches.” – Shiv Khera
5. “If you teach hatred to your children, one day your child will have that hatred reflected back onto them and onto YOU.” – Suzy Kassem
6. “Being a parent does not give you an excuse for bad manners.” – Rosalind Wiseman
7. “Being a parent shouldn’t be when it is convenient for you. It is a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year commitment.” – Unknown
8. “Leave your pride, ego, and narcissism somewhere else. Reactions from those parts of you will reinforce your children’s most primitive fears.” – Henry Cloud
9. “Anyone can have a child and call themselves “a parent”. A real parent is someone who puts that child above their own selfish needs and wants.”
10. “Fear-based parenting is the surest way to create intimidated children.” – Tim Kimmel
11. “You think people only need to heal from bad relationships? The truth is people are healing from hateful parents, academic problems, sibling feuds, betrayal from friends, etc. Not everything is about relationships. So heal Kings & Queens.” – Unknown
12. “Did you have parents or just some people who thought they should own somebody?” – Catherine Lacey
13. “Leave your pride, ego, and narcissism somewhere else. Reactions from those parts of you will reinforce your children’s most primitive fears.” – Henry Cloud
Related: 13 Signs Of A Toxic Parent
14. “The hateful and stinging words of a narcissistic parent can linger in the mind of an adult child long after the adult has left home.” – Shannon Thomas
15. “A child that’s being abused by its parents doesn’t stop loving its parents, it stops loving itself.” — Shahida Arabi
16. “Being a parent is easy but being a good parent is tough as it requires a lot of dedication and goodwill.”- Anonymous
17. “Instead of treating your child like how you were treated. Treat them with the same love and attention you wanted from your parents while growing up.” – Jonathan Anthony Burkett
18. “Your first obligation as a parent is to not bring chaos into your kid’s lives.” – Unknown
19. “It has been my observation that parents kill more dreams than anybody.” – Spike Lee
20. “Narcissist parents don’t care about their children’s feelings at all. Only their feelings matter.” -Kim Saeed
Toxic Parent Quotes For Not Ending Up Like Them
If you’ve dealt with emotional unavailability from your parents then here also are some abandonment selfish parents quotes that will assist you in understanding what you’ve gone through.
21. “For those choosing to break generational cycles, your parents couldn’t do it. Their parents couldn’t do it. But for some reason, you noticed the pattern and decided it ends with you. You’re the prototype. So much power you have. That must be a lot huh?” – Michelle
22. “Being a selfish parent is the biggest crime you can do to your child.”- Anonymous
23. “Don’t make your selfishness ruin your child’s life.”- Anonymous
24. “Your children don’t belong to you. You’re on borrowed time with them. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build a better human being; not to build a mini version of you and all your deflated hopes and dreams. Help them become the best THEM, not the best YOU.” – Neauxna
25. “A narcissist parent is easily frustrated by a healthy independent child that they can’t control through parental emotional manipulation.” – Shannon Thomas.
26. “It is human to be angry, but childish to be controlled by anger.” ― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Related: 20 Clear Signs You Are The Child Of Toxic Parents
27. “Toxic parenting leaves scars. Every child deserves good parenting. It is a parental responsibility, not a privilege.” – TCMD.
28. “They are not sorry for harming you. So, don’t feel guilty for cutting them off.” – John Mark Green.
29. What is a toxic parenting style that you are leaving with your parents? I’ll start. I will NEVER compare my children to other people’s kids. Ever. – Ric Flairchukwu
For Unhealthy Relationship Selfish Parents Quotes
Parents often tend to get selfish and become completely oblivious of their child’s needs, choices and freedom. These selfish bad parents quotes give an insight into bad parenting and how it affects a child in the long run.
30. “The family drama may look and sound different from generation to generation, but all toxic patterns are remarkably similar in their outcome: pain and suffering.” – Susan Forward
31. You don’t owe your family affection if they are being abusive and treating you poorly. I know that it’s so difficult not to feel guilty for holding back that love. I know that there are people who will tell you that you should just grin and bear it because they’re family.
People who will shame you for the way you feel. People who will try to convince you that wanting to take care of yourself in this way is selfish and unjustified.
Related: How Parents Cause Mental Health Problems In Children
But the truth is that it’s not your responsibility to be kind or loving to people who have consistently hurt and mistreated you — especially when these people continue to disregard your feelings, ignore your boundaries, and refuse to take responsibility for their behavior.
Just because the person hurting you is family doesn’t make them an exception. – Daniell Koepke
32. “The truth is, if we rebel in reaction to our parents, we are being controlled just as surely as if we submit.”
— Susan Forward,
33. “I have a gaping painful hole in my soul where good, loving parents and a normal, safe childhood should have been.” – Lily Hope Lucario.
34. “You can’t change the toxic behavior of your toxic parents but you can decide how you respond.” – Trialsandtests.
35. It’s up to us to break generational curses when they say “it runs in the family,” you tell them “this is where it runs out” – Unknown
36. “The family drama may look and sound different from generation to generation, but all toxic patterns are remarkably similar in their outcome: pain and suffering.” – Dr. Susan Forward
37. “Many children of toxic parents find it exceptionally difficult to identify who they are once they grow up.” – JR Thorpe
38. “If as children, we were treated as “burdens” to the family, it makes sense that we would try to earn love + safety by having as few needs as possible. While this can be a useful survival strategy, in adulthood it can translate to downplaying needs and inauthentic relationships.” – Crystle Lampitt LMSW
39. “Controlling parents will always assume their children are their property they can possess.” – Anonymous
40. “Parents wonder why the streams are bitter when they themselves have poisoned the fountain.” – John Locke
41. “Toxic parents are the root cause of all dysfunctional families because the fish rots first at its head.” – Anonymous
42. “Shoutout to people who grew up with emotionally unsupportive parents and have to hear other people talk about how supportive their families are while you’re basically guiding yourself through life. You’re strong and brave.”
43. “A child’s shoulders were not built to bear the weight of their parent’s choices.” – Toby Mac
44. “All of us develop our expectations about how people will treat us based on our relationships with our parents.” – Dr. Susan Forward
45. “A habit of abused kids, especially kids with unstable parents, is the tendency to notice every little detail. We magnify small nuances into major things, largely because small nuances quickly become breaking points for parents.
Managing moods, reading the room, perceiving danger in the order of words, the shift of body weight, it’s all a natural outgrowth of trying to manage unstable parents from a young age.” – Geek Dawson
46. “Bad parents see no wrong in the way they treat their children.” – Anonymous
47. “In some sense every parent does love their children. But some parents are too broken to love them well.” – Paul Young
48. “Being in a family where you were neglected sucks but that shouldn’t define you.” – Anonymous
49. “Speak to your children as if they are the wisest, kindest, most beautiful and magical humans on earth, for what they believe is what they will become.” ― Brooke Hampton
Related: Parental Gaslighting: How Parents Gaslight Their Children And Break Their Hearts
Bad Parents Quotes: Having a Selfish Mother Quotes
50. “An unloving mother robs the child of a sense of belonging. The need to belong can become a lifelong quest for him or her.” – Peg Streep.
51. “Toxic mothers plant seeds of guilt, low self-esteem and low self-worth into their daughters which further manifests when those daughters get into their own relationships making them extremely needy or even toxic just like their own moms.” – Trialsandtests.
52. “Narcissist mothers teach their daughters that love is not unconditional, that it is given only when they behave by maternal expectations and whims.” – Dr McBride.
53. “Toxic mothers are more dangerous than absent fathers due to their contagious toxic energy which poisons your soul.” – Trialsandtests.
Selfish Father Quotes: If You Deal With One
54. “Just because you pay child support, it doesn’t make you a good father.” – Unknown
55. “Manipulation and control are favorite weapons abusive dads often use on their children for control.” – Trialsandtests.
56. “I have learned that I should be careful with the words I choose to say when I am angry because later, those words always leave a huge wound of regrets in my heart besides hurting the loved ones. Those wounds can’t be healed!” ― Nino Varsimashvili
57. “There’s nothing worse than a man that can be everything to everybody else except a father to their own child.” – Unknown
58. “Respect to all moms doing double duty because of men failing to do their part as dad.”- John Mark Green
Selfish Children Quotes If You Don’t Want To Turn Into One
59. “No child is born a delinquent. They only became that way if nobody loved them when they were kids.” – Jeannette Walls
60. “As traumatized children we always dreamed that someone would come and save us. We never dreamed that it would, in fact, be ourselves, as adults.” – Alice Little
61. “It is never acceptable for us to be the cause of any child to feel unloved or worthless.” — Joel Burns
62. “An unpredictable parent is a fearsome god in the eyes of a child.” ― Susan Forward
63. “Children soak up both verbal and nonverbal messages like sponges—indiscriminately. They listen to their parents, they watch their parents, and they imitate their parents’ behavior.” ― Susan Forward
Related: 19 Signs You Were Raised By a Narcissistic Mother or Father
64. “I built up so much hatred for my parents, like so much anger for the life they had given me.” – Tana Mongeau
So were you able to relate to some of the quotes about selfish parents? We hope that you heal and form healthy relationships in the future. Don’t forget to love yourself!
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