Parenting affects a child later in life through what the child’s body learns to expect from other people. A child who is warmly loved, given steady limits and allowed to fail usually grows into an adult who can be disappointed or contradicted and still know who they are. Too much adoration, too little love, and harshness that passes for firmness each leave a different pattern, and those patterns show up most in adult relationships.
What I see when adults trace it back
People rarely come to therapy saying their parents shaped them. They come because a relationship keeps going wrong in the same way, or because they react to small things with a force that surprises them. When we look back together, the story usually leads to one of a few kinds of childhood. Some people were adored without limits. Some were not loved in a way they could feel. Some were held firmly by an adult who was also frightening, and some had nobody really there at all.
Most parents do not see this while it is happening. They are tired, repeating what was done to them, or working hard to do the opposite. A parent’s moods, certainty and temper become what the child grows up with, and the child adjusts to all of it.
The child who was adored without a counterweight
Being adored feels wonderful. A child who hears every day that they are clever and special has a warm start, and the warmth matters a great deal. The difficulty comes later, because nobody is adored endlessly. Teachers have thirty other students. Bosses want results. Partners have bad days and say so.
In Singapore this often arrives in secondary school or in the first job. The child who was always the smart one meets people who are just as smart, and nobody at the office cares about their exam results. If that child never had the experience of failing, being told no, and recovering with an adult beside them, an ordinary setback can feel like being found out.
Research supports this. A 2015 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences followed children and parents in the Netherlands for a year and a half. Children whose parents saw them as more special and more deserving than other children showed more narcissistic traits over time. Children whose parents were simply warm and affectionate developed healthier self-esteem. The effect was modest, and other researchers have cautioned against reading too much into one study. Still, it shows that warmth and overvaluing a child do different things.
Schema therapy, developed by Jeffrey Young, describes an entitlement pattern that can grow from overindulgence and a lack of limits. The version I see more often in adults is quieter. Someone leaves a job once they are no longer the favourite, goes cold when a partner criticises them, or stops trying anything they might not be good at.
The child who did not feel loved or seen
Children need to be seen, enjoyed and cared for. Attachment theory, beginning with John Bowlby, treats this as a biological need. A young child cannot survive without a caregiver, so losing a parent’s attention registers in the body as danger. For someone who has never been there, it is hard to understand how close to a kind of death this can feel.
A child in that position usually concludes that the problem is them. They are unlovable, too much, or not worth the trouble. Schema therapy calls this the defectiveness and shame schema. What follows is often an effort to fill the empty space. Some people chase attention. Some stay with people who hurt them, because being hurt feels better than being alone. Others fill the quiet with work, food, alcohol or their phone.
A loving partner later on does not undo this overnight. Moments of being cherished feel wonderful, and then the old belief returns. A belief about your own worth that formed over many years behaves like any long-standing condition and does not disappear with one good experience. I have written more about this in emotionally unavailable parents and fear of abandonment in Singapore .
The child held firmly by an adult who was sometimes frightening
Children need limits to feel safe. A parent who is clear and decisive gives the child something to lean against. When that same parent was also often angry, always right or a little aggressive, the child learns that safety and fear arrive together.
What settled the child was knowing where they stood with that adult. The hardness came with it, but it was never the part that helped. As adults, these people often want two things at once. They want to stand up for themselves and trust their own judgement. Their body still settles most around someone loud and certain, because that is what it grew up with. Polyvagal theory, developed by Stephen Porges, uses the word neuroception for the way the nervous system judges safety before we have a thought about it. It judges largely by what is familiar, so the two wants can feel impossible to hold together.
The cost often shows up in a close relationship. Being contradicted by a partner does not feel like a small disagreement. It feels like losing your footing, so the other person’s version has to be wrong. This tends to grow from one of three childhoods: being told your perception was wrong, being punished for mistakes without being shown what to do, or living in a house where one adult’s mood set the tone for everyone. In each case the child never got to practise being disagreed with and still feeling like themselves. The same person can be patient and fair at work and with friends. It shows up with the people they are closest to.
Partners sometimes decide they must become harder or colder to be taken seriously. That usually makes things worse. What helps is being clear and predictable, saying what you mean and following through.
The child with nobody really there
Some children grew up with no limits at all, or with parents who were rarely around. Others were given responsibility early. A younger sibling arrived, a parent worked overseas, and the child became the steady one in the house. Nobody was unkind. There was simply no room for the child’s own needs.
As adults, these people find it hard to say what they need. They are often drawn to partners who need a lot of looking after, because being useful is the way they have always been wanted. The difficulty is that they only ever find out their usefulness is loved. Whether they would be loved without it stays unanswered for years. You can read more in emotional parentification and why do I feel responsible for everyone .
What research in Singapore has found
An A*STAR policy brief from October 2026 draws on Growing Up in Singapore Towards healthy Outcomes, the country’s largest birth cohort study. Children of mothers who used supportive parenting had fewer depressive symptoms. Harsh parenting in early childhood was linked to more aggressive and rule-breaking behaviour. Mothers struggling with depression or anxiety were more likely to use harsh parenting or permissive parenting, which the brief describes as inconsistent rule enforcement. Separately, a study from NTU’s Early Cognition Lab found that more than 80 percent of children in Singapore experienced at least one form of physical discipline at ages 4.5, 6, 9 and 11.
The pressure on parents here is real. Long hours, a high-performance culture and small social circles where it feels risky to admit you are struggling all affect how a parent shows up at home. The research points the same way as what I see. A parent’s own wellbeing shapes what the child receives.
Inner child therapy in Singapore and what change looks like
Understanding where a pattern came from helps, but it rarely changes how the body reacts in the moment. In somatic therapy, we notice what happens physically when you are criticised, disagreed with or cared for, and we work with it in small amounts. In inner child therapy, we get to know the younger part of you that learned these rules and what it was protecting you from. Attachment counselling looks at how these patterns play out with the people you are closest to.
Working with the body helps people cope, but it does not mean the whole problem lives inside you. Much of it came from what happened around you when you were young, and some of it is still kept going by the people you are with now. You can read about my training and how I work on the therapist page.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does parenting affect a child later in life?
Parenting shapes what a child’s nervous system expects from other people. Warmth combined with clear, predictable limits tends to produce adults who can handle failure and disagreement. Too much adoration, too little love, harshness and absence each tend to show up later as difficulty with criticism, a belief of being unlovable, or trouble holding your own view in close relationships.
Can you love a child too much?
Warmth and affection are not the problem. Research from 2015 found that warmth was linked to healthy self-esteem, while seeing a child as more special and deserving than other children was linked to more narcissistic traits. Children also need to experience failing, being told no, and recovering with an adult’s support.
Why do I feel safe with people who are strict or controlling?
If you grew up with a parent who was firm and also frightening, your body may have learned that safety and fear come together. The nervous system tends to settle around what is familiar. What actually helped as a child was knowing where you stood, which you can find in people who are clear and predictable without being harsh.
Why can’t I handle being wrong in my relationship?
For some people, being contradicted by a partner feels like losing their sense of who they are. This often comes from a childhood where your perception was dismissed, mistakes were punished, or one adult’s mood dominated the home. It usually shows up most in the closest relationship, even when the person is easygoing everywhere else.
Can therapy help with how my parents raised me?
Yes. Therapy helps you see which patterns came from childhood and how they show up now. Approaches such as inner child therapy, somatic therapy and attachment counselling work with how your body reacts in the moment, which is often where insight alone does not reach. Change usually happens gradually over many sessions.
If something in this article resonated and you’re wondering whether therapy might help, you can find out more about how I work and book a session on the Services and Booking page.
You might also want to read
Emotional Parentification in Singapore
Why Do I Feel Responsible for Everyone?
Healing from Emotionally Unavailable Parents
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how parenting affects a child, parenting styles Singapore, childhood trauma Singapore, inner child therapy Singapore, attachment counselling Singapore, somatic therapy Singapore, fear of abandonment Singapore, emotionally unavailable, counsellor Singapore, therapist Singapore
