Emotional maturity is having the flexibility to administer your emotions. It’s understanding them. It’s being self-aware of your emotions. It’s with the ability to recognize and share your feelings appropriately. It’s the flexibility to form and sustain healthy relationships, hold yourself accountable, and interact in healthy conflict. Being emotionally mature is a skill everyone should possess since it produces quality relationships. Building and sustaining quality relationships is taught and learned by the primary teachers in an individual’s life: their parents. Parents are a toddler’s first teacher. They are the primary people children meet. They provide encouragement, guidance, and support in some ways for a lot of reasons. In short, parents are essential to the well-being of a toddler’s life. Many children and adults look to their parents for guidance in various areas of their lives because they’re the trusted individuals who shaped and molded them into the people/person they’re. They are expected to nurture children from the time they’re small and after they transition into maturity.
While it’s an automatic expectation of oldsters, or parental figures, to nurture their children maturely, the truth is that many parents have developed emotionally immature relationships with their children. Emotional immaturity is defined because the tendency to precise emotions without restraint. It is having limited insight on how their actions and reactions affect others. It is lacking effective communication, demanding attention, avoiding responsibility, and failing to carry oneself accountable for his or her actions. It often stems from untreated trauma, an unsupported mental health condition, growing up with insecure attachments, and so forth. Emotional immaturity will be attached to suppressed experiences that will manifest through various behaviors. As a results of these unhealthy behaviors, toxic relationships develop between parents and their child/ren. For believers, the Bible makes it clear that we’re to honor our mother and father because it demonstrates our love for Christ. It teaches respect for authority, and it honors God. So then, for believers and non-believers who’ve emotionally immature parents, how do they honor their parents? By setting clear boundaries for everybody to honor. If you do not know the right way to set boundaries with emotionally immature parents, take a take a look at the next list.
Photo credit: ©GettyImages/jeffbergen
