Dear parents, we know you have a tendency to blame yourself every time some unexpected behavior of your child hurts you. But parenting is not that straightforward, rather it is so multi-faceted that people take negative parenting tests to understand the gravity of their parenting situation. Does the negative parenting test has any scientific backing?
Not at all, according to its developer IDRlabs. It is only a test to figure out whether your parenting style is a consequence of the damaging effects of how your parents treated you. This test centers around the concept of how you were treated as a child. A participant has to undergo 30 questions to find out the negative behaviors of their parents.
What Does the IDRLabs Negative Parenting Test Measure?
A negative parent test is meant to measure the most common damaging patterns that exist in your parenting and figure out their relationship to the parenting style of your parents. You take the test multiple times to get better results.
The test basically measures your struggles in your adult life and how this somehow has roots in the way your parents treated you as a child. So, it all boils down to their parenting.
Basically, the test has 30 questions for the respondent in which a person has to identify the most common negative behaviors he found in his parents when he was growing up. All in all, the test uses six categories which include rejection, deprivation, competitiveness, controlling, overprotection, and punishing to identify negative parenting behavior.
Negative Parenting Styles
A negative parenting style is multi-faceted and involves a lot of aspects and factors. All in all, the major negative parenting styles are three that can actually negatively impact a child’s mind:
Permissive Parenting
This sort of parenting style involves communication but is negative because parents are less responsive or not at all responsive to their children. This, coupled with a lack of discipline, guidance, and misdirection, makes the child confused in life.
Parents, in order to avoid any conflicts, give to their child’s demands without openly talking about mental and emotional issues and addressing any concerns to solve them with practical solutions. So, any problems or negative emotions that exist are pushed under the rug.
Authoritative Parenting
As the name describes, this parenting style is all about strictness and being tough on the children. Parents become very harsh with their children in order to enforce their rules and discipline.
Such parents also deprive their children of emotional availability. The lack of emotional availability and communication makes children feel abandoned. The lack of sensitivity to the child’s feelings and unrealistic high demands can make the children timid.
Neglectful Parenting
This is the third negative parenting style which involves neglectfulness on the part of parents. This styles, like the previous one, also include emotional unavailability and lack of guidance to the child. This and the unresponsiveness to the child’s needs affects the child’s future.
An absent parent may think he is making his child more independent; however, the lack of participation in the child’s life makes the child feel left out of his childhood and grow up quickly into adulthood.
Possible Results of The Negative Parenting Test & What They Mean
The negative parenting test examines a variety of traits in parenting styles and their impact on the next generation’s parenting. The most common results and what they mean for the test are as follows:
Deprivation
Deprivation is a typical result that notes that children deprived of parental affection turn into adults with minimal emotional affection. They dread intimacy and never ask for closeness. The loneliness that they create around themselves is accompanied by aggressive outbursts, low tolerance, and unstable relationships as adults.
Such adults are often unaware that they are emotionally deprived and have problems dealing with intimacy. They remain distant from not only their partners but also their children later on. Moreover, these people are unable to express their feelings of deprivation and focus on what happened rather than their feelings.
This trauma and pain that a person carries within himself due to emotionally distant parents are passed on as a legacy to the partners and children of people who have suffered. Ultimately, the children face the brunt of this emotionally, and the cycle of emotional deprivation along with low self-esteem continues.
Over-Protection
Overprotection is also one of the results discovered in negative parenting traits. It seems normal to be protective of your children, but being overprotective can cost your child his future emotional relationships, as overprotection tends to restrict children of their freedoms.
You might have your child’s good in mind, but in the longer term, that damages their well-being by slowing their mental capabilities and decision-making powers. This further keeps them from becoming independent and making it on their own in life hard. This negative impact also runs into the next generation.
Punishing
This is one of the most disturbing and detrimental of negative parenting. Parents think that by punishing their children, they control them and make them do their bidding. This instills fear in the hearts of the kids.
Fear makes them do things like lying and keeping secrets, which can actually hurt them later on without an adult’s support. Furthermore, giving harsh punishments to children emotionally scars them for life.
Over-Control
Overly controlling parents who tend to take their child’s life into their hands cause more harm than good. Control is accompanied by emotional manipulation and pressure building on children and can even lead to outright threats.
The negative impact kids face is that they either become paranoid with fear or completely the opposite and throw caution to the wind. Both these conditions can prove harmful to the child’s personal growth in the future.
Rejection
Rejection in the form of insults, excessive criticism, and threatening and dismissive behavior to degrade the child are all behaviors of dismissive parents. This results in the child’s humiliation and the instilling of fear in the child’s mind of abandonment and feelings of low self–esteem and worthlessness.
Children with such parents also feel despondent, become passive and aimless, and are constantly in self-doubt. Kids are embarrassed by such parents and develop anxiety due to constant rejection, which can further lead to a lack of focus and even lethargy.
Overindulgence
Overindulgence is also a commonly found result in negative parenting tests. However, research shows the differences in participants as well as their backgrounds and concludes that the results keep on changing.
Overindulgence can be present in the form of excess competitiveness, exercising control, or overly rude behavior with your child in order to discipline him. It can come in any form, but the result is always the same: the child’s mental health is affected in the long term.
Recognizing Parental Behaviors
Parental behaviors are to be appropriately assessed whenever you wish to understand the mental condition of a child or, for that matter, an adult suffering from deep-seated issues. Shedding some light on how their parents treated them in childhood and how they have passed on those negative behaviors to their children is worth noting.
The dominant parental behaviors need to be broken down into different areas as the native parenting test does to assess the parenting skills of parents and how well they did their job. Once you can recognize these behaviors, it is up to you to categorize them as negative or positive.
What Are Poor Parenting Skills?
Poor parenting skills are those that have a negative impact on a child’s mental well-being and, in the future, pose issues for him in relationship building and other areas. Some of the most common poor parenting skills include:
Over Pampering
Although parents like to give their children everything they can to assist them in life and keep their happiness intact, this leads to them spoiling the children. While in the short term, it seems okay to spoil a child a little, in the long term, children are unable to become independent and fight for themselves when times change.
Such people find it hard to be responsible adults and show entitled behavior.
Lack of Motivation
Parents often forget how important it is to motivate their children. Giving them advice is not enough. You need to encourage them to pursue whatever they feel passionate about. Advice should be there, but along with the advice, you need to tell your child you believe them and that they can achieve big things.
Advice can only annoy children, but motivation helps them overcome challenges.
Not Valuing Your Child
At times, competitive parents completely forget to value their kid’s baby steps toward growth. This makes the children lose self-esteem, as they do not feel acknowledged. This is one of the worst parenting skills to follow.
The list is almost endless, but if you really don’t want to be a negative parent, all you need to do is focus on positive parenting and maybe visit a psychological facility that offers professional services regarding mental health to find out if the problem lies in your parents’ parenting style.
Effects of Criticism, Insults, and Bad Behavior on a Child?
The negative effects of excessive criticism, insults, and bad behavior on a child are an open secret. It instills fear in the heart of the child, and he becomes secretive in his matters. He can resort to lying to avoid being criticized and may show a fake and overcompensating personality in order to win the support and validation of his parents.
In reality, the child becomes highly fragile emotionally and will adopt lousy behavior. This he can do as a defense mechanism to overcome negative feelings about himself. Criticism and insults are such poor parenting styles that they can forever put the idea of worthlessness in a child’s mind.
Not only does their self-esteem gets hurt, but the child forever has trust issues and is unable to take on new challenges out of fear. This also affects healthy mental growth.
The Negative Parenting Test While Not Scientific Is A Worthwhile Exercise
Even though IDRlabs Negative parenting test is famous for providing a clinical basis for explaining parenting, it still has no scientific backing. It is only a combination of free online tests, quizzes, and assessments, which can never completely give precise results on anybody’s psychological condition.
The negative parent test is based on the respondent’s current perceptions of how his parents dealt with him in childhood and does not take into account any other factors to come to a detailed conclusion regarding the impact of parental treatment on a child.
The test is only best for educating people, but if anybody wants a definite psychometric assessment with accurate results, that can only be conducted by a psychiatrist or a qualified and trained healthcare provider.
Although the creators of this test have tried their level best in order to create a detailed assessment that is valid, you should never rely entirely on it unless you have seen a mental health professional. You can screen yourself but discuss it with your doctor.
Do not make assumptions or take online recommendations, and we can not stress this enough, the test is only a part of understanding your potential condition. The final assessment and recommendations are up to your doctor to decide.
For Authentic Information
As this test does not necessarily have any scientific backing, you need other ways to confirm the results of the negative parenting test. Looking for all the information online is not wise. Instead, you should look for healthcare professionals such as psychiatrists or other trained professionals once you have taken the test.
You will be surprised to know how many of the assumptions of the test were wrong. You can also go for support groups, but unless you have a psychiatrist to confirm your fears or the knowledge that you found online, you should never make any assumptions about your or your parent’s style.
Finally
The negative parenting test, although it does not provide accurate results or a clear clinical picture still, it provides an insight into your parenting style and tries to dismantle why this is happening.
Children are extremely sensitive, and you should be watchful of how you treat them. If you develop a negative parenting style, it will not benefit you or your child. On the contrary, it will scar your child and make him apply the same techniques to his partner or children.
Always be responsive to your child and be emotionally available. Emotional deprivation can only lead to emotional damage to the child, who can have failed relationships in the future. So to protect the child and not overprotect him, you need to be emotionally available.
