week three: Narcissism

This week promoted some readings that I found relevant both to my teaching and to my personal life.  I’ve been asked to find an article focused on whether or not teenagers are narcissistic or more self-aware concerning their online personas.  Narcissism is a word that has been much overused over the past few years, along with others like woke, gaslighting, love-bombing, and triggered. I know that I have been guilty of wrongly mislabeling people as “narcissists,” but I now realize that the word is now much overused—perhaps, in part, due to the wider references to the term resulting from concern with social media.  We need to recognize that the word “narcissism” is in itself ‘triggering,’ and that its use can cause psychological distress in those whom it’s used to describe.  I found one article, “Is my teen narcissistic or just a normal self-centered teenager?” that I think reflects my own views on the matter.  The article was written by a concerned parent who reached out to a doctor after a counselor suggested that one of her daughters might be “narcissistic.”  The parent reached out to Dr. Laura Markham, who provided her with some further insight into the true nature of narcissism, and how it may emerge in the lives or our children. Dr. Markham emphasizes that labeling teenagers as being narcissistic may in fact disrupt their feelings of being loved and accepted by those around them.

The concept of a narcissist and egotistic man is illustrated in this silhouette. (Source: Freepix, January 12 2016).

This topic hits home to me because I have an older brother whom the rest of the family, including myself, have sometimes labeled as being narcissistic.  I grew up being suspicious of my brother’s values, and I often found myself questioning his true feelings for other members of his family.  As a child, I didn’t really have a clear idea of what narcicssism actually meant, and I now realize that “egotistic” might have been a more accurate description of his personality. Growing up in a family with strong Hindu and Buddhist ties, I certainly understood what it meant to “quiet the ego,” and I tried hard not to let my own personal pride in my skills and abilities into my head.  Although I still think that my brother didn’t share in this kind of personal humility, I now understand that this wasn’t entirely his own fault. I now see his personal development in the broader context of his family's attitudes towards him—and, in particular, the tendency of immigrant parents grounded in tradition to pay more attention to the abilities of their sons than their daughters.  According to Dr. Markham, “Narcissism develops when a child does not feel good enough to please the parent and to cause the parent to accept and love them for who they are.  The parent may have praised the child, but only for certain traits, with the implication that the child isn’t good enough unless they exhibit those traits.” (Markham, 2023).  Things ring very true to me about my parents’ treatment of my brother: he was placed on a high pedestal held to be due to sons in many traditional immigrant families. The implications of this kind of over-estimation have been profound in my own family. I agree with Dr. Markham that we should admire our teens for who they are.  And so, I conclude that while my brother should not be labeled as a “narcissist” in the formal psychological understanding of that term, he has simply been the victim of unbalanced parental attitudes towards him, leading to the development of a rather bloated and egotistical view of himself. It is this that has got in the way of his ability to relate to his siblings on equal terms, and to the kind of striving for parental attention in his sisters described by Dr. Markham. All of this has significant implications for my own parenting and teaching. We need to let every child know that they are valued and loved as individuals equally: it is when conditions arise in which self-esteem develops in false ways that egotism emerges, which often becomes confused with “narcissism.”     

References:

Boyd, Dana. (2014). It’s Complicated: the social lives of networked teens. Yale University Press.

Markham, L. 2023. Is My Teen Narcissistic or Just a Normal Self-Centered Teenager? Aha! Parenting. URL: https://www.ahaparenting.com/read/is-my-teen-narcissistic-or-just-a-normal-self-centered-teenager