A narcissistic relationship is defined as one in which Person A expects Person B to cater to their needs, do what they ask, pay attention to them, live up to their expectations, and ask for nothing in return.

I found this online, and it apparently comes from the book The Narcissistic Family: Diagnosis and Treatment. I’d just really like to elaborate on the idea that due to the way we treat young people, the parent-child relationship is typically narcissistic, centered around one of the individuals in a relationship, rather than cooperative, which is how relationships should be.

Obviously there’s a lot to say about parents who are the self-centered ones in the relationship, so I’ll try not to dwell on this one too much, but it’s often the most important one concerning youth rights. Children can find ways to gain power and wield it over their parents to control them, and this is just as bad for society as abusive parents.

Parents are given a lot of power over a child for what is often mistaken as “protecting their child’s wishes.” If it really were about that, then we would have given children that power. You might say, “Hold on, children are far too immature to wield that or any kind of power! That’s why it’s important for parents to posses it, they know how to use it properly and can truly understand what is best for the child.” This is a terrible way to think. If children are too immature to be autonomous, we should be teaching them to be so, not holding them back in order to teach some strange lesson about maturity that takes until age 18. Thus, parents have too much power as is, while retarding development in their children.

And with great power can come such little incentive for responsibility.

Clearly, in the case of abusive parents, this is set up for disaster, but even normal parents will do a hefty bit of damage to their kids by doing what society currently expects of them.

Let’s say you’re my kid, and you’re in our neighborhood playing baseball with the other children. It’s the bottom of the 9th, the bases are loaded, but you’ve got two strikes against you so you aren’t feeling too confident. However, you do need at least two points to win, so you figure you should aim for right field on the chance that you don’t get that home run. You smash that ball into orbit, but not before it smashes through a neighbor’s window. When you come home to me, the parent, and I can tell what’s up, then you can probably finish the rest of this story in your mind so I don’t have to type it: “I’m sorry, Mr. Neighbor, for breaking your window.” And the moral of the story is: you never did it again.

But that’s not really learning anything, is it? How would you feel if I came into your house, took a few things I’d like to sell online because they’d make me a nice buck, and before I closed the door I made sure I mumbled a few cheap words while I looked down at your feet? You’d call the police, I hope. So the police come back later, asking for details, and you tell them about this weirdo who came into your house, stole some things of yours, and then said he was sorry but left, anyway.

“Wait, he said he was sorry?” one of them asks you.

“Yeah, it was pretty strange,” you reply. They then give you this odd look that you weren’t quite sure how to interpret.

“All right, we’ll look into it,” the other one says, seemingly reluctantly. It’s a strange day, but you don’t think too much of it. Your lawyer assures you that you have a rock solid case. The court day for this guy rolls around, so you’re pretty intrigued as to what this guy is going to say in front a room full of people. Surprisingly little, you discover:

“Your honor, I would like to present two pieces of evidence to the court. Exhibit A: I said I was sorry. Exhibit B: I’ve learned my lesson.” You guffaw in total confidence the rest of the room has, too, but the courtroom is entirely silent. In fact, they all give you that look like the police officers did. But here’s what’s really shuts you up: the judge accepts the evidence.

“Surely,” you think, “this won’t stand in a court of law?” This thought lingers in your mind for the rest of the trial. All doubts were put aside when the jury came back with the verdict.

“Not guilty,” the juror reads. “Additionally, we demand the plaintiff to, like, lighten up, man. ‘Cause, I mean, like, he said he was sorry.” The juror promptly shrugs and sits down. The judge considers it an open and closed case, and adjourns the court.

What kind of a society would allow this scenario to happen? One we’re helping to create.

For the record, that last bit wasn’t meant to be taken literally, just on the chance some smug idiot would like to take it so. If you thought that, then you might also think this blog post is about saying sorry. It isn’t.

Think about the baseball story again: notice how it says, “And the moral of the story is: you never did it again”? You may have assumed that it was because you learned your lesson. But which are you more concerned about: losing privileges, such as allowance, television, and a social life for a certain period of time, or the fact that your poor neighbor will be a few dollars poorer for having to replace the window? I bet you the first one was crossing your mind more than the other.

After quite a few rounds of this throughout an entire childhood, this would create a person who finds it pretty difficult to do something for someone else when they’ve wronged someone else that isn’t legally punishable. This person may also dislike authority in some capacity, or even distrust it if they feel wronged by the punishments they’ve received. This person may also find it pretty easy to point out how others are wrong, but unwilling to admit when he or she is wrong. It is likely he or she generally doesn’t see fault with anything he or she does. In other words, he or she is probably somewhat conceited. Worse yet, this person is immature, and probably won’t make sound decisions for him or herself.

And that’s just our first problem identified, but it’s the biggest one. The rest of this will come easier now that I’ve described how we create narcissism in children.

Now that we’ve created this conceited child, we have a new person who will not only mistreat their parents despite their best intent, but will most likely mistreat most of the people they meet and have relationships with, including–quite eventually–their own children. Assuming this problem is enabled without any intention of stopping it or intervening, this will continue forever until it is properly dealt with.

Here’s how we should intervene: let’s go back to that day where you break the window. Instead of what happened the first time–the game ending and everyone going home, you acting like a criminal when you came home, and me making you go over to Mr. Neighbor’s house to make a barely audible and meaningless apology–this did: you went over to Mr. Neighbor’s house of your own accord, apologized quite honestly and while making eye contact, and asked what you could to to make it better. In one easy movement, you have taken responsibility for what you’ve done, and possibly started a new relationship on the right foot. Quite a pipe dream, isn’t it? It doesn’t have to be.

This could all be avoided, this massive web of conceit, if we just stopped worrying so much about the kids and just taught them to be independent. They will have to be someday, it is an inevitability, so why bother putting it off? Some children can’t afford to wait.