Why Do I Still Want My Parents' Approval?
The Pattern
You are an adult. You have your own life, your own people, your own evidence of who you are. And still, a tiny part of you organizes around what they will say, what they will think, whether they will finally notice the thing you have built. You feel shame for needing this so much at your age. The shame is not warranted. The wanting is not regression. It is a developmental need that did not get met when it should have, and it does not have a statute of limitations.
Origins & Context
Erik Erikson's developmental psychology identifies parental validation as a core psychological need across the entire arc of childhood and adolescence. When that validation is absent, conditional, or contingent on performance, the developmental task remains incomplete. The adult continues to seek what the child did not receive, because the underlying need does not expire when birthdays accumulate.
Alice Miller's writing on the gifted child documents the specific case of children whose parents were unable to see them as they were, and who therefore spent their lives in pursuit of an approval that could not be granted, because the parent had no inner resource with which to grant it. The longing, Miller argues, is the residue of a thwarted developmental need, and meeting it requires grieving its impossibility, not redoubling the effort.
The wanting is not regression. It is a developmental need that did not get met when it should have, and it does not have a statute of limitations.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
It shows up as the way you frame your accomplishments in your head with their voice as the audience. The mental tally of what they would think of this. The small relief when they finally express something positive about your work, and the disproportionate hurt when they do not.
It shows up as the slight tilt of your major life decisions toward what they will accept. The career that almost happened but did not quite get chosen because of who would not have approved. The partner who almost was, the move that almost was, the version of your life that did not happen because, somewhere in the calculation, the family's invisible vote weighed too much.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as the Unmet Developmental Need (Erik Erikson), the persistence of childhood psychological tasks into adulthood when they were not adequately addressed in the developmental window. It is also named as the Conditional Lovability Wound (Alice Miller), the specific injury of having been loved only for one's performance rather than one's being. In contemporary work, Lindsay Gibson names a related dynamic in Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents as the Healing Fantasy, the unconscious belief that if one becomes good enough or accomplished enough, the parent will finally provide the validation that was withheld.
Related entries in this library: the Inner Child, Reparenting, Emotional Immaturity, Why I Cannot Disappoint My Parents, the Conditional Love wound.
Nikita's Note
I used to be ashamed of how much their approval still moved me. I thought I should be past it. The shame made me hide the wanting, and the hiding made the wanting louder.
What shifted was meeting the part of me that was still waiting, not as an embarrassment but as a child who had been waiting a very long time and deserved to be told the truth. The truth is that the approval may never come in the form she was hoping for. And that does not make her wrong for having wanted it. It just means we have to give it to her now, ourselves.
From the work
The wanting is not regression. It is a developmental need that did not get met when it should have, and it does not have a statute of limitations.From Healing the Mother Wound by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in Healing the Mother Wound — available on Amazon.