In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, my guest is therapist Morgan Pommells. We explore the lasting impact of having an emotionally immature parent (EIP), including how to begin healing and how we can break the cycle with our own kids. We also talk about boundaries with our EIP parent, why children's big emotions aren't personal attacks, and what every child truly needs to thrive.
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You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or check out the fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post.
We talk about:
00:00 – Introduction to Morgan Pommells
02:30 – What is an emotionally immature parent?
07:15 – Emotional immaturity vs. narcissism: What’s the difference?
09:00 – Why emotionally immature parents are often critical
10:30 – The biggest impact on children: Growing up without a strong sense of self
12:00 – How childhood with an EIP affects adult relationships and self-worth, and our own parenting
15:30 – Healing from emotionally immature parenting
18:30 – Why your child’s big emotions are actually a sign of safety
19:00 – Navigating relationships with emotionally immature parents as an adult
27:00 – Teaching children that feelings aren’t dangerous
27:45 – Emotionally immature grandparents: Do the patterns continue?
29:15 – The power of delighting in your child
32:45 – What if your parenting partner is emotionally immature?
35:00 – The parenting mistake we all make: Taking children’s emotions personally
36:00 – Morgan’s advice for every parent: Heal your own wounds before they parent your children
38:00 – Where to find Morgan and closing thoughts
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Morgan’s IG @morganpommells
Connect with Sarah Rosensweet:
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Sarah: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast.
Today’s guest is Morgan Pommells. Morgan is a therapist and coach who helps the adult children of emotionally immature parents stop seeing themselves through their parents’ eyes and finally come home to who they really are.
Morgan and I discuss what an emotionally immature parent is, how that is—and isn’t—different from narcissism, and how people grow up to parent this way. Morgan also shares how having an emotionally immature parent affects us as children, how it continues to affect us once we’ve grown up, and how we can heal from having been raised by an emotionally immature parent.
We also talk about the opposite of emotionally immature parenting and what our kids need in order to grow up whole and healthy.
Morgan has so much wisdom, and so much of our work overlaps. I think you’re going to learn a lot from this conversation, and I think you’re really going to enjoy it.
If you like this episode, please share it with a friend so more parents can learn about peaceful parenting. If you’re a fan of the podcast, you can also help us out by leaving a five-star rating and review in your podcast app. While you’re there, don’t forget to follow the show so you don’t miss an episode.
Let’s meet Morgan.
Sarah: Hi, Morgan. Welcome to the podcast.
Morgan: Hi! Thank you for having me.
Sarah: I’m so glad to have you on. We’ve been trying to schedule this for a while, and I think this is such an important topic for parents. I’m so glad we finally got to sit down and have this conversation.
Morgan: Me too. It’s a super important topic for parents.
Sarah: Tell us a little about who you are and what you do.
Morgan: I’m a therapist and coach in Ontario, Canada, and I specialize exclusively in working with the adult children of emotionally immature parents. Whether that’s through workshops or one-to-one work, everything I do revolves around helping people heal from having emotionally immature parents.
Sarah: So tell us: what is an emotionally immature parent?
Morgan: Great question.
An emotionally immature parent is someone who really struggles to manage their own painful internal emotions. Those emotions tend to spill out onto everyone around them instead of being worked through internally. These are parents who might struggle with shame, rage, or fear of abandonment, and instead of taking responsibility for those feelings and working through them themselves, they become everyone else’s problem.
They take those emotions out on their children. They may recruit their children into never leaving them because they’re terrified of being abandoned. The child becomes responsible for soothing and managing the parent’s anxiety, which is really the opposite of what a healthy parent-child relationship is meant to be.
Sarah: Yeah.
What causes somebody... I guess you don’t become emotionally immature—you just never emotionally mature. What causes that lack of emotional maturation? How does somebody become an emotionally immature parent?
Morgan: There are a couple of different pathways.
A lot of emotionally immature parents have their own relational trauma. If we experience something deeply overwhelming at a young age and don’t have the capacity to metabolize it at the time, we can become emotionally stuck there. Our biological age keeps moving forward, but our emotional development doesn’t necessarily come with us. Our emotional defenses stay frozen at that younger age.
In other cases, someone may have had the capacity to become emotionally mature, but emotional immaturity was all that was ever modeled for them. They don’t have another template. They don’t know a different kind of parenting exists because they’re simply working from the script they inherited.
Sarah: So far we’ve been talking about this in psychological terms, but what does that actually look like in real life?
Let’s focus on an adult child. What would a familiar interaction look like between an emotionally immature parent and their grown child?
Morgan: One of the biggest dynamics is fear of abandonment.
When their child grows up, goes away to university, finds a partner, or simply starts building their own life, emotionally immature parents can become very controlling. They can become very mean. They can use shame to pull their child back toward them and keep them emotionally close because they’re so afraid of being abandoned.
When children are younger, it usually looks like a lot of control. That parent has a tremendous amount of fear and anxiety, but instead of working through it themselves, they try to control their child. As a result, the parent feels safer, but the child feels controlled and suffocated.
Sarah: So they’re almost externalizing their own feelings?
They feel scared, so they make their child feel scared? Or is that too simplified?
Morgan: No, in some cases that’s exactly what’s happening.
If you have a parent who’s very anxious or very fearful, it can actually feel safer if everyone around them is afraid too. You don’t want to be the only person who’s scared of the big, bad threat you believe is coming. So if you can get everyone else to be afraid, at least you have company in that fear.
When children are younger, though, it often looks a little different. A parent might be deeply worried about how their child is doing at school or how they’re perceived by other people, so they try to control what the child says, wears, or does because that helps soothe the parent’s own fear.
Sarah: So that’s because they’re worried about what people think of their child because it reflects back on them?
Morgan: Yes, that’s certainly part of it.
There can be a real element of impression management with emotionally immature parents. Many of them are very concerned with how they appear to other people. Sometimes they experienced a genuine threat in their own childhood because some important family rule was broken. As a result, they become determined that their own child will never break that same rule because they believe that’s what keeps both of them safe.
Sarah: I also think it’s about attachment.
If people don’t think well of you, then you don’t get your needs met.
Morgan: Exactly.
If someone doesn’t think well of you, if they see you as a threat, or if they see you as different, that can feel incredibly dangerous.
Emotionally immature parents tend to like sameness. They want their children to think the same way they do and view the world the same way they do. They often use different techniques to influence their child’s thinking because differences feel threatening.
Ultimately, we’re talking about people who are acting from a deep desire to feel emotionally and psychologically safe. The tragedy is that the methods they use to create that safety can be profoundly damaging to their children.
Sarah: How is this different from narcissism—or is it?
Morgan: That’s a huge question.
You can absolutely have an emotionally immature parent who is also quite narcissistic, but you can also have an emotionally immature parent who isn’t narcissistic at all.
A narcissistic personality structure is just one presentation. Another emotionally immature parent might be incredibly anxious. There are different expressions of emotional immaturity, so it isn’t an either-or situation.
It’s also important to remember that emotional immaturity exists on a spectrum. You can have very mild emotional immaturity—and, honestly, all of us demonstrate emotional immaturity at certain moments in our lives. Then, at the more severe end of the spectrum, you might see something like narcissistic personality disorder, where someone relies heavily on emotionally immature defenses.
So it isn’t that emotional immaturity and narcissism are the same thing. Narcissism is one possible way emotional immaturity can present, but it’s certainly not the only one.
Sarah: Are there people who are emotionally immature all the time?
Morgan: Yes. When we talk about EIPs—emotionally immature parents—we’re talking about people for whom emotional immaturity is the rule rather than the exception.
All of us are going to have emotionally immature moments. Usually, those happen when something feels very threatening because we’re trying to keep ourselves safe. We want control in that moment. One very common emotionally immature defense is denial. Think about hearing that someone has passed away. One of the first things people often say is, “No.” That’s denial. We’re trying to metabolize something incredibly painful.
But those are moments. They’re moments we can eventually reflect on, learn from, and grow through. We can become more emotionally mature if we choose to do that. With emotionally immature parents, though, emotional immaturity isn’t just a reaction to certain situations—it’s their baseline, regardless of the context or the type of threat they’re facing.
Sarah: That makes sense.
One thing you talk about is emotionally immature parents being critical. Tell me about the critical parent.
Morgan: There are really two different versions of that.
One type of emotionally immature parent is highly critical because they’re deeply afraid that their child won’t be okay if they don’t follow the parent’s rules. They believe, “You need to get into a really good university. You need a really good job. You need perfect manners because otherwise people will be mean to you. They won’t give you opportunities.” Underneath all of that criticism is genuine terror and, in many cases, genuine love for their child. The problem is that the way they’re trying to soothe that fear creates rupture and disconnection in the relationship.
Then there’s another group of emotionally immature parents who have internalized a tremendous amount of self-hatred through their own trauma. They don’t know how to metabolize that pain because growing up hating yourself is incredibly painful. Instead, they project it onto their child.
They might notice a quality in their child that reminds them of something they’ve decided is ugly or unacceptable in themselves. It can actually feel satisfying to try to eliminate that quality in their child through criticism or shame—to make sure their child never becomes that way. In those cases, the criticism is really an expression of their own self-hatred.
Sarah: What are the effects on a child growing up with an emotionally immature parent?
Morgan: By far, the biggest effect is a lack of sense of self.
These are children who never really had the opportunity to discover who they are because they didn’t have a parent who was deeply curious about them. They didn’t have a parent who took a genuine interest in them, asked meaningful questions, or reflected their inner world back to them.
As children, we develop our identity in relationship with another person. We need someone to act as a mirror. But for the adult children of emotionally immature parents, you don’t receive a mirror—you receive a distortion.
Instead of hearing, “Tell me about yourself,” or, “I want to understand you,” you hear messages like, “There’s something wrong with you,” “I’m not interested in you,” or, “Your thoughts are weird, wrong, or shameful.” Over time, your sense of self becomes organized around those messages.
Sometimes the experience isn’t criticism so much as neglect. In those cases, it’s not even that you grow up believing you’re bad or shameful. You grow up feeling like you barely exist. Like you aren’t even a full person.
At the core of this wound is not really knowing who you are.
Sarah: Obviously that’s painful in and of itself, but how does that affect someone’s adult life?
How does it show up in the choices we make, the relationships we enter into, or the partners we choose? And maybe that’s actually a separate question, but I’m also curious about how growing up with an emotionally immature parent affects the way we parent our own children.
Morgan: They’re really connected.
The first thing is that when you reach adulthood without a solid sense of self, there’s almost this hunger inside you—a hunger that never feels fully satisfied. You don’t really know what you want. Sometimes you think you know what you want, and then you finally achieve it, only to discover it doesn’t feel the way you expected because something more fundamental is missing.
There’s this constant sense of never quite arriving.
Without a strong sense of self, it’s also much easier to end up in unhealthy or even abusive relationships. If you don’t know who you are, how do you know what you want? How do you know what’s safe? How do you know what your needs are? How do you stay connected to yourself?
Instead, many people become what we often call codependent. They become incredibly focused on making sure everyone else is okay. They’re wonderful caretakers, but meanwhile, none of their own needs are being met. Their own joy, happiness, and sense of aliveness get left behind.
There’s a deep emptiness because there’s nothing inside that feels solid enough to connect with.
Sarah: What about parenting? How does this affect the way we parent our own children?
Morgan: Growing up with an emotionally immature parent affects parenting in so many different ways.
For one thing, if you don’t have a strong sense of self, it’s easy to make parenting your entire identity. It becomes, “I’m just a mom,” or, “I’m just a dad,” as though there’s nothing else to you beyond that role.
But another really important piece is that emotionally immature parents tend to have very rigid rules. They hold strong expectations, and they genuinely believe terrible things will happen if those rules are broken.
If you grow up in that environment—especially without a strong sense of self—you internalize those rules. You come to believe that’s simply how the world works.
Then you become a parent, your children start doing what children naturally do, and they break those rules. They talk back. They get angry. They push limits. Those are completely developmentally appropriate behaviors, but they activate tremendous fear inside you.
You don’t necessarily realize that’s what’s happening. You may even feel your reactions are completely justified. But underneath those reactions is the terror you learned as a child. Because those behaviors weren’t allowed in your own home, seeing your children do them feels profoundly threatening.
Without realizing it, you begin responding to your child as though they’re doing something terribly wrong.
Sarah: I see that all the time with the parents I work with.
If your child does something that would have been dangerous for you to do as a child—whether literally dangerous or emotionally dangerous—it becomes a huge trigger.
Your five-year-old self is saying, “Kids aren’t allowed to do that. Kids shouldn’t do that. If you do that, you’re not going to get the love you need.”
Morgan: Exactly.
Your nervous system remembers, “Bad things happen when this happens.”
Another piece of this wound is that we often don’t realize we’ve grown up. A part of us still feels eight years old.
So when your own child is screaming, getting angry, or breaking the rules, part of your body reacts as though you’re the child who’s about to get in trouble. It says, “We’re not allowed to do this. Last time this happened, I got hurt. You need to stop. You need to be quiet.”
The difference is that now we’re the adult. We’re bigger. We’re more powerful. So we may respond with that same power to shut our child down.
For many parents, that reaction comes from a very real place of, “I get hurt when people scream. I get hurt when these rules are broken. This has to stop.”
Sarah: Yeah. Shut it down.
How does someone heal from having been raised by an emotionally immature parent? I realize that’s your life’s work, so it’s not a simple question, but where does healing begin?
Morgan: The biggest thing to understand is that this is a relational trauma, so it has to heal in the context of relationship.
As a therapist, I’m obviously biased toward therapy, but healing can happen through a coaching relationship, a healthy romantic relationship, or any relationship that offers consistent corrective experiences.
We need experiences where we express our emotions and someone stays. We need experiences where we express a need and someone genuinely wants to meet that need.
We have to update the template.
Insight alone isn’t enough. Reading about it isn’t enough. We actually have to experience someone caring about us.
Sarah: So it’s almost like reprogramming.
Morgan: Exactly.
It’s a real reprogramming process.
Our children can certainly be part of that healing journey, but they can’t become the people who heal us. We have to be very careful not to recruit them into that role.
Sarah: Can we heal ourselves by being a different parent to our children than we had? Do you know what I mean? Can it work in that direction? Could that be part of the healing process?
Morgan: Absolutely. There is something deeply healing about getting down on your child’s level and offering them the validation that you never received yourself.
At the same time, we have to be very careful not to parent our children as though they needed the parent that we needed.
Sarah: Because they’re their own people.
Morgan: Exactly. They’re their own people. They need the parent they need.
If we get caught in the idea that, “I just need to give my children what I never had,” we actually end up missing a lot about who our child is. We stop learning about them because we’ve already decided what they need. We think, “They’re crying because of this,” or, “They’re upset with me because of that,” or, “They’re struggling in school because of this. I know exactly what’s happening because this is what I didn’t get, so I’ll just keep doing the opposite.”
Meanwhile, our children are giving us a million different communications about who they are, what they’re feeling, and what’s actually going on for them, and we’re missing all of it because we’re so committed to this one version of parenting.
Sarah: I also find it can make parents pretty reactive.
I work with a lot of parents who grew up with neglect. They’re actually wonderful parents, but then their child behaves like a perfectly typical five-year-old and, internally, they’re thinking, “Wait a minute. I’m giving you everything I never got. How can you still be crying, yelling, and telling me I’m the worst mother in the world?”
Their own experience of believing, “If only I’d had this...” creates an unrealistic expectation of how their child should behave.
Morgan: Totally.
Where there’s been a lot of neglect, there’s often an internalized rule that says, “Don’t be seen. Don’t be heard. Be quiet. Take up as little space as possible.”
So when your own child takes up a lot of space—expressing big emotions, having big reactions—that can feel incredibly frightening.
What we don’t realize in those moments is that your child’s willingness to express their feelings, even to tell you they hate you, is actually a sign that they feel safe enough to do that.
It’s not your job to talk them out of their feelings. It’s your job to help them metabolize those feelings—to help make those emotions digestible for them—rather than trying to change them or shame them out of having them. They don’t need you to erase their feelings. They need you to help them move through them.
Sarah: In peaceful parenting, we talk about welcoming feelings.
What about maintaining a relationship with an emotionally immature parent? I actually kind of know the answer because I’ve taken your masterclass. What’s it called again?
Morgan: Protect Your Peace.
Sarah: Protect Your Peace. Yes. It’s wonderful. We’ll link to it because I recommend it for everyone.
But how do you think about having—or not having—a relationship with an emotionally immature parent?
Morgan: It really depends on whether you genuinely want that relationship.
Emotionally immature parents often raise their children using obligation and guilt, so you grow up without even realizing that you have choices. You’re recruited into following their expectations, and then one day you become an adult and realize you actually don’t enjoy this relationship with your parent—or maybe you don’t even want one—but it doesn’t feel like that’s an option.
So the first step is taking it up with yourself.
Do I actually want this relationship? And if I do, why?
Not from a place of pressure or with some hidden agenda. Even when people come to work with me one-on-one, unless someone is experiencing ongoing abuse, I don’t have an opinion about whether they should stay in contact with their parent. The healing work is learning to reconnect with your own sense of self, your own needs, and your own desires. I’m not going to become another authority figure telling someone what they should do.
Instead, I encourage people to ask themselves, “If I do want this relationship, what do I want it to look like?”
Boundaries don’t really exist in emotionally immature family systems. If you grew up with an emotionally immature parent, chances are you struggle with boundaries. So I ask people to imagine what it would look like if they actually got to customize this relationship.
Would you call as often as you do now? Would you attend every family gathering? Would you have a separate phone number just for them? What would you put in place to protect yourself while still maintaining the relationship, if that’s what you genuinely wanted?
Sarah: Because there may be reasons to continue the relationship.
Maybe you have a wonderful relationship with your other parent and you want to preserve that. I can imagine there are very thoughtful—not in a negative sense, but very intentional—reasons someone might choose to stay in a relationship they otherwise wouldn’t.
Morgan: One hundred percent.
And sometimes people don’t really have a choice. They may still be living with their parents. There may be financial realities to consider.
There’s also a very real psychological cost to going no-contact with a parent. It’s not an easy decision, even though a lot of online conversations make it sound simple. For the adult children of emotionally immature parents, that decision is often something they’ve wrestled with internally for years before they even consider it.
Most people don’t want to jump straight to no contact.
Instead, they’ll often begin by saying, “Let me see what happens if I put some boundaries in place first. If I’m going to have this relationship, here’s what I need it to look like.”
Sarah: Can you give an example of what one of those boundaries or parameters might look like?
Morgan: Sure.
It might be something like, “I’ll have one twenty-minute phone call every Sunday.” Or, “I don’t answer the phone during my workday because I’m working.”
Some people even block their parent’s number and only unblock it when they’re ready to call. Others use a second phone line app where all of their parent’s texts and calls go, but they turn off the notifications so they only check it when they choose to.
Boundaries can also involve where you go and what you participate in. Do you attend every wedding? Every Christmas dinner? Every family event?
Or they might involve what happens when you’re together. Maybe you’ve decided that if a certain topic comes up, you’ll say, “I don’t want to talk about that.” If your parent continues, you might say, “If we’re going to keep talking about this, I’m going to leave.” And if they continue, you actually leave.
That’s what makes it a boundary—you follow through.
Ultimately, it comes back to recognizing that this is someone you don’t feel emotionally or psychologically safe around. Once you accept that, it becomes much easier to ask yourself what you need in order to protect your peace.
People start realizing things like, “I don’t want to discuss this topic,” or, “I don’t want to stay on the phone for an hour because all they do is talk at me,” or, “I can’t answer calls in the middle of my workday.” Once you start giving yourself permission to prioritize your own safety, those answers often become surprisingly clear.
Sarah: And just to be clear, I know this is what you mean, but for anyone listening, a boundary is something you do. It’s not something you make another person do.
Morgan: Exactly.
A boundary is really an if-then statement.
“If you continue criticizing my body, then I’m going to leave.”
Sarah: Right. The boundary isn’t, “You’re not allowed to criticize my body,” because you can’t control another person. You can only decide what you’re going to do if they continue.
Morgan: Exactly. We have zero control over another person’s behavior.
Once we reconnect with ourselves, we stop asking, “How do I make my parent stop doing this?” and start asking, “Given that I can’t control them, what control do I actually have?”
I can hang up the phone. I can leave. I can tell them I didn’t appreciate what they said. I can choose not to attend the next family event. I can change the subject.
It’s always about what I’m going to do rather than trying to control someone else.
Sarah: Do you ever see emotionally immature parents genuinely change?
Morgan: Is it common? No.
Does it happen? Absolutely.
I’ve seen it happen in my own practice, and I’ve had clients tell me about meaningful changes they’ve experienced with their parents.
If someone is on the milder end of emotional immaturity and they truly realize they’re at risk of losing their relationship with their children, some parents do choose to go to therapy. They do the work. They genuinely try to repair.
But, in my experience, they’re the minority.
It takes an enormous amount of self-awareness. It requires being willing to recognize that you’ve caused harm.
Sarah: Which is exactly what’s so difficult in the first place, right? That lack of self-awareness is part of what created the problem.
Morgan: Exactly.
It’s a lack of self-awareness, but it’s also a lack of capacity to tolerate being the “bad guy.”
Emotionally immature parents often play a game of trying to identify who the bad person is, and somehow it’s always someone else.
When their adult child says, “You really hurt me when you did this,” or, “I’m still struggling because of the way you treated me growing up,” some parents become incredibly skilled at finding explanations for why it wasn’t actually their fault—why circumstances made them do it, or why the child was really the problem.
Those are parents who, at least in that moment, aren’t able to repair because they simply can’t tolerate the idea that they’ve done something wrong.
There can be an enormous amount of shame underneath that, especially if they’re already carrying years of unresolved shame from their own childhood experiences.
It takes a tremendous amount of emotional capacity to stay present with that and choose repair instead.
Sarah: One thing I saw on your Instagram really caught my attention. You were talking about how people often say, “Well, I was doing the best I could,” and you took issue with that.
I always teach that people are doing the best they can. That’s genuinely a philosophy I hold. But I would add, “Sometimes your best still wasn’t good enough.”
Would you agree with that?
Morgan: One hundred percent.
The issue I take with the phrase, “They were doing the best they could,” or, “I was doing the best I could,” is that, all of a sudden, we’ve left the adult child’s experience and shifted entirely into the parent’s experience.
The child has just brought you mountains of pain about things you’ve done, and suddenly the conversation becomes a justification. It becomes a rationalization. We’re no longer learning anything about the child’s experience because the conversation has been shut down by the statement, “I was doing the best I could.”
In that moment, it isn’t actually helpful. It’s functioning to protect the parent, which is exactly what that family system has always been organized around.
At its core, it’s almost a semantic argument. What does “doing your best” actually mean? Is it Olympic-level effort every single day? That’s not really the point.
The point is that we’ve once again centered the parent’s experience and stopped being curious about the child’s.
Sarah: Right. I think if a parent could say, “I did the best I could, and I realize it wasn’t good enough,” that could actually be very healing for everyone involved.
Morgan: Totally.
As long as the next sentence is, “Tell me more... and I can take it.”
That’s really the crucial part.
More than anything else, children need to know that their parent can survive their feelings. Whether a parent is emotionally immature or not, if a child grows up believing, “My parent can handle my emotions,” that child is much more likely to become emotionally healthy.
Too often, though, emotionally immature parents experience their child’s feelings as personal attacks. The child learns that their parent can’t survive those feelings.
And if Mom can’t survive my anger, or Dad can’t survive my frustration, then how am I supposed to survive these enormous feelings?
Sarah: That makes so much sense.
That’s exactly what we teach in peaceful parenting, too—that by staying grounded when our children have big emotions, we’re teaching them that feelings aren’t emergencies. They learn emotional regulation by watching us not become overwhelmed by their feelings.
Tell me about emotionally immature parents as grandparents. Do you see the same patterns showing up, or is the relationship with grandchildren different?
Morgan: In my experience, emotionally immature parents often try much harder with their grandchildren.
Sometimes I think that’s still connected to image management. They want to be seen as the wonderful grandparent. But they’re also older by that stage, and grandchildren represent something of a fresh start.
Here’s someone who doesn’t yet have years of hurt or disappointment with them. Here’s another opportunity to be liked, to be admired, to build a relationship. So I often see them showing up with more effort and a little more tolerance than they had with their own children. They also tend to feel less threatened because these aren’t their children to raise.
That said, many adult children become very protective of their own kids. They may decide, “Even if you’re somewhat better than you used to be, you still aren’t emotionally safe for my child.”
Sarah: Right. They’re still centering themselves.
Morgan: Exactly.
It’s still coming from a place of wanting to be seen as a certain kind of grandparent. Sometimes grandchildren become another bargaining chip—another thing the adult child supposedly owes them. Access to the grandchildren becomes another arena where the family drama can play out.
Sarah: Yeah. Holy heck.
You and I both talk about delighting in your child.
When I teach it, I explain that children learn to see themselves through our eyes, and delight is also such a powerful way to build connection. For anyone listening who hasn’t heard either of us talk about it, I describe it as letting the love you already feel in your heart actually show on your face.
Talk to me about the role delight plays in your work.
Morgan: This is something that the adult children of emotionally immature parents yearn for more than almost anything else—to simply be delighted in.
For me, delight looks like a parent who genuinely wonders about their child. A parent who lets themselves be amazed by who their child is, especially in the places where that child is different from them.
Imagine an incredibly athletic parent raising a deeply artistic child. Instead of trying to change them, that parent watches with curiosity and wonder. They’re moved by who their child naturally is.
That communicates something incredibly powerful: You matter to me exactly as you are.
There’s no agenda. There’s no performance required. Your authentic, messy, imperfect self moves me.
Every child needs that experience because it’s permission to keep exploring who they are. It’s permission to feel worthy of love, connection, and care. It creates this deeply rooted sense of, “I belong here. I exist. Who I am is good enough for this world.”
That’s the template we want our children growing up with.
For emotionally immature parents, that kind of delight can feel threatening because it requires surrendering control. But it’s really the sweetest part of parenting. It’s what children are longing for at their core.
Sarah: It’s the best.
There’s a quote—I think it’s from Pam Leo—that says every child needs to know there’s one person who thinks they’re the sun, the moon, and the stars all wrapped up into one wonderful human being.
Sometimes parents ask me, “Shouldn’t my child have a more realistic understanding of how the world works?”
And I always tell them, “The world will teach them that. You don’t have to.”
Morgan: Exactly.
The world is going to be hard enough. Your child doesn’t need you to prepare them by becoming another source of that hardness.
They’re going to encounter disappointment, rejection, and criticism out in the world. What they need is a safe place to come back to.
Knowing there’s always someone in their corner allows them to face that big, scary world much more confidently. Eventually, it isn’t even a conscious thought of, “If everything falls apart, I can always go home.”
Instead, it becomes a felt sense.
“I’ll be okay.”
That feeling becomes woven into who they are because, throughout their life, someone consistently had their back.
Sarah: I’ve interviewed several adults on the podcast who were bullied as children.
One man told me, “My parents loved me so much. I always knew they liked me. They genuinely thought I was wonderful.”
He said he was bullied terribly, especially in middle school, but it never really damaged his self-esteem because he always had that foundation at home. His parents carried him through those experiences, and they didn’t leave lasting scars.
Morgan: That gives me goosebumps.
I work with so many childhood trauma survivors and adult children of emotionally immature parents who say something very different. They’ll tell me, “I know my parent loved me, but I never felt like they liked me.”
They felt looked at with disgust, contempt, disappointment, or criticism. They didn’t feel enjoyed.
Being liked by your parent is profoundly different from simply being loved by them.
I completely agree with your guest. There really is something deeply protective—almost insulating—about growing up knowing your parent genuinely likes who you are.
Sarah: What if you recognize that your partner is an emotionally immature parent?
Morgan: The first step is to honestly assess the capacity for communication within the relationship.
Like we’ve talked about, all of us have emotionally immature moments. That’s why these conversations are worth having. You want to be on the same page about parenting. How are we going to respond when our child has big emotions? What are we going to do when discipline is needed? Can we agree on the kind of parents we want to be?
The way your partner responds to those conversations gives you important information.
If you’re consistently met with defensiveness, denial, minimization, or ridicule, that may be a sign that couples therapy would be helpful, assuming you’re continuing the relationship.
At the same time, your responsibility is to protect your child. You want to make sure that, regardless of what’s happening elsewhere, your child feels emotionally safe with you.
It always begins with trying to have those conversations and seeing whether your partner demonstrates a willingness to grow in emotional maturity—or whether you’re continually running into defenses and distortions that make genuine change very difficult.
Sarah: Is it possible for one parent’s influence to be enough to protect a child from the other parent’s influence?
Morgan: “Enough” is an interesting word because I’d want to know what metric we’re using.
Is one emotionally healthy parent better than none? Absolutely. Without question.
If a child has even one safe base, that alone provides an incredible amount of protection. It creates a buffer. It creates insulation.
That doesn’t mean the other parent’s emotional immaturity won’t affect them. It certainly can.
But we also know that one of the biggest factors in whether a painful experience becomes traumatic isn’t just what happened—it’s whether there’s anyone afterward to help you process it. Trauma isn’t only about going through something painful. It’s also about having no one afterward to help you make sense of it, regulate it, or feel supported through it.
So if a child has one parent who can help them process what happened, who can reconnect with them after those difficult moments, they’re in a much better position.
Sarah: Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, what should I have asked you that I didn’t? Is there anything important we missed?
Morgan: One thing I’m often talking about is helping parents stop taking their child’s emotions as personal attacks.
Parents frequently make these automatic connections: My child is angry, therefore they’re being disrespectful. Or, My child is shutting down, therefore I’m a bad mom or dad.
The reality is that children have a million different reasons for feeling what they’re feeling.
It’s incredibly helpful if, in those moments, you can temporarily remove yourself from the equation. Instead of immediately assuming it’s about you, get curious. Stay with your child. Ask questions. Try to understand what’s happening in their world before creating a story about what’s happening in yours.
We often assume we already know why our child feels the way they do, but we usually don’t.
Step into their world with curiosity instead.
If it is about you, and you’re a safe parent, they’ll tell you.
Then you can take that information up with yourself, talk about it together, and repair if necessary. But first, we have to give children the freedom to have their feelings.
That’s incredibly important.
Sarah: That’s beautiful.
Our work is so aligned. I’m really grateful you came on the podcast today. I’m sure parents are going to learn a lot from this conversation and want to learn more.
Where’s the best place for people to find you and your work?
Morgan: You can find me on Instagram at @morganpommells. My last name is spelled P-O-M-M-E-L-L-S.
Come on over. We talk about emotionally immature parents all the time.
Sarah: We’ll put all the links in the show notes, including your masterclass.
Is that available all the time now?
Morgan: Yes. Protect Your Peace is available anytime.
Sarah: Perfect.
Okay, final question.
What’s one thing you wish every parent knew?
Morgan: I wish every parent knew that they need to work their own shit out, or else their shit is going to raise their kids.
More often than not, the reaction you’re having, the story you’re telling yourself, the urgency you feel to immediately fix or stop something—that’s about your stuff.
Before turning toward your child, pause and turn toward yourself first.
Ask yourself, What just happened inside me? Why is this particular behavior so triggering? Why is this reaction bringing up something so intense?
That’s incredibly important data about you. In that moment, it’s usually much more about you than it is about your child.
Sarah: It’s so hard because I think a lot of people believe they’ve already done a tremendous amount of personal work before they have kids.
But in my own experience, and from years of coaching parents, there’s a whole layer you simply can’t access until you become a parent.
My husband and I were talking about this the other day. We had our first child when we were thirty, and we’ve often joked that if we’d started younger, maybe we would’ve had more children.
He said, “I don’t know. I probably needed more time to work on my stuff.”
And I said, “I don’t actually think your stuff would’ve shown up. Whether we’d had kids at twenty-five, thirty-five, or forty, there’s a whole layer that simply doesn’t emerge until you become a parent.”
Morgan: Exactly.
The portal hasn’t been unlocked yet.
Parenthood opens an entirely different window into yourself. It activates parts of you that often stay completely dormant until you have children.
There are aspects of yourself that may never become activated at all if you don’t become a parent. Parenting has a unique way of bringing those hidden parts to the surface.
Sarah: Think of all those blissfully happy people out there without children who don’t even know what their issues are.
Morgan: They’re living a very blissful life.
Sarah: Well, thank you so much, Morgan. It’s been such a pleasure.
We’ll put links to all of your work in the show notes, and thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
