Study: Parents may be to blame for narcissistic kids

Editor’s Note: Kelly Wallace is CNN’s digital correspondent and editor-at-large covering family, career and life. Story highlights Children whose parents overvalue them more likely to be narcissists, according to study Parents who overvalue their kids tend to think their children are better and smarter than others Kids who felt warmth from their parents more likely to have higher self-esteem, study found CNN — Everyone knows a narcissist – or two or three or four. “And what we found was that parents who overvalue, they think their child is very smart but in reality, the child isn’t smarter than others,” said Brummelman, who did the research for the study while at Utrecht University in the Netherlands along with researchers from the University of Southampton in England and Ohio State University Finally, the researchers made up book titles such as “The Tale of Benson Bunny” and names of newsmakers such as “Queen Alberta” and asked the parents if their children knew them. “It’s a very young field of research but what we do know is that narcissistic children … feel more entitled than others and they want to be admired by others,” said Brummelman. Brummelman said an important and crucial question for future studies is whether we can reduce narcissism levels in children and increase levels of self-esteem by “teaching parents to be warm and affectionate without telling children they are better than others and without conveying to children that they are more entitled than others.” I know so many of you reading this might be thinking: great, yet another study blaming me for what happens to my children.