Bargain perceptive quotes about selfish parents that can help you know harmful parenting styles. Realize consoling words, avowal, and insight from professionals who have experienced this inspiring journey. 

Prepared you know that almost one out of four adults say they were expressively neglected as children? It is likely that you are observing for affirmation of your own stimulating situations if you are looking for quotations about selfish parents. This path is not yours alone!

It can be immensely beneficial to find the fitting words to express a parent’s self-centered activities. Clarification quotations from people who have gone through comparable brawls might irregularly make us feel less alone and more understood. These well-chosen sayings about self-centered parents provide information and validation, assisting you in processing difficult feelings and proceeding your own development.

Unhealthy Relationship & Selfish Parents Quotes 2025

•  “A lot of people who have experienced trauma at the hands of people they’ve trusted to take responsibility, and that is what’s toxic.” 

•  “A person can’t pick up the children and just squeeze them to which-a-way they want them to be.” 

•  “An unpredictable parent is a fearsome God in the eyes of a child.” 

•  “At the end of the day, the most overwhelming key to a child’s success is the positive involvement of parents.” 

•  “Blood relatives often have nothing to do with family, and similarly, family is about who you choose to make your life with.”

•  “Did you have parents or just some people who thought they should own somebody?”

•  “Don’t try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.” 

•  “Dysfunctional parents let their children know how burdened they have been by their children and how many sacrifices they had to make in order to raise them.” 

•  “Energy vampires prey on others because they are in pain, and their behavior is a disguised cry for help. However, the important thing to remember is that you are not responsible for resolving their issues. While you can offer help to an energy vampire, it is ultimately their responsibility to sort out their struggles.” 

•  “Family is where you’re meant to be most free, don’t let blood chain you down.”

•  “Fear-based parenting is the surest way to create intimidated children.” 

•  “Fighting became a way of life and seemed perfectly normal for your family.” 

•  “Good parenting gives headaches, but bad parenting gives heartaches.” 

•  “If mental abuse was a punishable crime, a lot of parents would be in jail serving a long term.” 

•  “If parents wish to preserve childhood for their own children, they must conceive of parenting as an act of rebellion against culture.” 

•  “If you teach hatred to your children, one day your child will have that hatred reflected back onto them and onto YOU.”

•  “If your parents ignored you, or if they are just not emotionally available, or if they yell a lot, that is a type of trauma.” 

•  “In troubled families, abuse and neglect are permitted. It’s talking about them that is forbidden.” – Marcia Sirota

•  “Instead of treating your child like how you were treated. Treat them with the same love and attention you wanted from your parents while growing up.” – Jonathan Anthony Burkett

•  “It has been my observation that parents kill more dreams than anybody.” – Spike Lee

•  “It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.” – Anne Lamott

•  “It is the selfish parents who are to blame. Pay attention, be involved in your children’s lives. They are your legacy, your only hope.” 

•  “It’s very possible and very okay to forgive someone and still not want to spend time with them.”– Karen Salmansohn

•  “Just remember when you are ignoring your child, you are teaching them to live without you.” 

•  “Leave your pride, ego, and narcissism somewhere else. Reactions from those parts of you will reinforce your children’s most primitive fears.” 

•  “Let go of negative people. They only show up to share complaints, problems, disastrous stories, fear, and judgment on others. If somebody is looking for a bin to throw all their trash into, make sure it’s not in your mind.” – Dalai Lama

•  “Letting go doesn’t mean that you don’t care about someone anymore. It’s just realizing that the only person you really have control over is yourself.” – Deborah Reber

•  “Most children would rather preserve the fantasy of a loving connection with their fathers and mothers, at all costs, even if it costs them their self-esteem.” – Keith Ablow

•  “Narcissistic parents don’t really recognize their children as people separate from them. Instead, they see their children as little extensions of themselves. The needs of the child are defined by the needs of the parent, and the child who tries to express his needs is often accused of being selfish or inconsiderate.” – Jonice Webb

•  “No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education.” 

•  “Put your child’s likes before your selfishness.”

•  “Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.” 

•  “Remember, you are not managing an inconvenience; You are raising a human being.” 

•  “Selfish parents may someday realize what damage they have done that can never be undone.” 

•  “Sometimes, the people closest to you betray you, and your home isn’t a place you can be happy anymore. It’s hard but it’s true.” 

•  “The toxic parent sees the child as a threat to their own ego and having the child overshadow the parent is not an option in their mind.” 

•  “They ought to accept you for who you are. Parents ought to adore their children, right? You’d assume so.” 

•  “They should love you, just as you are. Parents should love their kids, right?” “You’d think so.” 

•  “Toxic family members will see expressions of forgiveness as weaknesses to exploit. Don’t give in to their tactics this way. If you need to forgive them for your own healing, then do it, but keep it to yourself.” – Sherrie Campbell

•  “Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years.” – Graham Greene

•  “We raise predators by treating children as prey.”

•  “You don’t have to leave your whole family in the past, just those who don’t deserve a place in your future.” – Christina Enevoldsen

•  “You must let go of the responsibility for the painful events of your childhood and put it where it belongs.” – Susan Forward

•  “Your family, your real family, will always welcome you home with open arms. Anyone who says you can lose their love isn’t really family, no matter what blood says.” 

•  Family is supposed to be our safe haven. Very often, it is the place where we find the deepest heartache.” – Iyanla Vanzant

• “When you grieve toxic, abusive parents, you don’t just grieve the abuse, you grieve everything you didn’t have.” 

• “Anyone can have a child and call themselves ‘a parent.’ A real parent is someone who puts that child above their own selfish needs and wants.” 

• “As a parent, you should be more concerned with your child’s happiness than your petty insecurities and jealousies.” – Unknown

• “Being a parent shouldn’t be when it is convenient for you. It is a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year commitment.” 

• “Being a selfish parent is a sign of not having learned from experience.” 

• “Children of narcissists learn that love is abuse. The narcissist teaches them that if someone displeases you, it is okay to harm them and call it love.”

• “Children shouldn’t have to sacrifice so that you can have the life you want. You make sacrifices so your children can have the life that they deserve.”

• “Everyone needs a house to live in, but a supportive family is what builds a home.”

• “I learned a long time ago that it’s not our fault if our parents are monsters. We can’t take responsibility for that, or we’re twice damaged. All we can do is try to go forward in a different way.”

• “In the narcissistic parent’s eyes, they do no wrong nor do they feel they should be held accountable for the bad and wrong things that they have done.” 

• “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you too can become great.” 

• “My parents loved us, but I wasn’t always sure they liked us.” 

• “Our parents plant mental and emotional seeds in us— seeds that grow as we do. In some families, these are seeds of love, respect, and independence. But in many others, they are seeds of fear, obligation, or guilt.” 

• “Parents forgive their children least readily for the faults they themselves instilled in them.” 

• “People who love themselves, don’t hurt other people. The more we hate ourselves, the more we want others to suffer.” 

• “Sometimes you just have to walk away. End toxic family relationships because they hurt more than they help. And start rebuilding a new definition of a healthy family in your life, far away from toxic family members.”

• “They are not sorry for hurting you. So, don’t feel guilty for cutting them off.” 

• “Your kids require you most of all to love them for who they are, not to spend your whole time trying to correct them.”

Selfish Father Quotes That Reveal the Truth

• “A father’s selfishness takes away from his kids’ future as well as their present.” 

• “Denying a child the joy and memories of being with the other parent is an act of ‘pure evil.’” 

• “Fathers should know that sons follow their example, not advice.” 

• “It doesn’t matter who my father was. It matters who I remember he was.” 

• “Real dads support their children without the law telling them they have to.” 

• “A real parent is someone who put their kids above their own selfish wants and needs.” 

• “Sons aspire to either become their father or vie to be his exact opposite.” 

• “A greedy father has thieves for children.” –

• “Becoming a father is easy enough, but being one can be very rough.” –

• “There’s really no point in having children if you’re not going to be home enough to father them.” 

• “Anyone can be a father but it takes someone special to be a dad.” 

• “When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.” 

• “Every father should remember that one day, his son will follow exactly how his father put his needs above everyone else.” 

• “A father shouldn’t have to think of his needs first and then accommodate the child’s needs.” 

• “A narcissist parent is easily frustrated by a healthy independent child that they can’t control through parental emotional manipulation.” 

• “Some fathers wonder why the streams are bitter when they themselves have poisoned the fountain.” 

• “My dad taught me everything I know. Unfortunately, he didn’t teach me everything he knows.” 

• “There’s nothing worse than a man that can be everything to everybody else. Except a father to their own child.” 

• “Boys want to grow up to be like their male role models. And boys who grow up in homes with absent fathers search the hardest to figure out what it means to be male.” 

• “When you grew up with an absent father, you grew up dreaming and wanting.. But most of all, you grew up way too fast.” 

• “My dad had limitations. That’s what my good-hearted mom always told us. He had limitations, but he meant no harm. It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm.” 

• “I never had a speech from my father ‘this is what you must do or shouldn’t do’ but I just learned to be led by example. My father wasn’t perfect.” 

• “Be more than a father, be a dad. Be more than a figure, be an example.”Selfish 

Mother Quotes That Reflect Real Struggles

• “Just because someone gives you life doesn’t mean they will love you in the right way.” 

• “It takes someone really brave to become a mother. As it requires a lot of strength to raise a child and love them more than one loves themselves.” 

• “If we, as mothers, are not careful we can begin to find our identity in our children and their behavior.” 

• “Do your kids see your kindness or are you always telling them NO?”  

• “When you become a mother, you are no longer the center of your own universe. You relinquish that position to your child.” 

• “No one, however powerful and successful, can function as an adult if his parents are not satisfied with him.” 

• “Your children vividly remember every unkind thing you ever did to them, plus a few you really didn’t.” 

• “She shrieked and shrieked for her mother, but her mother was already there. Her mother was the monster.” 

• “The hateful and stinging words of a narcissistic parent can linger in the mind of an adult child long after the adult has left home.” 

•  “If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do matters very much.” 

•  “Don’t make your selfishness ruin your child’s life.” 

•  “Any mother that could be cruel to a child is not going to apologize to that child when they have grown up.” 

•  “A good mother never uses her child for her happiness.” 

•  “If a mother cannot sacrifice for her kids, she doesn’t deserve them!” 

•  “Toxic mothers are image-oriented rather than love-oriented.”

•  “An unloving mother robs the child of a sense of belonging. The need to belong can become a lifelong quest for him or her.”

•  “If we, as mothers, are not careful, we can begin to find our identity in our children and their behavior.”

•  “I was worthy of her love whether she gave it to me or not. Every child is worthy of love.”

Eye-Opening Selfish Family Quotes to Reflect On

• “One of the saddest things in this world is to see a child grow up hating one of their parents because they only got one side of the story.” 

• “Somewhat paradoxically, parenting programs should focus on the behavior of the parents, not the behavior of the children.” – Timo

• “Narcissist parents don’t care about their children’s feelings at all. Only their feelings matter.” 

• “I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.”

• “Today’s troubled homes are made by parents who want to have children but don’t want their children to have parents.” 

• “No child is born a delinquent. They only became that way if nobody loved them when they were kids.” 

• “Wounded parents often unintentionally inflict pain and suffering on their children.” 

• “Being a parent does not give you an excuse for bad manners.” 

• “It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.” 

•  “All of us develop our expectations about how people will treat us based on our relationships with our parents.” 

•  “Parents. Honestly. Sometimes they really do think the world revolves around them.” 

•  “When you have children, there is no room for lies, no room for anything but the truth. Anything other than that is a bad example, I believe.” 

•  “Anyone could father a child. But a good parent puts his child’s needs before his own. A parent should be selfless, not selfish.” 

•  “A family who relies on their children for happiness make both their children and themselves miserable.” 

•  “It is impossible to be both selfish and happy in a family that behaves the same way.” 

•  “The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.” 

•  “People tend to raise the child inside of them rather than the child in front of them.” 

•  “To all you parents out there, don’t make your little girls, or little boys, so thirsty for love that they will want to drink water that will poison them.” 

•  “Some parents will provoke an independent child to anger in order to feel superior and prove the child’s flaws.” 

•  “Being a selfish parent is the biggest crime you can do to your child.” 

Conclusion 

These accounts about self-centered parents are potent notices that you are not alone in your scuffles. Although having egotistic or emotionally inaccessible parents leaves deep scars, it can be vastly healing to receive affirmation in other people’s words! Keep in mind that the first step to absconding destructive routines is admitting your discomfort.

These quotations might act as road signs on your separate healing path. Regardless of how far along you are in your recovery process or how well you are able to forgive your early experiences, let these lines serve as a reminder that you deserve respect, love, and good relationships. Decide what appeals to you, and remember that you can create the life you deserve!