Most parents do not set out to harm their children. Yet clinical psychologist Dr. Shahrzad Jalali argues that some of the most damaging things that happen to children occur not through neglect or abuse, but through repeated emotional patterns that feel entirely normal to the adults living them. In a framework published by the New York Post on May 6, 2026, Dr. Jalali identifies five specific parenting behaviors that accumulate over time to compromise a child's long-term mental health — and explains what healthier alternatives look like.
This isn't about perfection. Dr. Jalali is explicit that "it's not a single parenting mistake but a repeated emotional pattern" that shapes who a child becomes as an adult. That distinction matters enormously, both for how we understand childhood development and for how parents can course-correct without catastrophizing every imperfect moment.
Why Patterns, Not Moments, Define Childhood Development
Child psychology has long understood that isolated incidents — a harsh word during a stressful week, a missed recital, a moment of impatience — rarely leave lasting psychological marks. What shapes a child's internal architecture is the emotional environment they inhabit day after day, year after year.
Think of it like water erosion. A single rainfall doesn't carve a canyon. But consistent water, flowing over the same path across decades, shapes the landscape fundamentally. The emotional climate of a home works the same way. A child who is occasionally criticized is resilient. A child who is chronically made to feel their emotions are wrong, their love is conditional on performance, or their job is to manage an adult's feelings — that child grows up building psychological defenses that eventually become liabilities.
Dr. Jalali's framework is valuable precisely because it names the patterns clearly, allowing parents to recognize themselves without the shame spiral that often shuts down honest self-reflection.
Pattern 1: Conditional Love — The Hidden Tax on Achievement
Unconditional love, according to Dr. Jalali, is "the bedrock of a healthy self-worth in children." That sounds obvious. In practice, it's extraordinarily easy to make love feel conditional without intending to.
Conditional love doesn't always look like withdrawal. It can look like disproportionate celebration of achievements versus muted responses to ordinary moments. It can look like warmth that visibly increases when a child performs well and cools when they fail. It can look like language that ties affection to behavior: "I'm so proud of you" after a win, but conspicuous silence after a loss.
Children are extraordinarily attuned to these signals. When they detect that love has conditions, they don't think "my parent is being unfair." They think "I must not be enough." And they adapt — by performing harder, achieving more, suppressing the parts of themselves they've learned are unwelcome.
The adult consequences are well-documented: children whose love feels conditional may become high-functioning but fragile adults prone to perfectionism, burnout, and anxiety. They build careers out of the need to prove their worth. They struggle to rest. They find it difficult to accept love that doesn't come with an implied scorecard. High-achieving, chronically anxious adults often trace this pattern back to homes where love, while present, always had fine print.
Pattern 2: Emotional Invalidation — Teaching Children to Distrust Themselves
When a child says "I'm scared" and a parent responds "There's nothing to be scared of," they are not being reassuring. They are teaching the child that their emotional perception is wrong.
Dr. Jalali frames the consequence of chronic emotional invalidation through a striking diagnostic question: instead of asking "What am I feeling?" — the healthy internal question — an invalidated child learns to ask "What am I allowed to feel?" That shift is profound. It moves the child from emotional authenticity to emotional compliance, outsourcing the assessment of their inner life to external authority.
Over time, this creates adults who experience self-doubt, shame, emotional suppression, and difficulty trusting their own perceptions. In clinical settings, this often presents as people who say things like "I know I shouldn't feel this way, but..." — the "shouldn't" doing enormous damage before the sentence even finishes. They've internalized an inner critic who pre-approves their emotional responses before they're allowed to have them.
Validation does not mean agreeing with a child's feelings or removing all consequences. It means acknowledging that the feeling exists and is understandable. "I can see you're really frustrated" is not the same as "You're right to be furious and throw your toy." Validation is about recognizing reality, not endorsing every response to it.
Pattern 3: Parentification — When Children Become Emotional Anchors
Parentification is perhaps the most underrecognized of the five patterns Dr. Jalali highlights, and arguably the most insidious. It refers to the dynamic in which a parent — consciously or not — forces a child to stabilize the emotional life of the adults around them.
This can manifest in obvious ways: a parent who shares their marital problems with a ten-year-old, who cries to their child about financial stress, or who explicitly positions the child as their emotional confidant. But it also appears in subtler forms: the child who learns to read a parent's mood the moment they walk in the door and adjusts their behavior to manage it; the child who suppresses their own needs because they've learned that expressing them destabilizes the household.
The damage here is multidimensional. Parentified children lose developmental time that should be spent building their own emotional vocabulary and identity — they spend it managing someone else's instead. As adults, they often become compulsive caretakers, struggle with boundaries, feel responsible for other people's emotional states, and experience profound difficulty asking for help. They may be extraordinarily empathetic, but in a way that costs them rather than sustains them.
The role of parent and child is not interchangeable, and when those roles collapse, children pay a developmental price they often don't recognize until adulthood.
Pattern 4: Discipline as Love Withdrawal
How a parent disciplines a child sends a message about the nature of their relationship. Dr. Jalali emphasizes that disciplinary action should be framed as guidance, not withdrawal of love. The difference is not semantic — it's architecturally different in how it lands on a child's developing psyche.
When a parent responds to misbehavior with cold silence, emotional distance, or explicit statements like "I'm disappointed in you" framed as rejection rather than feedback, the child processes this as a threat to the relationship itself. They don't think "I made a mistake." They think "I am in danger of losing my parent's love." The correction becomes about survival, not learning.
Children can tolerate disappointment. They can tolerate consequences. What they cannot easily tolerate, without psychological cost, is the repeated experience that the person they depend on most may stop loving them if they behave badly. That fear doesn't produce good behavior long-term — it produces anxious compliance, fear of failure, and adults who are terrified of disapproval.
Discipline that communicates "I love you, and this behavior is not acceptable" lands completely differently than discipline that communicates "You have displeased me and my affection is now in question." The first produces internalized values. The second produces performance anxiety.
Pattern 5: Failing to Model Appropriate Empathy
Children learn emotional behavior primarily by watching it. A parent who dismisses others' pain, who responds to difficulty with contempt rather than compassion, or who treats their own emotional world as irrelevant models a framework that children absorb — even when they consciously reject it as adults.
Appropriate empathy, as Dr. Jalali frames it, is a critical foundation for healthy child development. This means not just responding empathically to the child's own feelings, but demonstrating empathy in how parents navigate the world more broadly: in how they talk about other people, handle conflict, respond to their own mistakes, and engage with difficulty.
A parent who never apologizes is not modeling strength — they're modeling that acknowledgment of error is dangerous. A parent who speaks contemptuously about struggling people is teaching their child what struggling people deserve. Children take these cues and build worldviews from them, including worldviews about what they themselves deserve when they struggle.
The Context: Why This Framework Matters Now
Dr. Jalali's framework arrives at a moment when parents face compounding pressures, including rising childcare costs and children's increasing over-fixation on technology. These pressures are not peripheral — they directly affect the emotional availability parents can offer their children.
A parent working two jobs to cover childcare costs and worrying about a child's screen addiction is a parent with depleted resources for the patient, emotionally present work that Dr. Jalali describes. This does not excuse harmful patterns, but it contextualizes them. Most parenting failures are not failures of love — they are failures of capacity, made worse by systems that offer parents very little support.
Understanding which patterns carry the most developmental risk allows parents to prioritize. You cannot be emotionally available every moment. But if you understand that emotional validation and unconditional love are load-bearing pillars of a child's psychological foundation, you can be deliberate about protecting them even when other things slip.
What This Means: An Informed Perspective
Dr. Jalali's framework is clinically grounded and practically important, but it requires one additional layer of context: these patterns harm children precisely because they're delivered by people children depend on. The same behaviors from a stranger have minimal impact. From a parent, they carry enormous weight — which is why the repeated nature of the pattern matters so much.
This also means that repair is possible. Children are not permanently shaped by early patterns in the way that older models of developmental psychology suggested. A parent who recognizes a harmful pattern and genuinely changes it — who starts validating feelings, who shifts the framing of discipline, who stops using their child as an emotional anchor — can meaningfully alter the trajectory. The architecture is not fixed until adulthood, and even then it can be reworked.
What's less forgiving is a pattern that continues without acknowledgment. The child of a parent who never recognizes the harm doesn't get an apology, doesn't get a corrected model, and has to do that repair work alone, in therapy, often years later, at significant cost to their adult functioning.
The most actionable takeaway from Dr. Jalali's work is not guilt — it's awareness. The patterns she identifies are common because they often emerge from parents' own unresolved emotional histories. A parent who experienced conditional love is more likely to transmit it. Breaking the pattern requires seeing it first.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know if I'm engaging in these harmful patterns?
The most reliable signal is pattern recognition over time, not incident-by-incident evaluation. Ask yourself: Does my child seem anxious about whether I'm pleased with them? Do they suppress emotions rather than expressing them? Do they seem to take responsibility for my moods? These behavioral cues in children often reflect the emotional environment they've adapted to. Honest self-reflection, ideally with a therapist, is more reliable than self-assessment alone.
Is it too late to change if my child is already a teenager?
No. Adolescence is a period of significant psychological development, and changes in parenting patterns during this window do register. The conversation may need to be more explicit — teenagers are cognitively capable of understanding an apology and a stated intention to do things differently. Naming what you've recognized and committing to change is itself a form of emotional modeling. The work is harder, but the developmental window is not closed.
What's the difference between normal parental frustration and damaging emotional patterns?
Frequency and repair. Every parent loses patience, says something unkind, or withdraws in a bad moment. What distinguishes normal parenting from harmful patterns is whether those moments are the exception or the rule, and whether they're followed by repair. A parent who yells and then apologizes, explains, and reconnects is modeling something healthy: that rupture doesn't mean abandonment, and that adults take responsibility for their behavior. A parent who yells and never addresses it models that emotional volatility is just how things are.
How does technology use fit into this framework?
Dr. Jalali notes children's over-fixation on technology as a compounding pressure, but it operates in two directions. Children who lack emotional validation at home often seek it through social media — peer approval becomes a substitute for parental emotional attunement. And parents consumed by their own devices are less emotionally present, inadvertently transmitting the message that the phone matters more than the child. The technology question is ultimately downstream of the relational question.
Can therapy help adults who experienced these patterns in childhood?
Significantly, yes. The adult consequences Dr. Jalali describes — perfectionism, emotional suppression, difficulty trusting perceptions, compulsive caretaking — are well-understood in clinical psychology and respond to evidence-based treatments. The work often involves identifying the original pattern, understanding how it shaped adaptive strategies that no longer serve, and building new internal frameworks. It is real work, but it produces real change. Adults are not permanently defined by their childhood emotional environment.
The Bottom Line
Dr. Shahrzad Jalali's five-pattern framework, as reported by the New York Post, offers something genuinely useful: not a list of failures to feel guilty about, but a map of the emotional terrain that shapes human development. Conditional love, emotional invalidation, parentification, punitive discipline, and absent empathy don't require a dramatic backstory to cause harm. They just require repetition.
The good news embedded in this framework is the same as the warning: it's the pattern that counts. Which means patterns can be identified, interrupted, and changed. A child does not need perfect parents. They need parents who love them without conditions, take their inner life seriously, and are willing to do the honest work of self-examination — even when that work is uncomfortable. That, more than any specific parenting technique, is what the research consistently points toward as the foundation of children who grow into psychologically healthy adults.
