Narcissism In Children Summary

Personality is unique to each individual. There are many personality traits, such as extroversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness, but one trait seems to be on the rise as a whole. The talk of a more narcissistic generation has increased throughout the 21st century as well as the interest in this personality trait. Researcher Eddie Brummelman has pointed out this increase in his research, especially in Westernized adolescence. Brummelman et al.’s article, “Origins of Narcissism in Children,” introduces the social learning theory and the psychoanalytic theory. These theories are used to analyze the correlation between the origins of narcissism in children and parental overvaluation or lack of parental warmth. However, there were multiple

In other words, influential adults who give excessive praise foster more narcissistic children. The second hypothesis is that influential adult’s lack of warmth does not cultivate narcissism in children. That is to say, influential adults who do not praise children will not be a cause for narcissism. This research will be a correlational study design just as Brummelman et al.’s was. This design is the most useful, since the study is interested in looking at the correlation between influential people in children’s’ lives and if narcissism levels increase or not because of their lack of warmth or overvaluation. Conducting an experiment would not be necessary because there are no variables to control or manipulate. Instead of a control group and independent and dependent variables, this study will simply look at the correlation between variables. The variables being testing are influential adult’s lack of warmth and children narcissistic levels, and the third variable is influential adult’s overvaluation, which is correlated with narcissism in

The main findings of Brummelman et al.’s study suggested parental overvaluation predicts child narcissism over time. It also found, surprisingly, that narcissism is not cultivated by lack of parental warmth. Consequently, then, it should be expected that influential adult’s overvaluation of kids can predict children’s narcissism, but lack in warmth from an influential adult does not effect narcissism. In other words, this revised study supports influential adults who do excessively praise children can cause narcissism, but influential adults who show little to no warmth to children is not a cause of narcissism. This is because influential people are synonymous to a parent. People who are influential in a child’s life means they spend countless hours with the child, impart their knowledge, share their feelings and beliefs, and truly shape the child as he or she matures. This is exactly what a parent should do, but because children grow up in a variety of circumstances, occasionally influential adults can take up that role, proving the importance of including them in this