Narcissism: The Development Of Permissive Parenting Style

Now, we live in the world where people are being categorized by their beauty, wealth or academic achievement. In order to become successful person or being recognize by other, we forget the importance of keeping good relationship with people around us and go all the way to becoming self- centered person. Generally self- centered also can be defined as self- absorbed or narcissism. Narcissism refers to a “pervasive pattern of grandiosity” that symbolized by arrogant behavior, lack of empathy towards other and feelings of entitlement (APA, 1994 as cited in Horton, Bleau, and Drwecki, 2006). This current practice in society makes younger generation become more self-centered than earlier generation because of their exposure to sophisticated technology,

As we all know, parents are the most influential people in their children development and this situation can be related to the social learning theory. According to social learning theory by Bandura (1977), behavior is learned from the environment through the process of observation. There are four types of parenting style that common practice by parents all over the world and each parenting styles have different impacts on children either it positive or negative but permissive parenting style can be highly associated with development of self-centered behavior. Parents that practice permissive parenting style are tolerant, use as little punishment as possible, have few requirements for mature behavior and grant considerable “self-regulation” by their children (Dornbusch, Ritter, Leiderman, Roberts and Fraleigh, 1987). As parents, they should give encouragement to their children but implying narcissism trait such as they are special and they will get what they want will give negative impact to them. Besides, parents also taught their children that having self-esteem is important to succeed in life. Having high self-esteem can be related to many positive things like good results or better relationship with people around but Baumeister, Campbell, Kreuger and Vohs (2003) study find out that high self- esteem does not cause a better performance in academic and people with high self- esteem have

Sometimes, people did not intend to be self-centered as there is thin line between self- esteem and narcissism. Gentile, Twenge, Freeman and Campbell (2012) carried out an experiment and concluded that college students who edited their Myspace page score higher on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) while student who spent on their Facebook scored higher on self-esteem. This study shows that different format on social networking sites impacts their user differently. However, Carpenter (2012) study about Facebook using Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) finds out that, the user show higher result on self- promoting behavior that associate with the narcissism traits. So, this study proves that Facebook also promoting narcissism and it is clearly shown that there is thin line between self- esteem and narcissism. In addition, people also misunderstood the self – care concept that make them become a self-centered person. Self- care means the way we take care ourselves in a healthy way and keep being active by doing activities such as meeting friends or family, quality personal time and going on vacation (NHS, n.d.). Self-care is actually a healthy lifestyle however people should be given a