Do people become narcissists because their parents are too mean to them or too nice? These opposing theories both have proponents, but it is the latter that gets support from the first long-term study of narcissistic traits in children.
Freudian psychoanalysts were the first to propose that children with cold and unloving parents compensate by loving and praising themselves excessively. But more recently, others have claimed that narcissism arises from the opposite problem – of parents praising their children too much, giving them an inflated sense of their own worth.
This might seem more intuitive, but the cold-parents theory is still alive and well among some psychoanalysts. To test this idea, Eddie Brummelman at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and his colleagues studied 565 children between the ages of 7 to 12, a period that often sees the emergence of narcissistic traits such as selfishness, self-centredness and vanity. "Previous studies were all conducted in adults," says Brummelman. "We wanted to see how [narcissism] develops over time."?