"Emotionally Immature" Is Not a Diagnosis

This post was authored by guest writer Rachel Haack, MA, MFTI, a therapist and consultant in Nevada.

Let’s talk about something that’s been sitting on my mind for awhile, especially as I watch how therapy language is evolving online and showing up in the therapy room.

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay Gibson has become wildly popular. I’m guessing many of you have read it, or at least heard about it. It’s everywhere—shared in Instagram posts, dissected in TikTok reels, recommended in therapy sessions, book clubs, Reddit threads, and covered by the New York Times. And I get why. There’s something profoundly validating about finding language that captures your pain—especially when you’ve spent years trying to make sense of a difficult relationship with a parent.

Truthfully, I didn’t want to write this. I’ve been avoiding it. It’s time-consuming, and I have a full practice to tend to—patients in pain, families in crisis, and, increasingly, an overwhelming number of parents asking for help after being labeled by their own children with a term that didn’t exist in the clinical literature a decade ago. But this book keeps showing up—again and again—in the therapy room, in strained relationships, in the cultural air we’re all breathing. And at some point, we have to name what’s happening. Because when something unscientific starts to shape how people understand themselves and their families, we don’t get to shrug it off just because it’s inconvenient. We have to respond.

First: “Emotionally Immature Parent” is not a diagnosis

It’s not a clinical category. It doesn’t exist in the DSM-5, ICD-11, or any psychological taxonomy. Gibson coined the term based on her own observations—not peer-reviewed research. The book includes quizzes and checklists that she created, but these are not validated assessment tools.

Equally importantly, one cannot create an adult child checklist in order to diagnose the parent, as tempting as it may be, because there could be many reasons for the person's symptoms. For example, an adult may have low self-worth. This could be due to a lack of good parenting, but it could also be due to undiagnosed learning disabilities, having been bullied in school, minority status, or a whole host of other reasons. So, not only is this concept not an actual diagnosis, even if it were, we wouldn't diagnose this way.

Still, the way people interact with this book often feels diagnostic. I’ve had clients walk into my office and say, “I finally figured out what’s wrong with my mom—she’s emotionally immature,” as if a formal evaluation has been conducted. But it hasn’t. What’s happened is that a deeply human and likely complex relationship has now been interpreted through a simplified, morally loaded framework.

Second: There are better, deeper, research-backed ways to understand this

What Gibson is trying to describe—emotional unavailability, volatility, dismissiveness—can be explained by well-established attachment patterns. Avoidant, anxious, disorganized—these help us understand how early experiences shape emotional responsiveness and relational behaviors.

Attachment theory not only helps us understand our parents—it also helps us understand ourselves. It invites us to ask: What patterns am I bringing into my relationships? How did my caregivers shape the way I manage closeness, conflict, and emotional need? It doesn't assign blame—it provides a compassionate roadmap for reflection and repair. Attachment patterns can evolve over time, especially in the presence of secure, consistent relationships. This is what real therapeutic work offers: a way to revisit the past not to stay stuck in it, but to make sense of it, integrate it, and move forward with clarity.

More importantly, attachment theory offers language that doesn’t shame or pathologize. It lets us understand people developmentally—not just morally. It allows us to hold pain and context. And it gives us a way forward—toward empathy, insight, and in many cases, repair.

But here’s what concerns me most:

The book shuts down dialogue before it even begins

I’ve seen it multiple times: clients tell me they’re unwilling to invite their parent to therapy. “They’re emotionally immature. They won’t change.”

When I ask where that belief came from? The book.

The most troubling part is that this belief often wasn’t theirs to begin with—it was given to them. Often, the adult child didn’t arrive at that conclusion on their own. The framework guided them there. Gibson’s criteria, language, and tone often function like a diagnosis the client didn’t know they were making until the book handed it to them.

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And nowhere in the book is there an emphasis on opening up therapy to bring the parent into the room. There’s no exploration of how relational dynamics unfold in real-time. No encouragement to engage in dialogue or observe the system. This is perhaps the most troubling thing from a family systems perspective: Gibson diagnoses from one side of the room and encourages disengagement from the other. That’s not family therapy. That’s diagnosis by proxy.

Social media has amplified and distorted the framework

What began as a well-intentioned self-help concept has taken on a life of its own online. On TikTok and Instagram, I see viral posts like:

• “10 signs your parent is emotionally immature”
• “If they can’t apologize, cut them off”
• “Emotionally immature people will never change—protect your peace”

This kind of language feels empowering—until it becomes dogma for cutting people off. We have to be careful about how fast content like this travels and how little clinical nuance it carries with it. When pain is met with a checklist and a catchy caption, we may feel momentarily validated, but we risk losing the ability to grapple with complexity.

And here’s where clinicians really need to pay attention.

This isn’t just about social media. This is about what we, as professionals, are allowing to pass as clinical reasoning. When unvalidated frameworks like this take hold, without assessment protocols, without peer-reviewed support, without systems thinking, it threatens the integrity of the work we do.

And when a licensed clinician constructs an entire framework based on unilateral anecdote, labels people they’ve never assessed with deeply stigmatizing language, discourages dialogue, discourages compassion, and presents this as therapeutic insight? That’s an ethical breach, not a contribution to the field.

I still have thousands of dollars in student loans to pay off—I’d really like our profession to be known for helping people, not handing out clickbait diagnoses that fracture families.

We cannot allow popularity to eclipse professional responsibility.
We cannot let the demand for clear answers override the discipline of ethical inquiry.
And we cannot keep pretending that concepts like this are “harmless” just because they resonate.

So what do we do instead?

We offer better frameworks. We stay grounded in science and systems theory. We hold space for pain—but we also hold the line on clinical rigor.

We remember that therapy is about making meaning, not assigning labels. It’s about observing dynamics—not diagnosing in absentia. It’s about helping clients tell the truth without erasing the complexity of the people they come from. And yes, sometimes it’s about helping people grieve the limitations of their parents—but not by scripting estrangement, and not by offering false certainty dressed up as psychological insight.

Final Thought: Some Fads Deserve to Be Retired

We’ve seen this before.

Pop psychology loves a catchy label. It loves simple explanations for complex pain. But what begins as “insight” often turns into ideology—and over time, many of these ideas don’t age well.

Remember when people were encouraged to scream into pillows to relive their birth trauma? Or when rebirthing therapy had its moment in the spotlight? Or the catharsis craze—where the key to healing was supposedly pounding the floor with foam bats and yelling at an empty chair? How about aromatherapy for trauma release, or drawing your inner child in sand trays and letting it “speak” through finger puppets?

These weren’t fringe practices—they were momentarily mainstream. They filled workshops, sold books, landed talk show segments. And then they quietly faded into the dustbin of therapeutic history, where they belong.

Gibson’s “emotionally immature parent” framework, in my view, belongs on that same shelf. A framework that gained cultural traction not because of clinical rigor, but because it felt good to say out loud. Because it packaged old pain into neat labels. Because it gave people a shortcut to understanding something that deserves far more careful exploration.

Yes—people are in pain. Yes—some parents are truly limited. But no, the solution is not to slap a label on an entire generation of caregivers and walk away in self-righteous clarity.

We can do better than this. Clinically, ethically, relationally—we must do better than this.

So let’s be honest about what this book has become: a cultural script with diagnostic gravity but not diagnostic integrity. And let’s stop passing it around like it’s a therapeutic tool. It isn’t. It’s time to retire this one alongside foam bats, primal screams, rebirthing rituals, and all the other well-intentioned but ultimately unserious ideas that didn’t hold up under clinical scrutiny. Let’s get back to doing real work—with real families, real systems, and real complexity.