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Parents’ Socialization of Narcissism in Children

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Handbook of Trait Narcissism

Abstract

Research on childhood narcissism has gained momentum over the past years. Narcissism emerges and develops from childhood onward. One main focus of research has centered around the question of how childhood socialization experiences contribute to the development of narcissism. Evidence accumulates that by overvaluing their children—seeing and treating their children as more special and entitled than others—parents may inadvertently cultivate narcissism in their children. This chapter reviews our current knowledge on the childhood origins of narcissism and highlights priorities for future work. Our aim is to foster an interdisciplinary and theoretically precise understanding of what makes narcissism bloom.

The writing of this article was supported, in part, by the funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 705217 to Eddie Brummelman.

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Correspondence to Sander Thomaes .

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Thomaes, S., Brummelman, E. (2018). Parents’ Socialization of Narcissism in Children. In: Hermann, A., Brunell, A., Foster, J. (eds) Handbook of Trait Narcissism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92171-6_15

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