Growing Up With a Competitive Parent: Signs, Impact and Healing
- Joanna Baars
- Jun 14
- 7 min read
What Happens When a Parent Competes With You
Sometimes, when people think about difficult parent-child relationships, they imagine harsh discipline, neglect, or open conflict. But not all harm looks like that. Some wounds are harder to name, and more confusing to explain. Like growing up with a parent who saw you not just as their child, but as competition.
It’s a strange thing to wrap your head around at first. The idea that your parent might have competed with you feels like it shouldn’t be possible. Parents are meant to support you, lift you, want the best for you. But for some people, that’s not how it felt. You may have sensed early on that there was something unspoken going on. That when you succeeded or shone in some way, it didn’t get met with the reaction you would expect. Maybe you picked up on subtle tension, a shift in tone, a withdrawal of warmth. Maybe it wasn’t even that subtle.
A competitive parent isn’t just someone who pushes their child to achieve. It’s someone who, at some level, feels threatened by their child’s strengths. This can show up in all sorts of ways. It might look like minimising your achievements, taking credit for your ideas, comparing you to themselves, or needing to be the centre of attention at all times, even during your moments. And because it’s so wrapped in family roles and emotional entanglement, it can take years to realise that what you experienced wasn’t healthy.
Often, the parent may not even be consciously aware they’re doing it. Their behaviour might be driven by old wounds or deep insecurities they’ve never had the tools to face. Maybe they grew up feeling small or invisible, and your natural confidence or success pressed on something in them they hadn’t dealt with. Maybe they were told they had to prove their worth, and so they learned to measure value by being the best, even in their own family. Whatever the root, that pain doesn’t excuse the harm, but it does explain how these toxic family dynamics can get passed down without ever being addressed.
Characteristic Signs of Parental Competition
Once you start to understand what a competitive parent is, it can bring a strange mix of clarity and sadness. On the one hand, things that felt confusing for years suddenly make more sense. But on the other, it can be painful to realise that someone who was meant to nurture you may have seen you as a rival instead.
As mentioned earlier, competitive parenting often shows up in ways that are hard to name at the time. You may not have had outright cruelty or aggression. It might have been more subtle, more slippery. But you felt it in your body.
One of the biggest signs you may have had a competitive parent is that you learned, often very young, to tone yourself down. You might have got used to minimising your strengths, or playing small so you didn’t make anyone uncomfortable. Maybe you felt anxious after doing well, like it would somehow cause a problem. Maybe you were taught, directly or indirectly, that being bright, attractive, creative, talented or confident was a threat. Not to the world, but to the people closest to. you. You might also remember moments where your parent seemed to mirror you in ways that didn’t feel right. Perhaps they picked up your hobbies or style in a way that felt more like competition than connection. Maybe they inserted themselves into your friendships or social spaces. Or made comments that left you feeling more like a peer than their child. These things can be deeply unsettling, but because they don’t fit the usual parent-child mould, they often go unnoticed or unspoken.
Another common dynamic is emotional withdrawal when you’re doing well. It can be incredibly confusing to achieve something or feel proud of yourself and then sense a coldness, distance or shift in your parent. It might not even be overt. Just a lack of enthusiasm. A kind of emptiness where you expected warmth. You may have grown up learning that your joy made others retreat. And then there’s the way they handled your confidence. A competitive parent often struggles to offer unconditional praise. Compliments might have come with qualifiers. “Well, I used to be good at that too” or “You think that’s hard? You should’ve seen what I did at your age.” It can feel like your growth somehow poked at their ego. Like their own unmet dreams got tangled up in your milestones.
The Impact and Beginning to Heal
If you’ve spent all or part of your life growing up with a competitive parent, it can take a while to realise just how deep the impact runs. More often, it shows up in less obvious ways, woven into how you see yourself, how you relate to others, and how safe you feel being fully seen.
In many cases, the child of a competitive parent often ends up feeling confused and conflicted. On the surface, the parent might say they’re proud or supportive. But the emotional undertone tells a different story, which leads to that feeling of walking on eggshells when you’ve done well. That weird discomfort when you get attention. That instinct to shrink yourself so no one feels uncomfortable. It’s hard to describe, but you absolutely know it when you’ve lived it. And because it often flies under the radar, it’s easy to internalise. You might grow up believing that you’re too much, that good things come with strings attached, or that success makes people love you less (not more). These beliefs can stick around long after childhood and shape how you tend to show up throughout your life.
You might notice that even now, in adulthood, there’s a part of you that flinches when you're praised. Or you find yourself hesitating when something good happens, almost waiting for a backlash. That response isn’t random. It’s your nervous system remembering how it used to feel to succeed around someone who didn’t know how to celebrate you.
As a result, it becomes clear that one of the most lasting effects of this kind of emotional parenting is a distorted relationship with self-worth. If your confidence or joy triggered withdrawal, criticism or jealousy in your parent, you may have learned to equate visibility with danger. You might unconsciously dim your light in external relationships, avoid healthy competition in work, or step back when attention turns your way. Not because you want to, but because something in you still believes it isn’t safe.
And as already mentioned above, you can imagine that these issues may (and most often will) strongly impact your general relationship patterns. This means if being close to someone once meant being compared, criticised or made to feel like a threat, it makes sense that trust would be difficult. You might find yourself drawn to people who recreate those same dynamics, not because they feel good, but because they feel familiar. Or you might become overly self-reliant, uncomfortable with vulnerability, always trying to stay two steps ahead emotionally. You may sadly notice that you have even started to repeat some of these patterns in your own parenting style.
But healing is absolutely possible. And it doesn’t mean confronting the parent or rewriting the past. It begins with slowly building a sense of safety inside yourself.
Understanding the dynamics of a competitive parent is a powerful first step. Once you name it, you start to separate yourself from it. You begin to see that the discomfort you’ve been carrying may not be yours to hold. That’s where healing begins. Not in fixing what happened, but in learning to see it clearly. Saying the truth to yourself, maybe for the first time: my parent was competing with me. I didn’t imagine it. It hurt. I deserved better. That alone can be a powerful turning point. You’re no longer pushing it down or minimising it. You’re starting to believe your own experience, which is something your younger self probably didn’t get to do.
Then you can take charge of what your journey may begint o look like which might include:
Therapy - Can be incredibly helpful here, especially inner child work, where you learn to reconnect with the parts of yourself that were shamed, ignored or made to feel threatening.
Journaling - Can also help you hear your own voice more clearly and start to sort out what was yours and what was projected onto you.
Boundaries - Are another key part of healing. Not just with your parent if they're still in your life, but with anyone who makes you feel like you need to shrink in order to be loved.
You might also start noticing what healthy connection looks like. It might feel unfamiliar at first. Praise without strings. Friendship without comparison. Support that doesn't come with jealousy. Let that unfamiliarity be a sign that you're growing into something new. You're building a relationship with yourself where you're allowed to take up space, to thrive, to be seen without fear.
If any of this feels relatable, you’re not alone. And more importantly, you’re not imagining it. One of the most painful things about growing up with a parent who competes with you is the way it distorts your sense of self. It can leave you feeling like your confidence is dangerous. Like your growth makes you unlovable. But that was never true. Healing from toxic family dynamics, especially from a parent who competed with you, isn’t quick or linear. But it is possible. You don’t have to stay in those old patterns. You don’t have to keep proving yourself or hiding yourself. You were never the threat. You were just the child who happened to shine, and now, slowly, you get to shine again.
If something here resonated with you, I’d love to hear it.
Whether it brought clarity, stirred a feeling, or simply gave you a moment of pause, you're not alone. These conversations matter, and your voice is welcome.
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Thank you for being here, exactly as you are.
Kindest Always.
Joanna Baars is a psychotherapist and writer based in London. Her work explores how we can learn to understand ourselves, in a complex world. Find out more...
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