Emotional Maturity: What Is It and Why Is It Important?

Five Patterns of Emotional Immaturity, and Seven Habits of Emotional Maturity

Sloth and Smell the Roses

Do you recognize this feeling? Your emotional battery is drained, and then someone pushes – no, pokes –  your buttons. You’ve had enough. Whether your trigger is whining, interrupting, demanding, complaining, or space-invading, the carefully cultivated, sparkly part of you that resembles Glenda the Good Witch goes “POOF!” and out comes the Wicked Witch of the West.

In these moments, you find yourself in old, familiar childhood patterns, including: 

1. Aggressive pattern. Shouting, threatening, name-calling, fixing, taking over, blaming, defensiveness, gaslighting 

2. Enduring pattern. “Turtling,” in the words of energy teacher Lynda Caesara, digging in, ignoring, passive aggression, resisting 

3. Leaving pattern. Mentally or physically departing

4. Merging pattern. Trying to make everyone happy, forgetting about your own needs in the process

5. Rigid pattern. Getting extremely rigid and rule-bound

Each one of these patterns, as described by Steven Kessler in The Five Personality Patterns: Your Guide to Understanding Yourself and Others and Developing Emotional Maturity, is a different type of emotional immaturity, defined by the American Psychological Association as “a tendency to express emotions without restraint or disproportionately to the situation.” Emotional immaturity is not always big or obvious — it can be subtle and even downright sneaky.

According to psychologist Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson, author of Disentangling from Emotionally Immature People, emotional maturity, like enlightenment (which I secretly think might be a synonym for emotional maturity!), is not a fixed state but a spectrum. Where you fall fluctuates moment-to-moment depending on how well resourced you are. There is no one who has "reached the apex of emotional maturity and stays there." 

In my own research and experience, I’ve learned that the following seven habits can help develop emotional maturity in adults and children:

1. Take responsibility for your behavior and choices, and seek to learn and grow from adverse experiences, keeping a growth mindset. In the words of parenting expert Barbara Coloroso, when you make a mistake, you “own it, fix it, learn from it, and move on.”
   

2. Become an emotion scientist. Get curious about feelings — yours and other people’s — and learn how to Recognize, Understand, Label, Express and Regulate them (RULER).  Dr. Marc Brackett describes each step in Permission to Feel, and the approach is taught to children in thousands of schools worldwide.
   

3. Listen to understand, not to be right, and be open to different points of view.

   

4. Have strong boundaries and stay grounded, mindful, and present in your energetic core (your “higher self”). Stay tuned into your own energy, identity, needs and desires. Energy workers such as Lynda Caesara teach how to do this.
   

5. Use assertive communication and conflict resolution  (e.g. I-Statements, clarifying intentions, asking questions, and avoiding assumptions and blame). In their book Connect, Stanford professors emeriti Dr. David Bradshaw and Dr. Carole Robin, advise moving towards conflict, not away from it. See it as an opportunity to collaborate and find common ground. The Mosaic Project, a non-profit on whose board I serve, specializes in teaching these skills to children.

   

6. Develop empathy: think about how your words, body language, and tone of voice affect other people. “Read the room” and don’t behave impulsively.
   

7. Notice when you’re being emotionally immature, seek support or guidance, and learn from your experiences.

All of these skills can be learned by both adults and children — it’s exciting and is what motivates me to write children’s books!

Why is Emotional Maturity So Important?

What is it like to spend a week with a tantruming adult toddler? Exactly. Emotional maturity makes the world go around, and is, I would argue, more important than physical maturity.  It’s key to resilience in work and life, and to have fulfilling relationships with family, friends, and colleagues.  On the flip side, a lack of emotional maturity can torpedo a project and alienate us from others, leading to rejection, loneliness and isolation, which experts claim is worse for our health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Emotional maturity and good emotional hygiene (which as I define as cleaning out stuck emotions and thought patterns on a regular basis) are also crucial to having a healthy relationship with ourselves. Our relationship with ourselves becomes the relationships we have with other people. As I like to say to my kids, you move through life with an invisible windshield. Every day, mud gets sprayed on it (in the form of our own and other people’s emotions). You have to wipe it clean to maintain a clear view.

For parents, teachers and caregivers, emotional maturity is essential to raising children. Kids rely on grownups to model emotional maturity, and provide a safe space for them to be emotionally immature (which is their right — they’re kids!).

Parents’ emotional maturity is also key to breaking cycles of intergenerational trauma. When parents heal their childhood trauma, which is stored in the body, they avoid passing it on to their kids. While this may sound like pressure, it’s also a gift: for many parents (myself included), a child’s well-being is the most powerful motivation to heal.

Parenting with Emotionally Immature Parents

Unfortunately, many adults’ own parents are the biggest challenges to developing emotional maturity. A staggering number of adults (I’ve read figures as high as 60%) were raised by emotionally immature parents. My own parents fit this mold, through no fault of their own: their entire generation had no language for emotional intelligence (which didn’t become a thing until 2005), self-compassion (which became mainstream around 2015), or growth mindset (which Dr. Carol Dweck coined in 2007). They didn’t have access to the internet, parenting books, counseling, or support groups (women in my mom’s generation only had one book – Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care – and men weren’t expected to engage in child-rearing at all).

For parents who are also adult children of emotionally immature people, developing emotional maturity is doubly hard. Instead relying on their parents (now grandparents) for support, they find themselves negotiating their parents’ emotional immaturity alongside that of their children.  It’s a recipe for exhaustion and a master class in personal growth.

The Life-long Work of Emotional Maturity

All in all, working to develop emotional maturity is a life-long project. But it’s worth it, especially when you consider the impact on children (how wonderful would it be to live in a world where everyone was emotionally mature?!). As I’ve recently discovered in developing emotional maturity with my own parents, one of whom recently was hospitalized with heart failure and is now recovering, the feeling of well-being and connection that comes with emotional maturity, quite simply, makes life worth living.

What is your experience with emotional maturity and emotional immaturity?  What tools or resources have you found useful?  What questions do you have?  Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments!