The Scapegoat and the Golden Child: A Narcissistic Mother’s Tactics

Because the scapegoat is watching.

(alternately, people are watching)

The narcissist doesn’t “parent” to improve the wellbeing of their child. They don’t have normal parenting instincts. Instead, they have a need to be seen or perceived in a certain way. They have a need to be in power, to be validated, and to see and keep others down.

When the narcissistic mother “parents” the golden child, look at what she’s really doing. Then think about what she does behind the scenes, think and look at the implication of her brand of parenting.

What you’ll find is that even her “stellar” parenting of the “deserving” child creates wounds. It lowers everyone beneath her, creates dependance, validates her false persona while driving a wedge between people. It hides the truth.

Narcissists must hide the truth. The truth creates an even playing field. It gives others the opportunity to act in their own best interests, it creates a stable foundation so that others can be self-determined and healthy.

The truth that she’s hiding is that she doesn’t really love anyone, she enjoys their subjugation, destruction, and pain. The golden child is elevated in order to create a wound in himself and the other children. Elevating the golden child destroys a sense of fairness. It wounds the other children. It corrupts the golden child. The children chosen to be golden typically REQUIRE boundaries and discipline, often more so than the scapegoats.

What a narcissistic mother will do is encourage children’s weaknesses, and punish or discourage their strengths.

So a patient child will be made to wait forever, wearing out his patience, never given what he needs. His patience will be used against him. He will learn to hate his patience.

And an impatient child will never be made to wait, instead, others will have to submit to his impatience, and he won’t ever get a chance to develop patience. The narcissistic mother might encourage him to feel he has a right to become increasingly aggressive when he’s impatient. His impatience will be rewarded.

A narcissistic mother wants the other children to feel jealous and destabilized by the relationship she has with the golden child. She wants them to beg for her attention, to resent the golden child.

She wants to golden child to see the flaws in the other children, to see them as she does. She wants the golden child to represent her, to make her look as if she is a good mother, and to make the other children look as they are flawed and guilty, and feel as if they are undeserving. She may encourage the golden child to torment or “discipline” his siblings.

She works to corrupt a sense of shared wellbeing between siblings. It pleases her to corrupt them, turn them against each other, and have them vie for her favor. She enjoys inflicting unfairness and using her treatment of the golden child as proof that she’s good, meanwhile, furthering the lie that the other children have deserved the mistreatment or neglect they receive. As long as she can create chaos, wounds, encourage entitlement and unhealthy shame, and punish good behavior and reward bad behavior and hide the fact that she’s responsible for all of it, she’s happy. She lives to do this, and she may play as if it saddens her that the kids are fighting, but she loves it.

Why does a malignant narcissistic mother treat the golden child as though they are deserving of genuine maternal care?

She feels competitive towards her children and she dominates them using divide and conquer.

She does this because its an extremely hurtful thing to do and it destabilizes and wounds everyone involved. It starts everyone off on uneven footing fighting amongst each other so she can hide her crimes of pleasure and blame them for being good/bad. Narcissists are always sadistic, sadism comes with unhealthy competition and unfair one-upmanship. Narcissists lack some internal sense of shared well-being and tenderness, their love for the children is replaced by sheer competition.