Narcissistic Mothers and Vulnerable Narcissism: When Your Kids Are Just Props | Taylor Frankie Paul & The Bachelorette

The Narcissism Conversation Has a Gender Problem

Say "narcissist" out loud and most people picture a man. The domineering CEO. The manipulative ex-boyfriend. The emotionally unavailable father. The entire cultural conversation around narcissistic abuse — the podcasts, the TikTok explainers, the Instagram carousels — overwhelmingly centers male perpetrators.

And the data partially supports that. The DSM-5 reports that up to 75% of those diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder are male.^[1] A 2015 meta-analysis of 470,846 participants across 355 studies found that men scored higher on narcissism overall.^[2]

But here's what almost nobody talks about: that gender gap is driven entirely by grandiose narcissism — the loud, dominant, authority-seeking kind. The subtypes where men pull ahead are Exploitative/Entitlement and Leadership/Authority. The Grandiose/Exhibitionism gap? Nearly zero.^[2]

And vulnerable narcissism — the shame-based, victimhood-driven, emotionally manipulative kind — showed no gender difference at all. Across 42 studies and 46,735 participants, men and women scored virtually identically (d = −.04).^[2]

Some research goes further. A study in Personality and Individual Differences found that women actually scored significantly higher on vulnerable narcissism than men.^[3] A 2022 review in SAGE Journals argued that vulnerable narcissism "tends to be more prevalent in women" but gets systematically overlooked because the DSM diagnostic criteria were built around the grandiose, male-presenting archetype.^[4]

The result? Women with narcissistic pathology aren't being identified as narcissists. They're being misdiagnosed — often as Borderline Personality Disorder — because their narcissism doesn't look like what clinicians are trained to see.^[5]

And here's where this matters for families: vulnerable narcissism is the subtype most strongly linked to child maladjustment.^[6] The version of narcissism that damages children the most is the one we're least willing to name — especially when the person doing the damage is a mother.

It's time to talk about narcissistic mothers. Not because fathers can't be narcissists. But because the research on maternal narcissism is clear, growing, and being ignored by a culture that still treats motherhood as sacred and above scrutiny.

What Is Vulnerable Narcissism — and Why Does It Look Like "Good" Mothering?

The core traits of narcissism are the same regardless of subtype: entitlement, lack of empathy, a deep need for admiration. The delivery system is what changes.

Grandiose narcissism is the one you recognize: extroverted, dominant, overtly superior. Vulnerable narcissism is its shadow — introverted, shame-based, hypersensitive, and deeply invested in the identity of being misunderstood or victimized.^[7]

In a mother, vulnerable narcissism doesn't look like tyranny. It looks like devotion. The mom who's "so real" about her struggles. The mom who cries on camera about how hard motherhood is. The mom who makes her mess into a brand and calls it authenticity. The mom who needs you — her child, her audience — to regulate her emotions for her.

Simply Psychology describes vulnerable narcissists as relying on emotional manipulation to sustain fragile self-esteem, presenting as misunderstood victims to gain sympathy and deflect responsibility — while secretly maintaining beliefs of superiority.^[7] When this personality structure inhabits a maternal role, the child doesn't just grow up with a difficult mom. The child grows up inside someone else's emotional economy — where their job is to regulate a person who should be regulating them.

What the Research Says About Narcissistic Mothers — Specifically

The literature on maternal narcissism has exploded in the past three years. The findings are consistent, disturbing, and almost entirely absent from public conversation.

Vulnerable Narcissistic Mothers See Their Children as the Problem

A 2024 study in Current Psychology examined 252 mother-child dyads. The headline finding: only maternal vulnerable narcissism — not grandiose narcissism — was significantly associated with child maladjustment. And the mechanism? Mothers with vulnerable narcissistic traits were more likely to perceive their child as "difficult." That distorted perception was what actually predicted the child's problems.^[8]

The child isn't actually difficult. The mother's lens makes them appear that way — and then the mother responds to the distortion, not the child.

Narcissistic Mothers Create Narcissistic Daughters — and Suppress Empathy

A 2025 study published in Frontiers in Psychology surveyed 416 female university students at King Faisal University. The results: a strong positive correlation between maternal narcissism and daughters' own narcissistic traits. Maternal narcissism was also negatively associated with daughters' capacity for empathy. Daughters of narcissistic mothers learn early that external appearances outweigh emotions and that emotional suppression is how you avoid pain.^[9]

Maternal Narcissism Predicts Self-Criticism, Depression, and Anxiety in Adulthood

A Turkish study using Structural Equation Modeling with 512 adults found that perceived maternal narcissism during childhood directly predicted self-criticism in adulthood (beta = 0.72). That self-criticism then mediated both depression and anxiety disorder symptoms. The mother's narcissistic traits literally reshape the child's internal voice — into one that attacks them.^[10]

Narcissistic Mothers Scapegoat — and It Causes Measurable Harm

A 2023 study of 504 Australian adults (Vignando & Bizumic) found that both maternal vulnerable and grandiose narcissism predicted scapegoating behavior, and scapegoating mediated the relationship to anxiety and depression in adult children. Mothers with narcissistic traits were more likely to designate one child as the family problem — and that designation left measurable psychological damage decades later.^[11]

The Parentification Trap

A 2025 systematic review in Cureus found that parents with vulnerable narcissistic profiles frequently misinterpret their child's behavior and react with disproportionate distress, expecting the child to provide reassurance. This dynamic creates parentification — a role reversal where the child becomes the emotional caretaker of the parent.^[6]

In a mother-child relationship, this is devastating. The child learns that their purpose is to stabilize their mother's emotional state. Their own needs become secondary — or invisible.

The Gender-Specific Finding

Green et al. found that maternal coldness was more strongly associated with vulnerable narcissism specifically in daughters — suggesting a gendered transmission pathway where narcissistic mothers may disproportionately damage their daughters' self-concept through emotional withdrawal tied to the mother's own fragile self-esteem.^[4]

The Momfluencer Pipeline: When Social Media Monetizes Maternal Narcissism

Social media didn't create narcissistic mothers. But it gave maternal narcissism a revenue model.

Research consistently finds a positive relationship between social media use and narcissistic traits, with platforms functioning as supply delivery systems — offering the likes, comments, and engagement that narcissistic personalities require.^[12] For vulnerable narcissists specifically, platforms allow the curation of a sympathetic self-image that would be hard to maintain face-to-face.^[13]

The "momfluencer" economy is almost entirely built by women. And it incentivizes exactly the behavior pattern that the clinical literature identifies as harmful: children as content assets, motherhood as brand, vulnerability as performance, chaos as engagement.

A study in Brain Informatics examined how narcissistic parents influence children's social media behavior, finding that children may share content either to mirror the parent's narcissistic tendencies or as their own expression — but the parent's pathology shapes what the child learns about self-presentation and validation-seeking regardless.^[14]

Fortesa Latifi, author of Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online, has observed that online motherhood is frequently portrayed as effortless and curated — and when serious allegations emerge, the gap between performance and reality becomes a form of public harm in itself.^[15]

The child in this system doesn't get to be a child. They get to be a deliverable.

Case Study: Taylor Frankie Paul — The Vulnerable Narcissistic Mother in Real Time

Note: This is a behavioral pattern analysis based on publicly documented events and clinical frameworks — not a clinical diagnosis. See full disclaimer below.

Taylor Frankie Paul is not an outlier. She's the case study that maps almost perfectly onto the clinical literature on vulnerable narcissistic motherhood — the relatable mess who weaponizes her own chaos while her children sit inside the blast radius.

1. Platform Centrality as Grandiosity

Paul didn't just participate in MomTok — she founded it in 2020, positioning herself as the gravitational center of a group of Mormon mom influencers in Utah.^[16] When the soft-swinging scandal broke in 2022, she went on TikTok Live and publicly revealed the group's involvement — detonating other people's marriages and careers to control her own narrative.^[17]

That's not transparency. That's a power move dressed as vulnerability.

2. Motherhood as Brand, Children as Supply

Paul has amassed over 6 million TikTok followers and 2.3 million on Instagram.^[18] Her entire brand was built on her children as content assets — aestheticized Mormon family life, curated milestones, shareable moments. That's the MomTok formula, and she was its architect.

When the scandal broke, she kept posting the kids. When the arrest happened, the bodycam footage became the opening scene of her Hulu series.^[17] Her children's disrupted home became a monetized narrative arc across four seasons of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.

In narcissistic family systems, children serve a function: supply extension. Their purpose is to generate engagement, sympathy, and validation for the parent. The child's needs are secondary to their utility.^[19] Paul's relationship with her kids has been almost entirely mediated through a camera — and that camera has never turned off.

3. The Domestic Violence Incident — With a Child in the Room

In February 2023, Paul was arrested and charged with aggravated assault, two counts of domestic violence in the presence of a child, child abuse with injury, and criminal mischief following an altercation with then-boyfriend Dakota Mortensen. She admitted to police that she threw metal chairs and a wooden play set at Mortensen.^[20]

Court documents confirmed that one of those chairs struck her then-five-year-old daughter, who was on the couch next to Mortensen during the incident.^[21]

Video of the 2023 incident, released by TMZ on March 19, 2026, shows Paul attempting to put Mortensen in a headlock, kicking him, and throwing barstools — all while her daughter was present.^[21] On March 20, Disney pulled her season of The Bachelorette, which had been set to premiere two days later.^[15]

Reactive aggression under perceived threat of abandonment is consistent with narcissistic injury response — particularly in someone whose identity is constructed through image management. The escalation to physical violence, in the presence of a child, maps directly onto the research linking vulnerable narcissism with impaired emotion regulation.^[6]

4. The Victimhood-to-Comeback Pipeline

Post-arrest. Post-scandal. Post-divorce. What followed? A Hulu deal. Four seasons. A Bachelorette selection — the first lead in franchise history who didn't come from the Bachelor system.^[22]

She monetized the wreckage. That's not resilience. That's leveraging chaos as content, which requires a specific relationship with shame — or rather, the absence of it.

Even the consequences became content. Even after her castmates told ABC executives they had concerns about continuing if she remained involved,^[23] her spokesperson's response to the released video framed Paul as the victim of her ex's "destructive campaign."^[21]

The wound doesn't stop being performed just because real damage is visible on camera. And the children are still inside the frame.

Red Flags: How to Spot the Vulnerable Narcissistic Mother

If you grew up with a mother who fits this profile — or if you're watching one operate in real time — these are the behavioral signatures the research identifies.

Chronic victimhood as a parenting posture. She's always the one being wronged. The child learns that their mother's pain is the organizing principle of the household. Their job is to manage it, soothe it, or at minimum not add to it.^[19]

Inconsistent warmth tied to compliance. Affection flows when the child mirrors the mother's needs. Independence, disagreement, or emotional separation is met with withdrawal, guilt, or punishment. The 2024 maternal narcissism study found this dynamic predicted child maladjustment.^[8]

The child as emotional regulator. Research on parental reflective functioning shows that mothers with vulnerable narcissistic traits have difficulty understanding their child's internal motivations. They misattribute the child's behavior and rely on the child to stabilize their own emotional state.^[8]

Empathy suppression in daughters. Daughters of narcissistic mothers learn to suppress their own emotions to avoid harsh criticism, internalizing early that external appearances outweigh feelings.^[9]

Public performance of motherhood. The curated Instagram post. The TikTok showing how "real" and "messy" motherhood is. The authenticity is itself the performance. The child's experience is secondary to how the parenting looks.

Chaos as recurring environment. The household cycles through crises — and the mother is consistently at the center of them. The child adapts by becoming hypervigilant, learning to read the room before they learn to read a book.

Why Nobody Wants to Say "Narcissistic Mother"

Motherhood occupies a protected cultural space. We'll say "narcissistic ex." We'll say "narcissistic boss." We'll say "narcissistic father" without flinching. But "narcissistic mother" triggers a different response — defensiveness, disbelief, accusations of misogyny.

The diagnostic system reinforces this. The DSM-5's NPD criteria were designed around grandiose narcissism, which skews male. Women presenting with narcissistic vulnerability are more likely to receive a BPD diagnosis instead.^[5] The disorder gets relabeled. The behavior doesn't change.

And the momfluencer economy provides cultural cover. A mother who posts her children constantly is "dedicated." A mother who monetizes her family's dysfunction is "brave." A mother who performs vulnerability is "relatable." None of those words exist in the clinical literature on narcissistic parenting.

The research doesn't care about cultural protection. It measures outcomes. And the outcomes for children of narcissistic mothers are measurable, replicable, and harmful: self-criticism, anxiety, depression, impaired empathy, insecure attachment, narcissistic trait transmission.^{[8][9][10][11]}

Breaking the Pattern

If you recognize this dynamic in your own upbringing, the first step isn't forgiveness or confrontation. It's recognition. Naming the system you grew up in is the beginning of not replicating it.

The intergenerational transmission is real. Research consistently shows that childhood neglect and emotional inconsistency from narcissistic mothers predicts the development of vulnerable narcissistic traits in the next generation.^[24] Daughters of narcissistic mothers are at particular risk — learning to suppress empathy and develop self-critical internal voices that persist into adulthood.^[9][10]

If you see this playing out in someone's public life — on a reality show, on a social media feed, in the curated chaos of influencer culture — understanding the clinical framework helps you stop consuming dysfunction as entertainment.

The child on camera didn't consent to being content. The child in the room during the DV incident didn't consent to being collateral. And the child growing up inside a mother's emotional economy didn't consent to being supply.

They were recruited. Not raised.

"Children of vulnerable narcissists are often caught in a real bind. Be a positive reflection on them, and you have their favor. But dare to be your true self or declare your own worth, and you might have trouble."

— Dr. George Simon, Clinical Psychologist

Seeing the pattern is the investment. Breaking it is the return.

Maybe yourself.