Understanding Projection & Transference: The 7 Ways You Seek Your Need To Be Faultless In Your Kids
- Lukas de Beer
- Apr 22
- 7 min read
Why understanding projection and transference is important and how you project and transfer yourself onto your child?
If you’ve ever walked away from an interaction with your child thinking, “Why did that upset me so much?”—you’ve already brushed up against the subtle power of projection.
The late psychoanalyst Robert Moore (Moore, From Painful Childhood to Generative Adulthood, 2008, p.30) however, takes a long hard look at parenting and notices how our own wounding is reflected in the ways we are parents:
"The more wounded the parents were in childhood, and the less celebrative they feel about their own true selves, then the more they will try to use their children to compensate for what they did not get for themselves. This usually leads to mutual chronic disappointment. Most problems between parents and their children are exacerbated by the parents’ feelings of inadequacy."
Our children upset us because in many ways we are also still children trying to cope with unresolved pain.
Projections and transference are psychological patterns we all participate in, mostly without realising it. Not simply clinical ideas—they’re everyday, human experiences that shape our relationships, especially the ones closest to us.
Projection happens when we unconsciously attribute our own feelings, beliefs, or unresolved issues to someone else. According to Freud (1911), who first introduced the term in psychoanalytic theory, projection is a defense mechanism. It protects us from the discomfort of owning something inside ourselves by placing it “out there” on another person.
It helps me to imagine a person walking around with a data projector—beaming their inner fears and unresolved stories onto everything and everyone around them. The problem is, they then react to those external images as if they’re real, unaware that they came from within in the first place.
For example, a parent who is deeply self-critical might overreact when their child makes a small mistake—because it triggers their own hidden fears of inadequacy.
Transference, on the other hand, is slightly different. It’s when we respond to someone in the present—like our child—as if they were someone from our past. Often, these reactions are shaped by early relational experiences, especially with caregivers. Psychologist Nancy McWilliams describes transference as "the displacement of attitudes and feelings from early figures in one’s life to people in the present" (McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, 2011). In parenting, this might look like expecting your child to carry the emotional burden you once carried for your own parent—without even realizing you’re doing it.
None of this makes you a bad parent. It makes you a human one.
And here’s the good news: the more aware you become of your own projections and transfers, the less power they have. Parenting offers a daily invitation to look inward—not for guilt or blame, but for clarity and compassion. As Jung so beautifully said: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
This blog series is an invitation to do exactly that: to become a little more conscious, a little more honest, and a lot more kind—with yourself and with your child. Because when you begin to notice your own inner patterns, you free your children from carrying what was never theirs to begin with. Understanding projection and transference can radically transform your parenting approach.
If you've been following my blogs, you would know that my coaching is deeply rooted in the Enneagram. So, it will be from this perspective I will present projection and transference, based on each type's ego pressure points. The great news is, you don't have to have any background about the Enneagram to follow this blog series, but if you do, I encourage you read it from that point of view.
Here are the 9 parenting types we'll look at in the coming weeks;
The Faultless Parent - Always blowing the whistle on imperfections
The Smothering Parent - Love so thick you can barely breathe through it
The Iconic Parent - Where children are the shiniest achievements on display
The Dramatic Parent - When life hands them melons they make melodrama
The Detached Parent - Parenting from a safe theoretical distance
The Frantic Parent - Has a helmet ready for your walk to the mailbox
The Enthusiastic Parent - Turning life into a carnival (vegetables not included)
The Protective Parent - Because they said so, that's why
The Peacemaker Parent - Let’s not make a thing of it
Without any further ado, let's kick this post off with with the first one on the list.
The Faultless Parent
So, Dear Parents…
Let’s talk about you striving to be faultless, blameless and perfect—specifically, what happens when your own deep need to be “good” and faultless starts spilling over into your parenting.
You may be the kind of parent who strongly believes in doing the right thing. Not just most of the time, but every time. Maybe you pride yourself on being consistent, reliable, honest. You likely keep a well-ordered home, lead with conviction, and hold yourself to high standards.
Those are beautiful qualities. In fact, they’re often the glue that holds families together. But they can also become the very things that quietly weigh your child down—especially when you haven’t made space for your own humanity.
Like I mentioned, this blog series is all about the ways we unknowingly transfer our own internal struggles onto our children. And if you’re someone who resonates with this perfectionist mindset, there’s a good chance that you’re projecting your inner critic outward. Not intentionally, of course—but subtly, consistently.
Here are seven common ways that your need to be faultless gets transferred from you to your child:
Your child feels like they must always get it right.
Without even realizing it, you may be sending the message—through your tone, your corrections, your sighs—that doing your best isn’t enough unless it’s flawless. Your child learns that mistakes aren’t part of the process; they’re problems to be avoided.
They become afraid of making mistakes.
Perfectionism creates a pressure cooker environment. Children stop exploring, risk-taking, or even trying if they believe failure will lead to disappointment. And because they love you and want your approval, they begin to avoid anything that feels uncertain or challenging.
They adopt rigid standards that mirror yours.
You likely hold strong moral convictions, and that’s a gift. But when your principles turn into non-negotiable rules with no room for nuance, your child starts absorbing those same black-and-white ideas. There's little space for questioning, complexity, or grace.
They struggle when things don’t go according to plan.
If you’re someone who needs control to feel safe, your discomfort with messiness or unpredictability can translate into anxiety for your child. They start feeling the need to manage outcomes—not just their own, but yours too.
They believe they must earn your pride by being good children.
The message here isn’t always spoken—but it’s deeply felt. If you only seem emotionally responsive when they’ve done something good or morally impressive, your child learns to equate love with achievement. They try to make you proud, not because it brings them joy—but because it feels like the only way to be enough.
They become their own harshest critic.
If you’re regularly pointing out what could be improved, continually trying to fix what’s “off,” or correcting even small errors, your child may start doing the same to themselves. And once that inner voice takes root, it’s often far more punishing than yours ever was.
They feel like they’re never quite enough.
This is the deep wound of perfectionism: the quiet, haunting sense that no matter how hard they try, they’ll always fall short. Even when you think you’re being encouraging, your child may hear a call to do more, be more, fix more. And eventually, they stop feeling safe in their own skin.
Moore (Moore, From Painful Childhood to Generative Adulthood, 2008, p.30), again:
Anytime you have parents, however, who are emotionally children, the child will immediately and intuitively start trying to parent them. Inside every child is a natural therapist, and you can understand why. They intuit that “If I expect to get anything from this person, I’m going to have to heal them first! I need to make them feel better, or they won’t be able to give me anything emotionally.” So they start trying it.
In analysis, we call this process “transference” and “counter-transference,” because all analysts, like inadequate parents, still have their own crazy parts, and the clients always realize this, and they always try to make the analyst get better for the same reason. The child in the client tries to heal the parent in the analyst so the analyst can do a better job of parenting them. That’s the way it works, and it’s probably always going to be that way to some degree.
We need to understand these processes because they have great power in the mentoring relationships we have with younger people. Perhaps the key litmus tests for detecting immature people masquerading as mature people around children is the extent to which they focus on having the younger people mirror and/or idealize them all the time. This is true in the church as well as in the family, or in business, or anywhere else one works with people.
A clear call to maturity. Someone one said maturity is the ability to absorb someone else's immaturity. In the case of being a parent, this is (sadly) not always so obvious.
If you've noticed some of this resonating with you - or even seeing some of this play out in your parenting, here are some practices you could implement to move you towards being a mindful and gracious parent:
Start with yourself.
Ask: Have I ever given myself permission to be enough as I am?
Many perfectionist parents live with an unrelenting inner voice—one that says, “You need to try harder. You can’t mess this up. You must be better!” But, what if the invitation isn’t to do more, but to let go a little?
Let the inner judge rest.
Give yourself space to make mistakes. Practice speaking to yourself with the same compassion you offer others. When you learn to soften toward your own imperfections, you’ll be surprised at how much more compassion you have for your children’s growing process too.
And in your parenting?
Teach your child that getting it wrong is part of getting it right.
Encourage reflection over correction.
Celebrate effort, not just outcomes.
And above all—let go of the myth of perfect parenting.
Parenting is not a performance. It’s a relationship. A journey. A shared becoming.
Maybe this song by The Porter's Gate will give you as much hope as it has given me.
Dear parent, your child doesn’t need you to be flawless.
They need you to be real, present, and gracious with yourself—so they can learn to be the same.
Want to talk about this? Reach out to me and let's explore ways to parent mindfully, lovingly and graciously.
You've got this.
Sources:
Freud, S. (1911). Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia.
McWilliams, N. (2011). Psychoanalytic Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Process. Guilford Press.
Jung, C.G. (1957). The Undiscovered Self.
Moore, R.L. (2008) From painful childhood to generative adulthood: Becoming the parents/mentors/elders we wish we had had, M.J. Havlick (ed.). Unpublished manuscript, Institute for Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Spirituality, Chicago.