When people think about what becomes difficult with lower intelligence, they tend to picture the obvious: reading, arithmetic, academic performance. These are the things that show up on tests and get noticed in school.
But there is a less visible category of difficulty — one that affects everyday life far more deeply than academic performance, and one that almost no one connects to intelligence at all.
Chapter 1: What Becomes Difficult When Intelligence Is Lower
People with mild intellectual disability (IQ 50–70) or borderline intelligence (IQ 70–85) do face difficulties with reading, calculation, and memory. This is expected and relatively well understood.
What is less understood is that these same individuals also face significant difficulty with cognitive functions that most people do not think of as intelligence at all — functions so fundamental that we experience them as simply being human.
Two specific capacities are most affected, and they happen to be the capacities most essential to parenting.
Chapter 2: The Two Surprising Difficulties
The two capacities most affected by lower intelligence — and least recognized as intelligence-related — are:
1. Taking another person’s perspective
2. Regulating one’s own emotions
These may seem like matters of character or empathy rather than intelligence. In fact, both require more sophisticated cognitive processing than reading or arithmetic.
Taking another person’s perspective requires reading facial expressions, understanding context, placing oneself in another’s position, and running a multi-step simulation of how the other person might feel. This is a complex chain of cognitive operations.
Regulating emotions requires the ability to observe one’s own emotional state from a distance, evaluate it in context, and choose a response rather than simply acting on the impulse. This too requires cognitive capacity that many people assume is a matter of willpower or character.
When we speak with someone, we instinctively monitor how our words might land. When we feel irritated, we assess the situation and often hold back. We take this for granted — but only because typical cognitive functioning makes it possible.
For someone with mild intellectual disability or borderline intelligence, these operations are genuinely hard. Not as a choice. Not as a failure of effort. As a function of how their brain processes information.
Chapter 3: How This Affects Parenting
Both of these capacities — perspective-taking and emotional regulation — are at the absolute center of parenting. Every significant challenge in raising a child requires them.
A toddler screams and refuses to do what they are told. Understanding why — developmentally, emotionally — requires perspective-taking. Responding in a way that is firm but not harmful requires emotional regulation.
When a parent cannot reliably do either, the child’s distress and resistance register not as things to be understood and responded to, but as provocations to be stopped. The parent’s response is governed by their own immediate emotional state rather than by any assessment of what the child needs.
Over time, the child learns that their emotional state — their fear, their excitement, their needs — has no reliable effect on what happens next. The parent’s mood determines everything. This is the core of psychological neglect, and it precedes most other forms of abuse.
A parent who cannot take a child’s perspective also cannot recognize when their discipline has gone too far. The feedback signal — the child’s distress — does not register as meaningful information. It may register instead as escalation, defiance, or a challenge to authority.
Chapter 4: Intelligence, Not Character
Perhaps the most important reframe this understanding offers is this: the parenting failures described above are frequently attributed to character. The parent is described as cold, aggressive, selfish, or cruel.
Sometimes those descriptions are accurate. But in a significant portion of cases — particularly among the 60 to 80 percent of abusive parents who have some form of cognitive limitation — what looks like a character failure is actually a cognitive one.
The parent is not choosing to be unable to understand their child’s feelings. They do not have the cognitive architecture that makes that understanding possible.
This matters for anyone trying to make sense of a parent who seemed to look right through them — who responded to distress with irritation, to excitement with indifference, to pain with dismissal. It was not that you were invisible to them because you were unworthy of being seen. In many cases, the capacity to see you was simply not there.
Related Articles
- The Intelligence Problem Behind Child Abuse
- What Are ‘Mild’ Intellectual Disability and Borderline Intelligence? The Hidden Spectrum
This article is part of an ongoing series on こころノート, a Japanese psychology blog exploring childhood trauma, parenting, and emotional recovery.
Frequently Asked Questions
What parenting skills are most affected by lower IQ?
The two most significantly affected capacities are perspective-taking (the ability to understand the child’s inner experience separately from one’s own) and emotional regulation (the ability to manage one’s own emotional state under stress). Both are essential to safe, responsive parenting.
Can someone with borderline intelligence become an effective parent?
Yes, with the right support structures in place. The risks increase in the absence of support, but many parents with borderline intelligence raise children safely when they have consistent help, reduced stressors, and access to practical guidance. Support level matters far more than IQ level alone.
Why might a parent with lower IQ respond with anger or dismissal to a child’s emotional distress?
Because accurate perspective-taking — understanding that the child’s inner state is separate from their own — requires a level of cognitive abstraction that is genuinely harder for people with lower IQ. What looks like coldness or indifference is often an inability to perceive and process another person’s emotional state accurately.
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