Is your child parentified?
Parentification occurs when a child takes on the role of a parent in a family before they are developmentally capable. They act as the caregiver, whether providing support emotionally or instrumentally (i.e. cooking, cleaning, caring for siblings, etc.) It’s not always obvious when a child is parentified: are they simply more mature than their years, or are they taking on responsibilities that 1) they can’t manage, or 2) have harmful emotional consequences?
For instance, when parents are splitting up/divorcing, a child may feel obligated to provide emotional support to one or both parents, acting as the confidante, giving advice, or holding secrets. This isn’t the child’s role, and it’s confusing: can they remain a child or must they now become the parent’s close friend? Who is taking care of whom?
Similarly, when kids feel they must intervene and mediate in their parents’ arguments or fights, they are taking on the adult task of regulating their parents. This isn’t the child’s job, not even when they’re a teen and more able to intervene.
Sometimes, older siblings feel they must care for their younger siblings; the parentification occurs when the older child is developmentally too young to adequately provide for their sibling. For example, a five-year-old should not be expected to give their two-year-old sibling an unsupervised bath simply out of safety concerns.
Why parentification happens
Kids often become parentified when a parent is unable to fill their parenting role. The parent may be working two full-time jobs, have a chronic illness, have mental health issues (i.e. depression), or be struggling with addiction. In the absence of a fully present or functioning parent, the child feels responsible to fill the gap despite not having the emotional, intellectual, or physical abilities to do so. In other words, the parent may not be forcing the child into this role; the child is only trying to help out.
Other times, the parent’s personal needs invite the child to act as an adult or parent, as with the above example in which a child becomes the parent’s confidante.
Some cultures or family dynamics (i.e. a family with 7 children, or a single parent who works long hours) encourage older siblings to take on caring roles for their younger siblings. This doesn’t necessarily lead to parentification as long as the older sibling is not unduly burdened and has the ability to adequately care for their younger sibling.
The emotional effects on parentified kids
Boundaries: Parentified kids experience the world as being turned upside down. They feel confused as to their role and their responsibilities. The boundary between themselves and others also feels unclear: they’ve entered an adult world which should have been closed to them. Because their parents didn’t define the boundaries between an adult’s world and a child’s—i.e. that adult problems belong to adults, not kids—the child doesn’t know where their responsibilities end and someone else’s begins.
Helping narratives: Kids will develop harmful narratives based on their misperception that they must help others even when it’s not their job to do so. They might tell themselves:
- Everyone’s happiness depends on me.
- I have to make sure everyone is happy.
- Doing for myself isn’t important because I have to help others first.
- I have to fix the problem even if I can’t do so.
Ongoing struggles with independence: When a young child must care for the parent, they develop a narrative that the parent can’t function without them. During adolescence, this narrative interferes with the child’s natural need to separate from the parent. The narrative ultimately impedes the adolescent from forming their own, independent identity. This may keep an adolescent/young adult from “launching” because they feel bound to their parent.
Failure narratives: Because kids are asked to do things they can’t adequately do, they’re set up to feel like failures. The narrative quickly gets established: “I’m no good.” This narrative is at the root of low self-esteem, and unless it gets addressed, the child will carry this very harmful self-narrative throughout their life.
Guilt/shame: A parentified kid’s failure often creates an inner conflict: they resent the parent then immediately feel guilty for this resentment. This conflict leaves them believing they are a bad child.
(For more on parentification, check out the very short story, “Rescuing,” about a girl who makes some important discoveries after saving her younger brother’s life.)
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Rescuing
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Naming Emotions: a Key Part of Successful Parenting
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2 thoughts on “How to Know if Your Child Is Parentified”
I think I’ve been parentifying my kid. What do I do? BTW, I can see myself in that girl in the rescuing story.
If you think you’ve been parentifying your child, seek therapy to understand what’s going on inside you that is contributing to this problem. There’s not one-size-fits-all answer to why you might be parentifying your child, but it’s happening based on narratives you learned in your own childhood. This is something you can unpack in therapy.
Thank you, RS, for having the courage to acknowledge there may be a problem, and the desire to change it!