Parentification

I would say that right now I have great female relationships, but that was not always the case.

I definitely eldest daughter syndrome, right? Parentified early on, hyper-independent, being in male dominated spaces, I didn't have a lot of female mentors.

So I would say now in my life, I just have a lot of really amazing women that are supportive of me.

And when I tell them, hey, I'm going to write a book, they're like, of course you are.

about the relationship between that sibling who gets parentified and their parents such that it builds an extra wide chasm in perhaps what was already a challenged relationship with their sibling.

Parentification is a very complicated topic.

It is.

And children who are parentified... often feel a lot of responsibility and a lot of resentment because they are inappropriately burdened with the role of mothering their own mother.

I guarantee it will be.

The first origin she points to is parentification.

Parentification is a deeply damaging dynamic where the natural roles in a family are completely reversed.

The child becomes the parent.

Precisely.

This is part of my Therapy Fundamentals series, where I take important psychological and relationship concepts and make them understandable, applicable, and useful in daily life.

Parentification is a form of role reversal in which a child assumes emotional or practical responsibilities that ordinarily belong to an adult.

The important word here is not simply responsibility.

Children benefit from having appropriate responsibilities.

Feeding a pet, helping with dinner, putting away laundry, or occasionally watching a younger sibling can develop confidence, contribution, and confidence.

A family is a team, and children should gradually learn how to participate in that team.

Parentification is different.

It occurs when the responsibility is developmentally inappropriate, excessive, emotionally burdensome, or necessary for maintaining the stability of the family.

And this really deserves its own section of this episode because, like I said, this can look very, very functional from the outside.

Parentification is looking like the capable one.

It's a persona.

But underneath the surface, what we usually see is, like we've said, the dysregulation, often quite a lot of the times numbness or emotional unavailability.

And this, this is precisely what parentification is.

Ooh, yeah.

Parentification is making a child responsible for, um, m- have responsibilities like an adult.

Yeah.

Taking care of other children, that's an adult responsibility.

Now, this was actually very harmful.

Parentification is widely recognized as a form of abuse because it forces kids into adult roles before they're emotionally or mentally ready.

Instead of having their own childhood, the older children were made responsible for someone else's.

They didn't get to just grow up.