Excessive responsibility as a child or emotional, physical or mental burden from parentification trauma can cause long-lasting implications to the child’s mental well-being as they progress in to adulthood.
Helping parents out occasionally is okay, it can allow children to embrace skills such as responsibility, empathy, love and care towards others. However, when a child is set unrealistic expectations and demands, which they are incapable of coping with at such a young age, this is not okay.
What is Parentification
Parentification tends to refer to a child who ‘grows up too fast’. This can happen when the child is responsible for their parents emotional needs or having to care for their siblings, when they are just a child themselves. This can impact a child’s development and lead impacting their mental health later on in life.
Here is the different types of parentification:
- Emotional Parentification: Emotional parentification occurs when parents seek emotional support from their children. For example; discussing who they are dating, their divorce, work problems, health scares, seeking validation etc.
- Covert emotional parentification: This is when the parent prevents the child from making their own decisions, forming their own opinions and developing their own likes or dislikes. This is when the parent controls the child for their own benefit and doesn’t have the child’s best interest at heart. The child takes on the parents toxic emotions and grows up to think that people are only happy with them if they act or say things in a certain way. They are unable to be themselves, unlikely to know their true self, become anxious and develop people pleasing tendencies.
- Instrumental parentification: This is when a child takes on responsibilities that they are too young to cope with. For example, chores, caring for siblings, or cooking.
Parentification Causes
It could be that the parent is incapable of fulfilling their role as the caregiver. Here are some examples;
- Alcohol or drug dependant
- Death in the family
- Domestic abuse
- Sexually predatory tendencies (sometimes directed at the child)
- Immaturity
- Financial problems
- Mental health issues such as depression
- Disability or illness
- Narcissistic or controlling tendencies
- Work demands
- The parent was neglected or abused as a child.
Parentification trauma impacts
Parentification creates unrealistic demands and expectations for the child, this can lead to the child developing anxiety or depression during childhood, but could also impact children later on in life, which may need to be treated by a therapist.
Parentification situations
Here are some examples of Parentification:
- Caring for siblings: This is when the child takes responsibility for the well-being of their younger sibling. For example, they may change their nappies, feed them, help them with homework, wash their clothes and more.
- Emotional burden: This could be that the child feels responsible for their siblings or parents happiness, well-being and emotional support system. Their parent may not be around, so their siblings health and safety is on their shoulders. Alternatively it could be that the parents often fight, and the child finds themselves in the middle trying to make peace, or listen to their relationship problems.
- Household expectations: This creates a huge amount of pressure, it includes the child having to cook, clean, do food shopping and take the bins out etc.
- Caring for themselves: This is often when the child cooks their own dinner, looks after themselves and their overall emotional and physical needs are neglected.
- Providing emotional support: This is when the child is expected to listen to their parents problems, the parent tends to demand validation and attention.
Parentification Trauma Treatment
Often parentification trauma goes untreated until the child grows up and realises that they experienced an unhealthy childhood. At this stage, it’s a good idea to seek professional guidance and support from a therapist.
Top tips:
- Talk to someone
- Journal your feelings
- Acknowledging you were too young to deal with the situation, and be kind to yourself.
- Allow yourself to reflect on your childhood, and label your feelings. It’s common for you to feel guilt and shame, but reminding yourself it wasn’t your fault is a good start.
Self awareness – takeaway
Having been in this situation, and come out the other side, my biggest takeaway was self awareness. This is all about understanding your emotions, behaviours and triggers.
Here are a few examples of how I felt during this stage:
- Inability to connect with yourself, or feel disconnected from others
- Always having to put others first, before your own well-being
- Anxiety – worrying if I said or did something that the other person may dislike
- Someone in a bad mood, and instantly thinking it’s about you
- Having to ‘solve’ other people’s problems, rather than just listening
- Taking on others emotions or problems as if they are your own
- Low mood – self negative talk
- Tendency to people please
- Sruggled to say no to demands
- Feel pressured to meet expectations
- Defensiveness
- Lack of trust
- Difficult accepting constructive feedback
- A lack of empathy for myself
- Feeling that everyone is against you
- Unable to delegate, taking on everything yourself
- Loss of childhood can lead to frustration, anger or low mood
- Self blame or self doubt
Parentification Trauma – Conclusion
While there are many examples of how parentification trauma can negatively impact adult life, it’s important to note that having this responsibility as a child can also create good traits such as empathy, and if channeled in the right way, it can help you build strong, loving and lead to fulfilling and caring relationships. It’s Always best to seek advice, support and guidance from a therapist on how to channel your good nature into a healthy relationship moving forward.
Often, parents who rely on their children as a supply to feed their own emotional needs or agendas are narcissists. Understanding more on this can help you begin to recover and protect yourselves. It can also be helpful to understand the roles assigned to children in a narcissist family.