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Children who experience “parenting” are children who have to grow up too quickly because they are expected to take on the role of parenting of their siblings or their own parents. There are a number of reasons a child can be considered a parent – some are preventable, some are not; however, in either case, the effects of parentification are rapid and long-lasting.
When a parent dies, becomes disabled, or moves out, a child may feel like they have to step in to help their remaining parent. In other cases, parents may not have the necessary financial or other resources, forcing them to rely on an older child to care for their younger siblings. Parentification can also occur when a parent is mentally unstable, copes with addiction, or lacks the emotional ability to act in an appropriate parenting role.
The long-term effects of parentification
Whether intentional or unintentional, avoidable or not, parenting can be an extremely stressful situation for a child, with often long-lasting consequences.
“Parenthood is often a lack of boundaries within a family system,” says Christine Myers, a licensed marriage and family therapist at Thriveworks in Midlothian, Virginia.
A parent is often asked to take on tasks they are not prepared for, such as caring for a very small sibling or entrusting a parent with personal affairs.
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“The child is expected to do things that they may not be able to cognitively and are unprepared for, which can lead to feelings of failure, shame, or low self-esteem,” says Myers.
Parentified children can develop problems that persist into adulthood, such as anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and the inability to develop healthy relationships of their own. For those who became parents as children, breaking this cycle can be very difficult as most of us learn about family relationships by observing our own. In other words, parenting can seem very normal to a child growing up in this environment.
“We tend to what we know,” says Myers.
Even if a person realizes that this parentification was not normal or healthy, they may still have difficulty understanding what healthy boundaries look like in a relationship and how they can be enforced. Therapy can be helpful in addressing some of the thoughts and behaviors you may have developed in order to cope with the stresses of parenting and establish healthy habits for the future.
What to expect from therapy
Dealing with the effects of parenting often means dealing with the dysfunctional beliefs and thought patterns associated with the experience. For example, many children with parenting feel acutely responsible for others, which is a habit that is difficult to unlearn. Therapy often aims to unpack these thoughts and behaviors in order to address and resolve them.
There are also some relationship habits that they need to unlearn, such as extreme independence or the urge to take care of others while neglecting their own needs.
“Children who have become parents often find a large part of their identity in a caring role as they age,” says Myers.
For an adult dealing with the effects of a parent, some of the therapies that can help may help:
Trauma-based cognitive behavioral therapy
That is a Type of therapy This helps patients to identify and address dysfunctional thought patterns and assumptions in order to help them understand their experiences as well as their self-image.
In the case of adults raised as parents as children, this may also mean addressing their belief that they are solely responsible for the well-being of others and their concerns about their inability to assume age-related responsibilities.
Narrative Therapy
Narrative Therapy helps patients to see themselves apart from their problems, to give them enough distance from the topic to understand how it can harm them. This can help give patients a new perspective, one that can help them change their thought patterns and beliefs.
For adults who were parented as children, this can help untangle their acute sense of responsibility towards others and invest too much in their caregiver identity until they neglect their own needs.
Family therapy
Since parentification is a problem that arises from the lack of adequate boundaries within the family, Family therapy can help break unhealthy patterns within a family unit and determine what healthy boundaries should look like.
Couples therapy
Adults who were parentified as children often have a hard time building healthy relationships of their own. Couples therapy can address these issues by helping set healthy boundaries within a relationship and improving communication.
Parentification forces children to grow up too quickly in ways that are stressful and unhealthy. Difficult as the long-term effects may be, parentification doesn’t need to define a person. Instead, with appropriate recognition of what happened and the right therapy, this is a cycle that can be broken.
