Understanding Parentification: The Parentified Child & Invisible Trauma

Photo by Jessica Felicio via Unsplash

Trauma experiences that happened in childhood can be acute, chronic, or hidden. Experiences that were traumatic in childhood can have a severe impact on our self-esteem, relationships, and our overall mental wellbeing.

Trauma in itself is a wide topic in the area of mental health, and there particular traumatic experiences that remain unspoken or under-discussed. Parentification is a form of role reversal, where the child becomes the parent - either to their siblings or parents. There are two types of parentification and both forms can be incredibly traumatizing. It’s a toxic family dynamic, that often goes undetected and at times becomes the norm in some cultures.

Emotional Parentification

Emotional Parentification occurs when a parent dumps their emotional experiences, thoughts, and/or feelings on their child. The child may be depended on for emotional support from a parent but not get emotional support from the parent in return.

Instrumental Parentification

Instrumental parentification occurs when a child has to physically maintain the family, which takes shape in many forms like cooking or cleaning for young siblings whilst a parent is a school. Young carers often became the parentified child.

As a result, children who are parentified often grow up too quickly, missing out on their childhood.

The impact of being a Parentified Child

According to research by Cicchett & Toth, 1995; Golden, 1999, not all children that parentified in childhood go onto experience negative effects. However, the majority tend to grow up into adults who may people please, and caretaking characteristics in adulthood.

Many parentified children, may experience high levels of depression, anxiety and eating disorders. A study by DiCaccavo (2005) reflected that parentification can ‘set the child up for failure’, as a child tries to perform tasks beyond their current capabilities. As a result, this may lead to feelings of depression, low self-esteem, and shame.

There are many survival mechanisms that are developed and adopted in childhood. The trauma of being the parentified child can stay with us for a very long time. As adults we can struggle to set boundaries, have difficulty being vulnerable with other people and use humour to disguise how we really feel and even isolate ourselves, push away love and intimacy for the fear of being engulfed. We may even become perfectionists, finding it difficult to relax and try to control everything and everyone around us. When you grow up as a parentified child, you automatically assume that everything is always your fault, your inner critic terroizes you, telling you aren’t good enough or doing enough. At some point, you have to develop the courage to stand up to your innner critic, silence or befriend it.

Healing Parentification

Becomes parentification is an invisible trauma and often goes undetected until adulthood, it is important to work through this trauma by re-parenting yourself. You may even need to grieve what you didn’t have in childhood. If you have poor boundaries, you will need to work with a therapist to learn and develop healthy boundaries in all of your relationships.

Working through feelings of being a parentified child can be difficult and that is why it is important to develop self-compassion, as opposed to self-contempt. There is where inner child work can be very powerful and healing because we get to tune into ourselves and comfort the young child within us that was once neglected.

Developing a support system can be equally as healing, and make the process a little easier.