Reflection
Parentification: The Child Who Was the Parent
Parentification is an inversion: the child takes the parent’s role, and the parent the child’s. It can be practical: the child who runs the household, raises the siblings, manages the bills at eleven. And it can be emotional, more invisible and often heavier: the child who becomes his mother’s confidant, his father’s therapist, the marriage counsellor of their arguments, the keeper of the household’s mood.
Nobody decides it. An overwhelmed parent, ill, depressed, addicted, or simply alone, leans on the child who is there. And the child never refuses: he does not yet know it is not his role, and he discovers that carrying earns him love. It is often the eldest who is chosen, and more often still the eldest daughter. I have written elsewhere about these children trained like ninjas to read the atmosphere of the house, and about the little girl on permanent watch for fear her mother would take her own life: parentification is the name of their childhood.
The substitute partner
I remember a patient whose father had left. Her mother sank into depression, then into drink. And the daughter was there. She listened, in the evenings, to her mother’s sorrows; she put her to bed, she watched the bottles, she took care of her. Without anyone deciding it, she had become the substitute partner: the confidante, the support, the adult of the household. She was a child, and she held the role her father had left empty. Details have been altered to protect anonymity.
What it produces in the adult
The parentified child becomes a recognisable adult. Hyper-responsible: he carries everything, plans everything, and the mental load feels natural to him, since it has been his habitat forever. Highly competent, and this must be said, because it is real: these children make adults of remarkable maturity, reliability and capacity. But at a precise price.
He does not know how to receive: he was trained to give, and offered help makes him uncomfortable, almost unsafe. He chooses partners to carry, and finds himself in the saviour complex, whose root is exactly this: my value comes from fixing other people. He carries an old anger, buried under loyalty, because you cannot openly resent a parent you spent your childhood protecting. And he carries a grief that was never grieved: for the childhood he did not have.
The work: handing back the load, grieving, learning to receive
The work begins with a sentence the parentified adult takes a long time to be able to say: it was not my role. Not to accuse the parents, who were most often overwhelmed rather than malicious, but to put things back in their place: a child is not the author of the family’s balance.
Then comes the grief: mourning the childhood that did not happen, the games not played, the lightness never known. It is a real grief, and it frees what it passes through.
Then the strangest apprenticeship: receiving. Letting yourself be helped, be carried, without guilt and without debt. For the former parentified child, receiving is harder than giving, and that is precisely why it is the path.
And the therapeutic relationship itself plays a particular role here: it is often the first place where this person is, at last, the one being looked after. Many cry the first time they feel it. That is the beginning of the work, not its end.
I see patients in English and in French, at Harley Street in London, in Paris, and by secure video. See also hyper-empathy and the mental load, the saviour complex, emotional dependency, and the work on trauma. Book a consultation.
