Family of Origin Roles Series: The Parentified Child (From Confidant to Consultant)
This article is based on the Reimagining Love podcast episode “Family of Origin Roles Series: The Parentified Child (From Confidant to Consultant).” To listen to this episode, click here.
Welcome back to the blog! This article is part of a series of six articles (based on solo episodes of the podcast) that we’ll be sharing here over the next few months about Family of Origin Roles.
The introductory episode of the podcast came out a few months ago, so if you didn’t have the chance to listen to that, I’ve linked it here. We also just released the FINAL podcast episode of the series, and we’ll ALSO be sharing a really robust free workbook that’s going to take the themes and concepts we’ve been exploring in this series and walk you through a personal transformation process, through just a few simple exercises. And it’s all going to be rooted in this understanding that the role you played as a young person shapes your beliefs and your relational patterns today. If that resource is of interest to you, make sure you’re signed up for my newsletter—I’ll be sharing it there. You can go to dralexandrasolomon.com/subscribe to subscribe to the newsletter.
Today’s article is all about the Parentified Child role. Remember that this work is about getting to know yourself, but it’s also going to help you get to know the people around you. So even if you suspect that you’re not a Parentified Child, I hope you’ll still read this article. It could help you better understand someone close to you and lead to deeper connection with them. Our plan for this article: we will look at the origin story for the Parentified Child, the cultural factors that might create and reinforce that Parentified Child role, the impact of being a Parentified on friendships, work relationships, and intimate partnership, and then interventions– not to fix you, but to liberate you from old stories that you must tend to other people’s emotions to keep yourself safe.
Hallmarks and Examples
How do we identify the Parentified Child within a family system? And how do you know if that was you? With all of these roles, we ask, “How did this child attempt to create emotional safety for themselves and stability for their family?” So here, the common theme among Parentified Children is that they attempted to create emotional safety in their family system by tending to the Big People’s needs and emotions. Here are some telltale signs that you were the Parentified Child in your Family of Origin. Your parents relied on you as a sounding board, an advisor, or a shoulder to cry on. The adults in your family often treated you as a part of their “tier” even though you were a kid. You were on the receiving end of confessions, tears, and big emotions from a parent who was struggling, and you provided comfort to them with your words and/or your presence. You were told you were, “so mature for your age,” wise beyond your years, or an “old soul” As an adult, you feel on edge when the people around you are struggling with big emotions and rush to their assistance with advice, ideas, and comfort. Self-care feels selfish to you. Caring for others feels automatic and assumed. And, for each of our 6 roles, I am assigning a sort of BUMPER STICKER or catch phrase. For the Parentified Child, the motto or core belief is this: I’m loved to the degree that I’m nurturing.
I want to share some examples of the Parentified Child in pop culture that my team and I came up with. Think of Rory from Gilmore Girls, and the way she and her mom Lorelei have very few boundaries between them, and how she serves as a confidant to her mother during difficult moments. Think of Fiona in Shameless, and how she has to take care of her siblings and her alcoholic father. Similarly, think of Maeve from Sex Education.
Todd Solomon contributed a few ideas here. See what you think of these:
Paul Rudd’s character vis a vis his father played by Albert Brooks in the movie, This is 40.
Mark Wahlberg vis a vis his father in Daddy’s Home
The original Karate Kid, Daniel LaRusso in his relationship with his mother.
And then he really went into the way-back machine to pull out Angela and her mother, Mona, on the 80s classic, Who’s the Boss.
By the end of this article, I bet you’ll be able to think of some examples of your own. Send me an email or a DM and let me know who you come up with!
Origin Story: FOO
So, what forces might have contributed to you being cast as the Parentified Child? How did you come to be that way? First, I want to note that you’re going to notice some overlaps between this role and the Peacemaker, as well as the first role we talked about in this series, the Perfect One. These roles have key distinctions, but they all feature “over-functioning” tendencies. If you identify as any of these three roles, you’ll probably find content that supports you in all three of those articles. In the case of the Peacemaker and the Parentified Child, a young person was pulled out of their role as a child and plunked into the adults’ business, in an effort for the system to create an approximation of stability. The Peacemaker and the Parentified Child had to exhibit adult-like qualities or navigate between adults way too early.
When it comes to differentiating between the Peacemaker and the Parentified Child, here’s what you’ll want to keep in mind. While the Peacemaker placed themselves between family members, either through mediation, distraction, or humor, the Parentified Child served as an emotional support system for one or more members of her family. In other words, the Peacemaker used doing as a conflict-defusing strategy, while the Parentified Child used being: being there as a listening ear, a shoulder to cry on, or a friend to vent to.
A word I’m going to use throughout this article is “enmeshment.” Enmeshment refers to the blurring of emotional boundaries between family members, and it’s certainly at the heart of the Parentified Child’s experience. We can discern between healthy closeness and enmeshment with a few check ins:
Closeness between parent and child is predicated upon both parties choosing, enmeshment is about duty or necessity.
Closeness feels mutual, enmeshment feels one-sided.
Closeness ebbs and flows (we move toward each other, we move away from each other), enmeshment feels like stuckness.
Closeness leaves both parties feeling connected, light, and calm, enmeshment leaves one side (here the Parentified Child) feeling depleted, anxious, and burdened.
In a close relationship, the parent is mindful of not sharing too much, the parent checks themselves. In an enmeshed relationship, the parent is not mindful and does not check themselves.
In a well-functioning family system, the Big People generally keep their inner worlds and life challenges in the “adult tier” of the family, talking things out with their adult partner, adult sibling, their own parent, their friends, or a therapist. The Parentified Children grew up in a system where one or more Big People had very loose boundaries with what they shared emotionally. Even more, that child was pulled into their Big Person’s big emotions and was relied upon as a source of comfort or validation. They had to provide endless sympathy to the Big People who were taking care of them, in order to ensure they themselves would be safe (“I am going to prop you up because if you feel better then maybe, just maybe, you can give me what I need”). And, to make matters more confusing, the Parentified Child was often made to feel that this was their superpower or special skill. So, to the adult Parentified Child, Love feels like agreement to lose yourself and to endlessly give. If you were a Parentified Child, these are some of the core beliefs you may have carried around with you back then:
I cannot be okay unless the big people are okay. My job is to love them back into their okayness.
I take my attachment figure’s side no matter what. “Yes, Dad is unkind.” “Yes, Grandma doesn't appreciate you the way she should.” “Yes, your boss is the worst.”
And again, our bumper sticker: I'm loved to the degree that I'm providing comfort
What leads a family system to “parentify” a child? Well, there are many reasons, some having to do with internal and emotional qualities of the members of the family, and others due to external stressors—or a combination of both. In a family where one or both of the parents were really struggling, who felt like victims of their own lives and likely were in some ways, whether they survived trauma or war or poverty, or who were living in very difficult circumstances, these dynamics are much more likely to arise. If parents have not tended to their pain and their wounds and are overwhelmed by life and old pain, then the system benefited from you attempting to provide comfort. We can have so much empathy for parents and families in situations like these. And at the very same time, we can acknowledge that it was not appropriate for a child to be expected to comfort the adults in their home.
You were not a trained therapist at that time (though, spoiler alert, you probably became one when you grew up), but that was your effort to create stability within the system and therefore to try to create some approximation of emotional safety inside of you. When we're little kids, we actually can't be okay if our parent isn't okay. And if you have a parent who cannot get out of bed, bringing them toast, climbing in bed with them, wiping their tears, are all ways of trying to do something, some approximation of trying to make it different, or to at least join them in that world.
Parentified Children are also forced to side with their struggling parent. They take their side no matter what. An emotionally immature parent, or an emotionally ill-equipped parent, isn’t able to see the part they play in relational challenges, so they’re in need of backup support for their point of view. This is the hallmark of an emotionally immature parent—they can't really see their role, and how as adults, we cocreate our circumstances. If you grew up with a parent who lacked the ability to see their part in whatever their dynamic with their own mother was, or their partner, then your parent was stuck in this victim stance. Their narrative was: Nobody understands me. Everybody's against me. I try so hard to make your father happy. I do so much for my mom and she doesn't see it. And so when that's the refrain, the Parentified Child enters that reality, and they begin to echo it. They internalize the messages their parents are projecting, because at the end of the day, they’re kids!
For the Parentified Child, validating these stories is an unconscious attempt to make their parent feel better, to boost them up. When the child does this, they get a pat on the back, hearing: “Nobody understands me like you do. I'm so lucky to have you.” And herein lies the Parentified Child + Parent cycle: the parent is hurting, the child provides comfort, and then the child is validated for giving that comfort. They understand that dynamic as their best opportunity to get attention and love. And that sticks with them far beyond childhood. It becomes a part of the child’s self- definition: I am good when I'm comforting. This is now the established pathway for affirmation, for self-esteem, for connection.
As a Parentified Child, you may have been complimented for being “mature for your age” or “so grown up.” But the reality was you were having to act like an adult when you shouldn't have needed to act like an adult. Most likely, the Big People around you were not conscious of the dynamic and the role you were playing. For them it was just like, “Sweet! I have this great kid who’s like a little therapist in my pocket! They always know what to say and we have such a close connection.” What they could not see, crucially, is that they were reinforcing a narrative that primed their child to have difficulty separating their own emotions from other people's emotions.
As Parentified Children become teens, they may be the type of kid who steers clear of teenage milestones and mischief, or if they do, these behaviors are shrouded in secrecy. Blowing off steam or getting in a bit of trouble don’t fit with the Parentified Child’s narrative of themselves. Secrecy breeds shame, and the Parentified Child may be particularly at risk of this cycle in adolescence. Or, they may forego these normal teenage behaviors altogether because they skipped over that developmental phase and had to go straight to being an adult. The Parentified Child wasn’t given the space to be reckless, or silly, or selfish. And those are actually really important qualities for adolescents to act out and reckon with. If I'm good to the degree that I'm my sad parent’s therapist, then there's the idea that I can’t mess up. I don't get to be immature. I’m more a part of the parental subsystem than the kid subsystem, so I’m cut off from those experiences.
I want to put a big ole reminder here that family structure per se does not guarantee a child taking on a particular role. I’m thinking here about single parent families, which are usually single mother families. Single parent family systems tend to be more democratic, less hierarchical, so it may be the case that a kid, especially an oldest kid or a female kid, may be somewhat more likely to become parentified, at least to some extent. In the case of a single parent who is managing a family all on their own, with no partner to lean on, vent to, and share responsibilities with, you can see why a child could so seamlessly be cast into the Parentified Child role. It’s understandable! But there are factors that impact how deeply and how desperately the kid takes on those parentified qualities. Risk factors for a kid becoming a Parentified Child include:
The single parent is isolated, lonely, and overwhelmed
There is financial instability
There’s an absence of community or extended family support
The single parent is not engaged in their own healing work
What are the protective factors that can keep a kid from becoming burdened with that parentified role? It’s when that single parent is doing what they can do to resource themselves and create the healthy boundaries kids need between “kid stuff” and “adult stuff.” And by the way, I’m so proud and in awe of all the single parents out there who exhibit this, despite undoubtedly grappling with the loneliness and intense load of single parenthood.
I’m saying that family structure on its own is far from determinative. A two-parent family system where the parents don’t feel supported by each other for whatever reason creates the conditions for a kid to take on that Parentified Child role. Partner A isn’t getting what he needs from Partner B, so they go to this child to vent, get validation, or confess things they feel they can’t communicate to their partner.
This is all to say, the likelihood of a Parentified Child dynamic emerging is less contingent on the parent’s relationship status, and more contingent on the relationship quality. A supported and grounded single parent isn't leaving a ton of space for a kid to become a Parentified Child, but a single parent who is not investing in Relational Self-Awareness is. A thriving marriage is not going to leave much of a space for a child to become a Parentified Child. But a lonely marriage will.
CULTURAL/GENDER
We’re now going to talk about how our cultural location and socioeconomic status might amplify and intersect with the Parentified Child role. Of all of the roles, this one might have the most intersections with cultural factors. Starting with gender—we know girls are socialized to “play house” from a very young age. They’re taught that caregiving is an inherent part of who they are—think baby dolls and play kitchens—and they are praised for being gentle and comforting. This primes young girls who are in a position to be brought into that parental subsystem to really get absorbed in that caregiving role and to feel proud of the comfort they can provide, even though it’s inappropriate for them to be doing this as a child.
For men who grew up as a Parentified Child, moving through adulthood and their own relationships can feel complicated. His entering into a relationship of his own may feel like an abandonment, either because there's direct messaging coming from the mother about this, or simply lingering guilt from knowing how central he is in his parent’s world. He might feel discomfort about “leaving” his parent now to take care of himself or to follow his own happiness. When that male Parentified Child is cis hetero, and his mother is overly reliant on him for emotional support, I often see that painful and complex triangle between the man, his mother, and his wife. If this touches a nerve, know that we talked about complex in-law dynamics in episodes 46 and 47 of the show.
When it comes to race, we know from research, for example, that the “Adultification” of Black girls is very real. A groundbreaking study from the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality provided data showing that adults view Black girls as less innocent and more adult-like than their white peers, especially in the age range of 5–14. If the world is already seeing you this way and sending you messages that it’s time to act like an adult and that there is no room for your silliness, your experimentation, and your play, that’s only going to solidify an already-Parentified Child’s view of themself.
Here are a few other ways we need to take culture into account. When I think of Parentified Children, I also think of families who immigrated to a new country without a lot of familiarity with the language or culture. As kids growing up in that new environment and attending school, it’s possible that they are absorbing the language and culture more rapidly than their parents, and therefore play more important roles than a second or third or fourth generation child around helping the family—as a literal language interpreter or kind of a cultural translator for the family. Helpful and essential, and also, a heavy weight for a child to bear. If a family is struggling financially and there’s a lot of stress and internal pressure and parents working long hours and multiple jobs, this could amplify a parentification situation as well. If a parent has a disability or becomes disabled, parentification may happen. In these examples, pragmatics and necessity rather than family dysfunction are driving the parentification process. And regardless of the etiology, or the reason why, you need to understand how your role shaped you then and echoes inside of you and within your relationships today.
INTERPERSONAL
Let’s fast-forward now to the present moment and look at the Parentified Child as an adult– at work, in friendships, and in relationships.
WORK
Soooo…in terms of work, you're probably a therapist or helping professional. At least you get paid now for a service you provided then for free! But in all seriousness, it makes so much sense that your experiences growing up led you to develop gifts in empathy, care, and leadership. You may have followed these threads and become a nurse or a teacher or a school counselor. But whether you’re in a helping profession or in a more traditional corporate environment, you might be seen as a safe ear for venting on any team you're on. It’s probable that you take on more than you need to in terms of providing comfort and solace to team members. And similarly to the Peacemaker, you might find yourself as someone that accumulates mentees at work—people are drawn to you as a mentor, because you have warmth, empathy, and you’re really that person who has their finger on the pulse of the organization. You feel safe and generous and mature to others. Parentified Children may also be at risk of experiencing imposter syndrome and may struggle to seek out support when they need it. They see themselves as the one to be helping others, not the one in need of help.
FRIENDSHIPS
Let’s explore the Parentified Child in the context of friendships. The theme I want to talk about here is one we’ll continue to discuss when we talk about intimate partnerships in just a moment, but it applies to friendships, too. For the Parentified Child, there can be a kind of ambivalence about closeness. Why? Because closeness feels both familiar and assumed or expected. It’s both something that they’re very comfortable with, and something that feels like a chore. Closeness feels like both a desire and an obligation. For a Parentified Child, the line difference between responsible to and responsible for feels blurry af. A reminder here that the Parentified Child's first experience of closeness was a misuse of closeness. So when the opportunity for closeness presents itself as an adult, it’s going to kick up those old wounds, when you had to be an adultified child and when you lost yourself in someone else’s emotions as a way to attempt to keep yourself safe.
The thing is, though, that actual intimacy is when there's space for two people's experiences. Actual intimacy is intersubjectivity. Traveling between my world and your world. Traversing between my experience and your experience. I visit your world to feel close to you, but I come back home to mine. And intimacy is mutual. It’s me understanding your world and you understanding my world. Back then in your family of origin, that wasn’t the template. So for the Parentified Children in a friendship, it can be almost a push-pull: I want to be close, but I don't know that I can trust you to not swallow me whole. I’m scared you’ll expect me to be your everything or that you’ll need me to care for you. I would urge Parentified Children to seek out connections with folks who you sense really have their feet beneath them. This is going to be the space in which you can develop the kinds of healing connections you deserve, and where you can explore deep connection that honors both your experience and your friend’s experience.
INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS
In intimate relationships, this ambivalence about closeness is going to be kicked into high gear. Parentified Children are primed to confuse closeness with need. So, they’re going to have a hard time feeling like their partner wants to be close to them, instead seeing their bids for intimacy as needs or requirements.
If two folks who were Parentified Children come together in a romantic relationship, there’s going to be a lot of common ground. That glorious sense of, “hey, I get you. I know your experience.” But I also urge these two to start by exploring their unique origin stories and honoring the differences between them. Perhaps Partner A was providing support to two struggling and emotionally volatile parents, while Partner B was a confidant for his overworked single mother. Those are two very different sets of circumstances that should be unpacked and understood before making assumptions about shared experiences. When these partners come together, they’re going to share an unconscious expectation that they will lose themselves within the experience of closeness and intimacy, because that’s what happened when they were little. What's easy for these two is getting close. What's difficult is staying differentiated, being able to step away from each other without guilt.
Whether the Parentified Child is partnered with another Parentified Child, or someone who occupied a different role, the healing journey for a Parentified Child in a romantic relationship is learning how to offer support without overfunctioning or blindly validating. Being able to say things like: "Okay, I can see that your boss is a dick… and I wonder if we can also look at some of the ways you might be playing into this dynamic.” Being able to blend validation and gentle, empathic challenge is so healing for a Parentified Child, because they get to feel supportive and separate. This is what I want the Parentified Child to experience in their adult intimate relationship– it’s the medicine that can help them repair what was taken away from them as kids.
I do think a Parentified Child is at somewhat greater risk of having issues around jealousy in their romantic relationship. If I am a Parentified Child and my partner is getting close to a co-worker, or taking a weekend with their friends, it may feel threatening to me. I worry that your need for others indicates that I am not enough for you, what I have to offer is inadequate, subpar. And if you need other people in your life, then maybe you don't actually need me. And if you don't actually need me, who am I to you? Rational? No. Wholly understandable in the context of the impact of this role? Yes. The Parentified Child is primed to feel threatened by things or people that take their partner away from them and that confirm that other people or experiences are capable of meeting their partner’s needs. The healing of course is in me, the Parentified Child, affirming to myself that I don’t have to mean everything to my person to mean something to my person. And it’s actually a blessing and a relief that my person has lots of sources of comfort and connection. In my adult relationship, it’s not all on me the way it was back then. Connection is a renewable resource. My partner’s connection with others does nothing to diminish their connection with me!
If we want to think about specific cross-role pairings, I am thinking about how if you are a Parentified Child and your partner is a struggling one, that's just like a hand-glove situation. The Parentified Child is primed to view their partner as their responsibility, and the struggling one has a history of creating connection via needing help or needing attention.
On the flip side, if you are a Parentified Child and you meet someone who is grounded, self-sufficient, and in touch with their own needs and emotions, as much as you might admire and be drawn to them, it can be really confronting for you, like where do you fit into their world? But, that relationship dynamic ends up being really healing for you, because your connection with this grounded person allows you to rewrite your definition of love. Now, rather than love being the unilateral provision of care and comfort, love is two people bringing their experiences together and sharing them. Both partners get to have needs, desires, and emotions.
If you are the partner of the Parentified Child, the message I want you to give your partner is this: I appreciate you, and I love your support. But I actually don't need your support. And, the fact that I don't need your support is not a rejection of you. It's an affirmation that you have chosen a competent partner. And thank goodness you did! Instead of putting your focus on me, turn that focus back on yourself. The care you historically offered to others? Well, now you get to offer that care to yourself. And I will cheer for you when you do.
TREATMENT
Let me share some specific liberatory practices for the Parentified Child, so I’ll just speak directly to you now.
Somatic healing, or body-based healing, is especially critical for you. You likely need practice being in your own body. You have experienced emotional boundary violation, so you need practice feeling where you stop and the other person begins. Body-based practices are so good here. Breathwork, movement, mindfulness, yoga, etc. I love the work of Dr. Hillary McBride. She has been a guest on Reimagining Love.
Self-care has become such a generic and overused term. But what I want you to be doing is getting explicit when you are offering care to yourself. Rubbing lotion on your body after a shower. Notice how loving you’re being of yourself. You put your phone down and go to sleep instead of doomscrolling. Notice how you’re caring for yourself. You ask your boss for an extension of a deadline. Notice how you’re advocating for the breathing room you need. Your healing work is about taking the care you so readily offer to others and extending it to yourself. The practice here is to talk to yourself about it. Narrate it. Make it explicit.
Your healing is about creating relationships where you can give because you want to rather than because there's an expectation that you have to, or because the other needs you too. And you will need to be intentional to notice that feeling of mutuality, like land it inside of you– that feeling of choice, that feeling that this person is drawn to you for you, not for the comfort you provide. That's the goal— for you to create relationships where you get to have the experience as an adult that contrasts what you knew as a child. And for you to feel that the care you give is additive, optional, lovely but not essential. Your care sits on top of the care this person is getting from other people and it sits on top of the care this person is giving themselves.
I’ve done this with each of the articles, I’m going to close with mantras for you, Parentified Child. Feel free to write these down in your journal, pin them up on your bulletin board, or record yourself reading them as a voice memo on your phone. Ok, here we go:
Like the old saying goes, I put my own oxygen mask on before helping others.
Martyrdom isn’t love.
I care for myself today to honor my inner child.
When I was little, I couldn’t rest. Now I get to rest.
The love I give to the people around me, I also give to myself.
Loving myself is not a rejection of the people around me.
I’m not defined by my ability to make other people feel better.
Conclusion
As a reminder, if you’d like to take the roles quiz, you can find that link here. We’ll be back next time with an exploration of the final role: The Rebel. To all the Rebels out there, thank you so much for being patient! As I mentioned at the start of the article, we’re now sharing a free workbook with tailored journaling prompts and practices for all of the roles, so if you’d like to receive that in your inbox when we share it, make sure you’re signed up for my newsletter, which you can find a link for in the show notes. Or, visit dralexandrasolomon.com/subscribe to get added to the list. Thanks for joining me, and until next time, be well!