When children shoulder age-inappropriate responsibilities, they can mature into adults with serious emotional scars. How to recognize and treat the imprint of parentification

When Talia was 11, it never occurred to her that there was anything strange about her making Pesach while her perpetually unwell mother rested in the recliner nearby and issued instructions. That was the pattern of her life; Talia mothered her younger siblings, none of them ever receiving physical affection or verbal affirmation from their mother.
With the perspective of decades and the help of supportive therapists, Talia realizes her mother was never a parent toward her.
“I chalish for a mother,” she says, her voice breaking. “Once, as an adult, I visited my parents for Shabbos, and the table was set; I cried for hours. For once, she did something for me. I was the child and not the adult.”

The Parentified Child

A common term for the role reversal that Talia experienced is “parentification.” While popular, the term does not appear in the DSM, notes Michelle Halle, LCSW, and has the unfortunate tendency to become an overused buzzword.
Though it has no clinical definition, parentification describes the process of children taking on age-inappropriate adult responsibilities, whether emotional (such as becoming a parent’s confidant or replacing the emotional support formerly provided by a deceased or divorced spouse) or physical (such as shouldering an undue burden of responsibility for shopping, housework, or childcare). As the word implies, the parentified child is forced to grow up too fast, becoming the parent in the relationship with either a parent or sibling.
Frequently, these relationships can be precipitated by some sort of loss in the family. It could be the loss of a parent, leaving a void in either the physical functioning or emotional well-being of the home, or the loss of a sibling, which creates a pressure on the other children to spare their parents any further emotional anguish.
Parentification can also occur when one parent is unable to manage their responsibilities for any reason, such as physical or emotional illness.
Esther, the only child from a marriage that was both her parents’ second, was younger by far than any of her half-siblings. On a practical level, she ran the house. Her mother started a business when Esther was in high school, so Esther routinely took responsibility for Shabbos cooking and cleaning. When her married half-siblings needed something taken care of, they would call her rather than one of her parents.
As the only one home, she became the therapist for her parents’ volatile marriage, and her mother frequently poured out her marital woes to her youngest daughter. If she didn’t seem to be taking her mother’s side actively enough, her mother would become upset and berate her for her callousness. Her mother’s pain took center stage, leaving Esther with no one to share her own feelings with throughout her adolescence.
Esther was only 13 when the heaviest emotional burden landed on her — her parents separated, moving to different floors of their home. They told her they were only staying married because of her. Esther remembers experiencing a rare moment of candor and telling her mother, “Get divorced if you want, but leave me out of it!” But it took years before she realized how abnormal the situation actually was.
The dysfunctional patterns of her home life manifested themselves in unhealthy friendships from her teen years and on, though neither she nor her loved ones recognized it at the time. “I was always there for everyone,” she remembers. “It was my job to fix everything, and it became a very destructive pattern in my life. I was always the savior in my friendships and didn’t need anything in return.”
Her friendships had no boundaries in place, and, mirroring the dynamic she knew from home, the young men she was drawn to were always needy and unavailable.
Eventually Esther ended up with a dating history strewn with toxic relationships with narcissistic men. At that point she finally took a long, hard look at her life. “What’s the pattern here?” she asked herself. “I’m the common denominator.”
It took still more painful years, working with a series of therapists and self-help tools, for Esther to untangle the baggage of her past. With courage and help, she faced the realization that her parentified upbringing, which had seemed so normal at the time, had left her with poorly-defined personal boundaries, a habit of putting her needs last, and working herself to the bone for a crumb of others’ approval.
Monica Werczberger, a certified codependency recovery coach, sees Esther’s story frequently in her work with clients. “There’s a small child inside who never got to be seen, heard, or feel safe,” she says, describing the typical parentified child who has developed codependent tendencies as a result. “As an adult, you become more disconnected, lose touch, and the inner child doesn’t trust you anymore. You let people step on you, and you don’t set boundaries.”