Parentification: The Childhood Trauma Behind Overfunctioning, People-Pleasing & Burnout

Far too many women (especially eldest daughters) are wrestling with the aftermath of parentification, which occurs when children have to grow up too soon because of the physical absence or emotional neglect of their caregivers. In this episode, I unpack the many circumstances that can lead to parentification, the deep wounds it creates, and why it’s so damaging for your later relationships (namely marriage and parenting).

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• What parentification is, the various ways in which it occurs, and why 
• The long-term psychological harm children suffer when forced into roles they’re not developmentally ready for
• The difference between instrumental and emotional parentification—and which is more damaging
• How even unintentional parentification can cause inter-generational damage
• Adult signs & symptoms that you may have been parentified so you can work to heal and break the vicious cycle

FOR SO MUCH MORE:

Relevant past episodes on attachment styles:

·      4 Attachment Styles Every Mom Must Know: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2471152/episodes/18536271

·      3 Keys to Secure Attachment: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2471152/episodes/18563959

·      The REAL Reason You’re Triggered by Your Husband & Kids: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2471152/episodes/19087521

Join the next round of Moms Made NewTM so stress no longer sabotages you—or your relationships: https://momsmadenew.com 

Book a free consult with Dr. Amber 1:1: https://tidycal.com/solutionsforsimplicity/free-consult)

HOMEWORK:

Take a deep breath and reaffirm: I am safe. I am enough. If this episode resonated with you, share your thoughts with me via email through the link in the show notes or DM me on Instagram @solutionsforsimplicity. 

COMING UP NEXT:

Join me back next Tuesday at 5am Eastern to keep unpacking the hidden sources of stress stealing your time and joy.

CONNECT WITH AMBER: Website | Instagram | YouTube | LinkedIn 

Ready to finally get to the root of your problems and change your life FOR GOOD? Book your free 60-minute consult to learn more about working 1:1 with Dr. Amber.

Transcript

0:00

When a child is so focused on their parents, they don't get the chance to develop their own identity or be aware of their own needs. They don't get the chance to properly individuate. This often then leads to worthlessness and unhealthy attachment that can sabotage all your subsequent relationships. Welcome to More Time for Mom. where overwhelmed moms get science-backed strategies to overcome the hidden sources of stress stealing your time and joy. I'm your host, Dr. Amber Curtis. Ready to make more time for you? Let's dive in. I so often feel like the messenger, the bearer of what could be seen as very bad news, these deep, heavy things that you might legitimately wish you didn't know. I confess there is absolutely a part of me that wishes I could go back 5 plus years and not know all that I do now, not feel the weight of the emotions that have surfaced as I have had these big awakenings and realizations of my wounds and how they show up all the time. However, I really, really urge you to stick with me and begin or continue this incredible, beautiful journey of self-realization and healing and making peace with your past. Because whether you know it or not, whether you want to know it or not, I guarantee that so much of your past, even if it was really good, so much of your past is dictating your current life experience. And it will continue to do that until you have the awareness and the tools to repair the damage and then really rewire your nervous system for greater safety and capacity. It is so possible. It's what I have been doing, what I love helping my clients do. And so, just please know, solidarity. I am here with and for you every step of the way. Alright, if you listened to last week's episode, I went deep into a recent realization that I have had about what is really happening for me when I get triggered by my husband or kids in the present moment. I want to continue that conversation today, but do so in a way that opens your eyes to a broader phenomenon that so many of us have experienced, but maybe never had words or a label to attach to it before. That is the concept of parentification. Whether you already know anything about it or not, please listen to this episode in its entirety because I am going to unpack it and go through so many layers that you might not have realized or considered, not the least of which is how it could be showing up and affecting you today, all these years later. And then, same as last time, even if you do not personally think this applies to you, Please, please, please listen, because I know someone around you. It might be your spouse, your sibling, the random woman at the grocery store, the parent of your kid's best friend, your next door neighbor. You never really know what someone has been through. And I will say this over and over. I am a broken record, but you have to start seeing everyone's current behavior as simply an indication of how their nervous system got wired to respond to threat. Because every situation is full of stressors and we think that someone is being unreasonable or out of hand or has gone off the deep end, is really overreacting. completely blowing things out of proportion. The reality is that you will never fully know what someone else's nervous system has been through and the way that it got wired to try to protect itself from threats to its physical or social survival. So even something as simple as getting cut off in traffic, or Walmart delivery being out of the one thing you needed to make this recipe, or seeing your kid has tracked muddy footprints up the stairs, or your husband making a comment about what's for dinner. Your reaction in that moment is not about that moment. It is about all the other things that surface and your nervous system is working through based on the protective adaptations that got wired into your brain from a young age. I know that sounds really vague. Of course, we've all had our own unique experiences and every nervous system is, what we say in the statistics world, an N of 1, meaning there is only one nervous system just like yours in the universe. Everyone is unique. But we can draw these overarching generalizations based on commonalities and trends or, again, research studies and conclusions after all these decades of trying to understand the nervous system. Today, we are talking about parentification. You need to know this because it might describe your childhood and bring to light things you didn't know before. You also need to know it so that you can ensure that you don't parentify your kids. Even inadvertently, okay, we really, really want to make sure that whether we were wounded this way or not ourselves as children, that we don't either pass on those wounds or start those kinds of wounds in our own families. As an academic researcher, I have spent quite a while researching the scientific studies behind this and really delving deep into the psychology and the neuroscience of it. Put simply, parentification is when a child has to grow up too fast. They are forced to take on developmentally inappropriate roles or responsibilities. It's especially common that there is this boundary confusion or even boundary dissolution where the child essentially becomes the parent. and has to do things or fulfill a role that normally the parent would do without the child even being cognitively aware of it. We'll first talk about where it comes from, and then we will get into the different forms it can take and the many signs or symptoms that a parentified child might display, especially once you've grown up and become an adult. A 2023 article from the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health defines parentification like this. It's when children and adolescents are expected to become pseudo-parents and pseudo-adults long before they are cognitively and physiologically equipped for these roles. Let me quickly interject that as we are talking about this, it's important to remember that responsibility is good. Yes, we want to raise strong, capable kids that will become self-sufficient adults. But no, we don't want to wound them by making them over-responsible as children, especially on the emotional front, which we will get into. There is such a difference between expecting your children to pitch in and having chores versus the child having to do those things because the parent can't or won't. It's of course hard to put a precise number to this problem. But estimates range anywhere from 2% to 30% of the population might be parentified. I want to offer that while there is undoubtedly more awareness of and attention to this issue now than ever before, if anything, the prevalence would be that much higher in our or any prior generation before us, where cultural norms and everyday realities presumably made it that much more common. As I'm always saying, we want to extend the benefit of the doubt to our parents and to offer what's called unconditional positive regard to everyone. We want to believe, for our sake, that other people were doing the best they could, they genuinely didn't know, or wouldn't have intentionally done this to us, if they knew better or had tools to do better. Yes, sadly, there are plenty of circumstances where parentification might have been overt and intentional, but more often than not, I think it was really unintentional. This same article says that parentification typically results from the abdication of parenting responsibilities, child neglect, or child maltreatment. There are myriad reasons why it might occur. It could be because of parental illness or addiction. It could come from the loss of a parent, whether through divorce or death or imprisonment. It could be because of a parent's mental health issue or physical disability. It could come from economic demands and financial hardship like unemployment or child care challenges, single parents trying to cobble together multiple different jobs just to make ends meet, but then being absent because they were working. Of course, it can come because of crises like war or deployment or migration. And then it can also come from dysfunctional family dynamics where a parent might have been themselves immature, emotionally unavailable, or depressed. Importantly, research indicates that parentification can be passed down generation to generation. because people who were themselves parentified might not realize that there's anything different available to them. Parentification is more common in certain regions of the world, like Southeast Asia. It also tends to be a little more common in larger families, where the older siblings are inevitably relied upon more to help care for younger siblings. It's important to remember that parentification is a really complex thing tied to many other kinds of emotional or psychological issues, like enmeshment, when a child loses their sense of identity and literally does not see themselves as separate or distinct from another person, like a parent. as well as codependency, where someone's self-worth depends on others and you're really overly reliant on either meeting someone else's needs or having another person meet your needs because you haven't yet learned how to do that for yourself or your sense of self-worth is so tied to or derived from another person. The two main ways that parentification occurs are number one, what's called logistical or instrumental parentification, where a child is made to be responsible for tasks and things that aren't appropriate for their age. Well-known examples would be caring for younger siblings, cleaning or cooking, having to care for oneself. In some instances, it involves the child needing to go find work or hire themselves out to bring in extra income to support the family. And number two, emotional parentification, which is definitely the harder or the worst one if we had to pick, although it should be noted that a lot of times someone experiences both. they really tend to go hand in hand. Emotional parentification is when the parent imposes their emotional needs on the child. They are seeking emotional or mental support. Examples here would include being a mediator or a go-between between your parents, being a parent's confidant or having to be told things that a little child shouldn't have to know or worry about, being expected to make a parent feel better or to provide advice, as well as being expected to keep secrets. It also includes having to live up to parents' expectations and kind of having this box imposed upon you about what your parents expect you to do or else. The reason that parentification is so damaging is because it inevitably causes emotional neglect. The child's emotional needs are not seen, appreciated, let alone met by their parents. The child instead is constantly providing for the parents' needs. When a child is so focused on their parents, They don't get the chance to develop their own identity or be aware of their own needs. They don't get the chance to properly individuate. This often then leads to worthlessness and unhealthy attachment that can sabotage all your subsequent relationships. I have made several episodes on attachment styles. I will link those in the description. Another way that parentification is often broken down is by role. This approach looks at whether the expectations are parent-focused, where the child is preoccupied with caring for their own parents, sibling-focused, where they have to devote their energy and attention to parenting and providing for other siblings, or spouse-focused, where the child might even be expected to fulfill the kinds of roles that spouses, adults, are supposed to get from one another. Here is a long list of signs or symptoms of someone who has been parentified. As you listen to this list, you can look out for it in a child or think about whether you exhibited any of these things when you were little. And then I especially invite you to think about whether you are presently experiencing any of these things as an adult. Obviously, each of the things I'm about to describe could come from any number of causes. But if this podcast and the concept of parentification are resonating with you, then you might hear yourself in this description. Remember, that's not to make you feel bad. That's not a bad thing. It is simply giving a name to what your brain and body have been through, what they have known your whole life. Sign number one, is stress and anxiety, being constantly preoccupied with what is done or what needs to get done and how things are going to get done, who's going to do them, etc. Physical symptoms like stomach aches or headaches, The Cleveland Clinic notes that where boundaries have been confused or roles reversed, it's very common that a person doesn't have the ability to recognize their own emotions and stresses, so they manifest as physical symptoms. Aggression, trouble at school or difficulty learning, social challenges, whether that is on one extreme, lacking emotional intelligence, or on the other extreme, being such an attuned, deeply feeling person that you don't have separation between other people's emotions and yourself. You take everything on and feel it for them. difficulty making or maintaining friends, the inability to enjoy age-appropriate activities, neglecting your own needs and feelings, being riddled with self-doubt or self-blame or guilt, Even if you cognitively recognize that you are not to blame and didn't do anything wrong, it can really surface as I am currently experiencing with a lot of anger that is ultimately masking this deep grief over the loss of a childhood you now realize you should have had and didn't get. Substance abuse, eating disorders, addiction, Self-harming behaviors, even things like over-exercise or the pursuit of physical pain as a way to suppress or drive away the emotional pain you don't know how to name and process. Poor communication skills. Unstable relationships. Feeling like you're the go-between or the mediator between your parents. Getting complimented by outsiders on your level of maturity or how great and responsible you are. Feeling more mature than your parents. Fearing your parents' response, especially if they perceive you're letting them down. stunted or what's called arrested emotional development, hyper-responsibility, where you feel a compulsive need to put others' needs ahead of your own, often resulting in burnout and exhaustion, over-functioning as a way of trying to seek external approval or validation to subconsciously earn your self-worth, Having trust issues? Difficulty identifying, let alone sharing your feelings? The list goes on and on. And this isn't even an exhaustive list. I just want to highlight how far-reaching the consequences really can be. And if you realize that you have been parentified, then you get it. I imagine that so many of these things might describe you. I promise we are going to keep unpacking all of this bit by bit, helping to open your eyes and your heart to all that is available for you now, regardless of what you have been through. Your homework for this episode is just to take some deep breaths. Put your hand on your heart and reaffirm, I am safe. I am strong. I am enough. There could undoubtedly be some big emotions stirring as you take all this in. Whether because you are realizing that you were parentified, you're worried that you might be parentifying your kids, you're finally understanding why your spouse might be the way that they are, I encourage you to name and validate all the emotions that come. Even if this feels worse to know, I promise there is so much growth and healing available to you. Thanks to neuroplasticity, it is so, so possible to repair and rewire your nervous system from all these past wounds. That doesn't mean you won't still get triggered, but it means that you will recognize that you are triggered in the moment and then have the ability to respond from your ideal self, not from that wounded place. Reach out to me by email on Instagram at Solutions for Simplicity or by using the link in the description to book your free 60-minute consult so we can talk more. Join me back next episode to keep unpacking the hidden sources of stress stealing your time and joy. Until then, remember nothing you do and nothing that has been done to you changes how wonderful and worthy you are. Have a great day. I know more than anyone how precious your time is, so the fact that you spent it listening to this podcast means the world. Make sure to subscribe, and if you got value out of this show, I would be so honored if you'd leave a review and share this episode with another busy mama who needs to hear it. We've got this.