“We never had to worry about you.”
Although it’s intended as praise, this common sentence might feel all too familiar to people who were known as the “easy”, “agreeable” or “good” kid: the one that never made a fuss and didn’t take up too much space. In truth, these children may have appeared “low maintenance” because their caregivers left little room for them to express normal childhood needs and emotions.
Whilst some children are naturally self-sufficient, there is a distinction between healthy autonomy and extreme autonomy as a survival response to the unavailability of safe and predictable caregivers. In the case of the latter, these children may have been assigned adult roles, both practically and emotionally, beyond what was developmentally appropriate. For example, they may have been required to constantly perform home duties like cooking, cleaning and caring for younger siblings whilst their caregivers were absent. Alternatively, parents may have confided in them about complex relational dynamics and adult themes, expecting emotional support and advice that was beyond what the young person could reasonably understand let alone provide.
These are all examples of what is called parentification: a term used to describe what happens when a child ends up taking on the role of a parent.
Sadly, children experiencing parentification are unlikely to view these moments as problematic at the time. Our caregivers set the blueprint for what we understand as normal, and it isn’t until we become older, leave the home, or receive other frames of reference for what is healthy/normal, that we truly begin to question the impact of what occurred.
What is parentification?
Originally coined by family therapists Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy and Geraldine Spark in the 1970s, parentification is a term that describes a role reversal inside a family, wherein a child meets the needs of the adults instead of the other way around.
It usually plays out in two forms and it is not uncommon for people to have experienced a mix of both types.
Instrumental parentification takes the form of practical tasks, including cooking, shopping, managing the household budget, being responsible for taking younger siblings to school or helping them with their homework, or booking medical appointments for parents. These are all examples of visible work that are likely to elicit praise from adults, without understanding the toll that this role reversal and the heavy mental load it carries has on a young person.
Emotional parentification is less tangible, more difficult to identify and research suggests that it can have a more profound psychological impact. Examples of emotional parentification could include a child that becomes their parent’s best friend or unofficial therapist. In listening to the details of their parents’ marriage issues and keeping a vulnerable parent company, a child may miss crucial developmental experiences of their own, leaving core emotional needs unmet. Children may adopt the role of keeping the adults in their lives regulated, wherein they may learn over time that their needs and emotions come second, and their role is to keep the peace.
It is important to note that parentification is not often an intentional act by caregivers to hurt their child or minimise their needs. Instead, it is more likely that a family is experiencing significant psychosocial hardship. For instance, a parent might be living with a mental illness or addiction, caring for a family member, or experiencing significant family violence. Similarly, specific events might catalyze a period of parentification, including a divorce, death, financial hardship or acculturation stress when moving to a new country. In some instances, a caregiver might never have had their own needs met, or have been parentified themselves in childhood, resulting in a repetition of what was normalised in the past.
When does helping out become parentification?
Importantly, the involvement of children in contributing to family life or the broader household is not inherently problematic. Children benefit from having opportunities to build their skills and experiences, with scaffolding and support from caregivers, in the healthy development of autonomy. Instead, what is of most relevance here is context.
Psychologist Gregory Jurkovic, author of Lost Childhoods, argued that a child’s broader environment makes all the difference in determining whether parentification occurred. For example, assessing whether the responsibility given to the child suited their age, as well as how long it went on for. Extra support for a parent during a vulnerable time of theirs (e.g., recovering from surgery) leaves a very different psychological impact to an entire childhood spent managing the emotions of one’s caregivers, and subduing their own needs as a result. Interestingly, children whose effort is acknowledged, and who still receive care in return, fare much better than children whose caregiving for others is merely expected, invisible or invalidated. This is because the former still provides opportunities for core needs to be recognised, and a complete role reversal of parent-child is avoided.
Signs you may have been a parentified child
Many of us only recognise parentification in hindsight, usually when we comparatively see our childhood to those of our friends and partners, where big differences may become apparent.
Parentification experiences people commonly describe include:
Knowing more about a caregivers’ money worries or relationship problems than a child should
Struggling to remember a time when you didn't feel responsible for someone's mood
Being the one that siblings came to when they were hurt or scared
Learning to stay quiet about your own problems because the household already had enough going on
Being "easy" or "no trouble" as a way to earn love or keep the peace
Feeling guilty doing normal childhood activities whilst leaving a caregiver at home
Adults relying on a child to smooth over conflict between them
Realising that your birthdays or school events often got lost in the family's bigger concerns
Even a couple of similar experiences to those above, repeated over time can shape how we see ourselves and what we believe we are allowed to need.
Schema Therapy core needs that get missed in parentification
Schema Therapy is grounded in the concept that every child has a set of core emotional needs, and when those needs go unmet for long enough, the child develops beliefs about themselves and the world to make sense of it. Jeffrey Young, who developed the model, described five of these needs. Parentification tends to impact most of them, however, a few of them experience a bigger toll:
Secure attachment
As children, we all need a reliable, warm caregiver than we can trust will be there to look after us. A parentified child, however, often experiences the reverse arrangement. That is, they may feel like they are the caregiver taking care of others, without someone to turn to for comfort or safety.
Freedom to express needs and emotions.
If our caregiver is already overwhelmed, as children we can quickly learn that our own emotions, like sadness or anger, only compounds their distress. As a result, we subdue what we feel or need, which keeps our environment stable in the short term, but leaves us with a longterm belief that out emotions are invalid or intolerable to others. Many parentified adults report that they struggle to identify what they feel, but excel at predicting and responding to how everyone around them feels.
Spontaneity and play.
It’s difficult to enjoy the innocence and wonders of childhood when we are keeping one ear out for trouble, and as such, lots of parentified children may find that they were good at entertaining younger siblings whilst rarely getting to enjoy being a kid themselves.
The childhood need for autonomy is a paradoxical one here, as parentified kids often look extremely independent, and in practical terms they are. Underneath, however, this sense of independence was instilled into them early, in the absence of a safe base to return to. This is an example of competence growing out of necessity, yet the identity that develops around it may be organised exclusively around other people's needs.
Early maladaptive schemas linked to parentification
When core needs go unmet, schemas form. These are deep, long-lasting patterns of belief and feeling that kick in automatically when we experience something that activates the original emotional wound. It is important to note that, whilst there is no specific Parentification Schema, themes of parentification are frequently apparent in a few schemas, generally in combination with one another.
Self-sacrifice
Perhaps one of the most significant schemas linked to parentification, the self-sacrifice schema involves a strong, almost automatic focus on meeting other people's needs at the expense of our own. This is usually driven by an acute sensitivity to other people's pain and a fear of feeling guilty or selfish if you put yourself first.
People with this schema can often be seen as the “backbone” of their workplace, peer group or family. They are also likely to be frequently running on limited energy due to investing it into others, which can result in a sense of resentment that nobody thinks to check on them.
Emotional deprivation
The emotional deprivation schema is grounded in the belief that our need for nurturance and understanding will never truly be met. For a parentified child, this belief was likely an accurate read of the situation, however, as an adult, it can mean feeling lonely even in loving relationships, or struggling to ask for support because we assume that it won’t arrive.
Unrelenting standards
When our sense of worth was tied to being capable, being merely okay at something can feel dangerous. The unrelenting standards schema drives a constant push to do more and do better, with very limited room for rest.
Subjugation
Subjugation is a schema tied to handing control over to others, usually to avoid conflict or someone else's distress. Parentified children likely became experts at reading moods and adjusting themselves to match, and as adults they might say yes when they mean no, or honestly have no idea what they'd choose if nobody else's feelings were involved.
Enmeshment
The enmeshment schema generally develops in contexts of emotional parentification in particular. The enmeshment/undeveloped self schema describes being so emotionally entangled with a parent that our own identity never fully separates. We might feel our mother's anxiety as if it were our own, or feel overwhelming guilt about moving away from her or having relationships/friendships with others, despite being an adult.
Schema modes: the inner child who never got to play
If schemas are the underlying beliefs, schema coping modes are the moment-to-moment states that we shift into when one of these beliefs gets triggered. A few of the most active modes in parentification are:
The Compliant Surrenderer
The compliant surrenderer is the mode underpinning the legacy of parentification. This mode is calm in a crisis and endlessly accommodating of others needs, going excessively above and beyond. Other people love this mode, because they directly benefit from it, however, the person living with it is often left exhausted.
The Guilt-Inducing Critic
Most schema therapists suggest that our inner critic modes carry the voices of early wounding experience. For parentified people, the inner critic can take various forms, but is commonly guilt-ridden. It might sound something like: you're being selfish. How could you even think about yourself right now? It's the voice that makes doing something nice for yourself instead of for others seem self-indulgent or somehow wrong.
The Vulnerable Child
Underneath the competent, independent exterior is a younger part of us who was lonely and frightened and who longed for someone to look after them for a change. Our vulnerable child mode can be difficult to reach because it learned early that its needs were a burden. Many people first discover it in therapy and are surprised by how much grief it carries, as well as how powerful it can be to soothe their vulnerable child during schema triggers.
The Angry Child
It is not uncommon for parentified people to forbid themselves from feeling angry about what occurred. We understand why it happened, and being angry at a parent we love can feel disloyal and unfair. Importantly, however, no matter how much we mask it, resentment has a way of exposing itself. This might be in unexpected circumstances, such as sudden irritation with our partner for not noticing us struggling, or alternatively, a bolt of bitterness for a sibling when their life seems easy whilst ours is riddled with responsibility and exhaustion.
The Happy Child
The happy child within us holds our inherent capacity for play, spontaneity and silliness and for parentified adults it is frequently the most neglected part within us. Some people describe not knowing how to relax without a purpose, or feeling guilty when they're simply having fun.
The Healthy Adult
This is the mode that schema therapy works to build, which is a kind and reliable part of us that can navigate our adult life, whilst making space for our vulnerable child within. The healthy adult is different to the “little adult” that developed early and quickly due to parentification, in that it can look after our needs, as well as considering other people’s needs.
How parentification persists in adult life
It is unlikely for skills that a parentified child develops will merely disappear. Instead, as we grow up with them, we might actually get rewarded for them, which makes the pattern even harder to see.
In relationships, parentified adults often find ourselves drawn to people who need looking after. This is because there is something familiar about this dynamic, where being needed feels safe, whilst being cared for can feel uncomfortable or even suspicious. At work, we might be the reliable one, noticing what needs doing before anyone else does and instantly picking it up. As such, it is no coincidence that a lot of people raised this way end up in caring professions like nursing or social work. With family, we might still be the one that a parent calls when something's wrong, where even well into adulthood, stepping out of the caring role can bring a wave of guilt that feels completely out of proportion.
On the inside, parentified people might describe an odd sense of both capability and imposter syndrome, like a child wearing oversized adult clothes waiting to be exposed as a fraud. Rest might feel unearned to us without self-sacrificing to others first and asking for help can feel synonymous to failing. A painful sense of grief may underly all of this, of which we may struggle to find the words for.
Parentification in context: carers, siblings, culture and neurodivergence
Young carers in Australia
Caring for family is more common among young Australians than many people realise. According to the ABS Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers, 391,300 carers were under the age of 25 in 2022, up from 235,300 in 2018.
Being a young carer is not automatically the same as being parentified, where plenty of young carers are well supported and their contribution is recognised. The risk of parentification increases, however, when the caring expectations are heavy and persist for years, particularly when nobody is caring for the young person in return.
Siblings of kids with complex needs
Some people grow up alongside a sibling or family member with a disability or serious illness. The term "glass children" emerged to describe children in these instances, as parents, through no fault of their own, can end up looking straight through them to the person who needs more. Despite its painful underlying metaphor, it can be helpful for framing and validating the uniqueness of this experience.
Culture and family obligation
In many cultures, children helping their families is normal and valued. Australian kids from migrant families often become language brokers, translating documents or speaking for their parents at appointments. Strong family interdependence is a strength in itself, and as such it absolutely should not be pathologised through a narrow Western lens. The question schema therapy asks is more personal: did you also get to be looked after? Many people hold both truths at once, wherein they are proud of what they did, and they also missed out on something.
Neurodivergence
Neurodivergence can be a double edged sword in the context of parentification. Firstly, a parent with undiagnosed ADHD or Autism may have struggled with the logistics of family life, leaving a child to fill these gaps. On the other side of things, neurodivergent children who learned to scan faces and track every shift in mood often became extraordinary emotional caretakers, at a huge cost to their own nervous systems. If you're an AuDHD adult who's always been the family's emotional radar, both sides may feel familiar.
Healing from parentification: what can help
There is no quick fix for a role we might have been playing since our early years, and recovery absolutely does not automatically require cutting family out of our lives. For most of us, the healing process is about building awareness of our parentified vulnerable inner child, and working to meet that child’s unmet needs. Here are some brief stretegies:
Name the parentification
Many of us feel a surprising sense of relief when we initially learn about parentification, because it turns a vague feeling that a need was not met into an experience that's recognised and shared by lots of other people.
Allow yourself to grieve
Grief brings with it a sense of pain, and it is for this reason that people frequently try to skip this step. We can hold two truths simultaneously:
We can understand why our parents leaned on us AND
Still feel sad about the childhood we didn’t get to have.
Grieving is not a sign of us being ungrateful, but rather, can help us to rewrite those guilt inducing narratives that keep parentification wounds active in adulthood.
Pause before acting on feelings of guilt
When the urge to rescue someone emerges, see if you can allow yourself to take a short pause before responding. In this time, ask yourself whether going above and beyond for this person is your responsibility, or whether the old Guilt-Inducing Critic is running the show. Occasionally the answer is still going to be to help someone else, but setting limits with our guilt inducing critic can allow us to act within reason, without burning ourselves out via compassion fatigue.
Make time for your Happy Child
For many parentified adults, playfulness and silliness are the hardest things to implement and it is for this reason that they have made this list. Allow yourself permission to do something purely because you enjoy it, with no productivity attached. This could be building a Lego set, going to the beach, going to a playground or being creative. Our happy child deserves some recognition, as well as some opportunities to play.
Set boundaries incrementally
There is no obligation for us to officially announce a new version of ourselves to those in our lives, but rather, we can embody the changes we would like to see through setting small boundaries. This may begin with allowing calls to go to voicemail rather than answering them right away, delegating tasks to others, or actively articulating our needs, rather than silencing them for the benefit of others.
How schema therapy helps with parentification
Something interesting that frequently occurs in parentified clients is that in the first few sessions of therapy, they may start to try and look after their clinician. This could take the form of apologising for taking up too much time, and working hard to be a “good” client that doesn’t cause drama or rock the boat.
Schema therapy is unique in that it works with this activated mode in session directly. One of the core elements of schema therapy is something called limited reparenting, where the therapist meets some of the needs that went unmet in childhood, within the boundaries of a professional relationship. For someone who was parentified, simply being cared for without having to earn it can be one of the most powerful parts of therapy. Whilst it can feel unfamiliar at first, over time it can help to heal the inner child and set a new blueprint for a healthy adult to emerge.
Imagery rescripting, another key part of schema therapy, gives us a chance to revisit an early memory, like sitting up late listening to a parent cry, and bring in an adult who takes the weight off the child. Our younger self finally gets to hear that it wasn’t their job.
Chair work can give the Guilt-Inducing Critic a seat of its own, so you can hear what it's saying and start setting some limits with it. It can also make space to say the things you never could to a parent, without the pressure of confrontation.
At The Felt Sense, this work is somatic, trauma-informed and neuroaffirming. We pay attention to how the old role lives on in your body, and work to create a safe place to slowly unmask, and to rewrite the story. We offer sessions in Thornbury, Melbourne's inner north, and online. If you've spent your life holding everyone else together, you're allowed to have somewhere that holds you. Book a free 15 minute chat and we can see whether schema therapy feels like the right fit.
