By definition, parentification meaning is when children are placed in the position of caregivers to their parents or siblings, either emotionally or physically.
Parentification varies in its stereotypes by physical forms, such as waking parents up to go to work or cognitively by helping parents to make decisions, giving advice, or serving as confidantes.
Research shows the most common parentification technically identified are mainly emotional parentification and instrumental parentification.
Emotional parentification meaning is defined as a situation when a child is responsible for the emotional distress of the caregiver and acting as a peer instead of being a child. On the other hand, it becomes instrumental when the children are given hard labour that is not appropriate for their age. Here we can say, taking care of sickening siblings or preparing food for the household.
Dr Dawn Snipes, an expert on integrative behavioural health, breaks down what constitutes to be parentification.
“In a moment where a child is experiencing parentification, they may be expected to help the parents to make decisions, give advice and serve as confidants for the things that are either going on in their relationships or at work,” she says.
“Whatever it is, it can be overwhelming for a kid to try to deal with such difficulty because they are kids and can’t develop their skills and tools to deal with life, especially adult life, so when they are to do it.”
Relationally, a child in a parentified relationship may be expected to mediate between adults and caregivers. They are put in this situation where they have to act as adults when the adults aren’t rising to that level.
Dr Dawn says that regularity as a major component of the character must be present to be called a parentification.
“Environmentally, a child experiences parentification when the child is expected, for example, to wake up the parents with regularity,” she said. “When the child has to remind the parent or help the parent get ready to go to work or when the child starts working to help pay the bills, you know obviously that a child is parentified.”
When something occasionally occurs, especially in a home with a single parent, where caregivers may be sick with the flu, for instance, or the child is bringing soup, peanut butter sandwiches, or whatever to the caregiver who is sick in bed, that’s totally different, but it becomes parentification when something happening all the time and a child has to basically become a parent, and the parent is acting in the role of the child emotionally.
Traumatic experiences of parentification
Dr Dawn Snipes argues that when such things happen, there is an ongoing boundary violation for the child. She says in a “parentified relationship”, instead of caregivers being constantly there, responsive to the child’s needs, attentive to the child’s validation what’s the child’s thoughts and wanting encouragement and safety, instead the child finds him or herself doing these in a position of their parents.
“This could be terrifying for the child because they feel like, well, if I don’t do this, nobody is going to do it. It is exhausting; they are not allowed to be children, and they are not able to do things that other children are doing. They are robbed of their time to be themselves because they’re so focused on trying to figure out how to be parents.”
“They don’t actually get time to get the opportunity to actually develop themselves,” she adds.
She warns parentification is more likely to happen when a parent or a sibling has a physical or emotional impairment such as depression, anxiety, addiction, or debilitating or during the divorce period or if one of the caregivers among parents goes away.