Parentification and Narcissism Recovery

I mentioned in last week’s post that when a parent triangulates their child into their partner relationship, it results in parentification of the child. Because this is just one of many ways children can be parentified, and because parentification is a wildly common experience in narcissism recovery, it deserves its own conversation.

The internet generally defines parentification as putting a child or teen into an adult role in which they take on adult responsibilities, including taking care of siblings, or emotionally supporting a parent.

While I agree, I’ve found this to be an incomplete definition. It’s more accurate to say that parentification is when parents, directly or indirectly, put children unwillingly into a position of responsibility for adult tasks. Of course, those adult tasks could include responsibility for taking care of siblings, or emotionally supporting the parent, but as we’ll explore, parentification is a broader topic than caretaking.

It's important to make some distinctions when discussing taking responsibility for tasks. Many children and teens enjoy taking responsibility for tasks, and want to be supportive of their parents. They may enjoy taking care of others, or feel proud to support their family. Watching their little siblings, preparing meals or doing chores, or helping a younger sibling with homework may bring them joy and satisfaction.

And research shows children and teens benefit from having responsibilities, beginning early in childhood and all the way through adolescence. Learning how to do a task, remembering to follow through, and successfully completing tasks are important life skills. These successes build a child’s self-concept, as well as helping children and teens improve their mental and physical abilities.

So, what separates learning how to be responsible from parentification? One difference is that when a child or teen wants to complete the task, or they are able to understand the necessity of completing the task, it doesn’t feel like parentification. If a teenager wants to babysit or make dinner, they’ll enjoy the experience. If they don’t want to babysit or make dinner, but they can see their parent needs help, or if everyone old enough takes turns making dinner, then following through on the tasks may not be enjoyable, but it’s understandable.

The other aspect that separates learning responsibility from parentification is the word learning. A child or teen is learning how to be responsible. Ultimately, responsibility for the task falls on the parent. If the child or teen forgets or needs help, it’s the parent’s responsibility to remind or assist. Expecting an elementary-aged child to put their laundry in the hamper, and to help with putting their clean clothes away, are age-appropriate tasks. Expecting an elementary-aged child to be responsible for remembering to wash, dry, and put away their own clothes every week is not. Expecting a teen to help with caring for younger siblings is age-appropriate. Expecting a teen to be responsible for their younger siblings can easily cross the line to parentification.

This distinction becomes even more critical when the topic turns to children or teens taking care of their parent. There’s nothing wrong with a child or teen supporting their parent when they are injured or sick, or with children seeing their parent cry when something sad has happened. Children learn empathy and compassion by being supportive, and learn that grieving is normal and healthy when their parent cries.

There’s a key difference, of course, between being supportive, and supporting. A teen voluntarily making their parent a cup of tea after a long day is supportive. Expecting your teen to nurture you at the end of a long day puts the teen in the position of supporting the parent. Crying when you hear your grandparent died is normal, healthy grieving. Many children, even young children, will spontaneously be supportive when they see their parent cry, and both crying and being supportive are normal and healthy. What's not normal or healthy is expecting your child to comfort you because you’re sad after the death of your parent. This thinking puts children and teens in the role of supporting, instead of being supportive.

It's easy to see how being parentified is challenging for children. Parentified children are expected to understand—and respond appropriately—to situations beyond their age level. Parentified children are hypervigilant. They have limited life experience, so it’s even harder for them to predict when something is going to happen next than it is for adults. And when things do happen, that limited life experience makes it harder to know what to do.

This brings us to an aspect of parentification that’s often ignored: When you’re taking care of your siblings, or taking care of your parent, there’s no one there to take care of you. In other words, parentification means you are parenting yourself. If you were six when you were first parentified, you were raised by a six-year-old. When you turned seven, you were raised by a seven-year-old, and so on.

This kind of self-parenting can also happen as a result of neglect. When a parent doesn’t guide, provide, or protect their child, the child is left to figure it out on their own. Again, if you were six when your parent wasn’t there to guide, provide, or protect you, you were being raised by a six-year-old.

If you had a parent with narcissistic traits, it's likely you were parentified. Parents with narcissistic traits are self-centered and entitled. They expect to get what they want, when they want it, because they want it. If they need to be comforted, they think they should get it. Because they lack empathy, it's hard for them to imagine what it's like to be a child or teen trying to step into an adult role and support them. These characteristics make it easy for parents with narcissistic traits to parentify their children.

Parentification is important to identify and discuss, because its impact can last a lifetime. In particular, parentification tends to lead to anxiety. Foundationally, anxiety is grounded in the belief that bad things are going to happen, you won’t be able to handle them, and you have no one to ask for help. That, in a nutshell, is the parentified child’s lived experience—they lack adult abilities and knowledge, bad things keep happening, and they don’t have a parent they can count on to help them.

So, if you were parentified, what can you do? The first step in healing from parentification is identifying it. Many people who were parentified blame themselves for their mistakes and failures as a child or teen, because they saw their parent’s expectations as reasonable. Those unreasonable expectations can accompany children into adulthood. Acknowledging you were parentified as a child or teen is the starting point for letting go of the expectation that you should be able to do everything, and be able to do it all perfectly.

The other part of healing from parentification is learning to see the world through a different perspective. If you were parentified, you may fear good things happening, because it means the other shoe will drop. You may see your life as “me against the world,” and it’s hard for you to imagine that others will help you.

If so, you’ll want to begin with your circle of control. When you look at how much is in your circle of no control or influence, it’s easy to see that both good and bad things are going to happen. A good thing doesn’t mean a bad thing is going to happen—bad things are going to happen, whether good things happen or not!

It’ll also help you to explore the antidote to anxiety, which is this: Whatever happens, you can handle it, and if you can’t handle it, you can ask for help—and keep asking, until you get the help you need. If you were parentified as a child, and you’re here reading this, chances are you’ve handled some challenging circumstances—as a child or teenager! If you can handle those situations, you can learn how to handle adult situations.

And as an adult, you have access to resources unlike those available to you as a child or teenager. As an adult, you have freedom to ask for help, and to keep asking until you get the support you need.

Naturally, we’re just scratching the surface of parentification recovery today. If you were parentified as a child, you’ll probably benefit from working with a therapist who specializes in family therapy. If your parent had narcissistic traits, you may want to seek a therapist who specializes in narcissism recovery. You deserve a lifetime of health and happiness!

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