I am a youngest child. I am so much younger than my older siblings that we are not from the same generation (and yes, I know generations are made up anyway, but still). My parents are old enough to be my grandparents. I remember several times as a child wanting to do something (play on the playground equipment, see an animated movie) and being shamed for it by my siblings who didn’t want to wait around for me to have a childhood or experience the joys of play. “Aren’t you too old for that?” is a refrain I heard many times until I was around 8 or 9 when I finally stopped trying to be a kid and learned to hide the fact that I was a child which was obviously not acceptable.
My best friend’s parents divorced when we were pretty young. Her mom had a job with long hours, sometimes overnight. Her older sister was mentally slow and had some social problems. Even as an adult, my friend has had to “parent” her sister, making sure she had a place to live, a job, that she was occasionally cleaning her place. It’s one of the main reasons my friend chose not to have children.
These are two very different examples of parentification, and probably not even the most common ones out there. Here are some symptoms that parentification is happening:
- A child seems unusually mature, like a “little adult”
- A child has difficulty expressing their own needs
- They show excessive guilt or responsibility for managing others’ emotions
- They have limited access to carefree play or friendships
- They are over-attuned to others and hypervigilant in relationships
- They feel anxious or ashamed when they can’t help
I was recently reading some comments in Reddit in a discussion about some crazy things that had happened to people growing up in a Mormon family. A few of them shared stories of something psychologists refer to as parentification, when parents expect or demand that older children in the family behave as parents to other family members and deny them the experiences of childhood. One Redditor said that she was so firmly expected, as the oldest daughter in a large family, to be readily available to take care of her younger siblings that her mother told her that if she wanted to “selfishly” go out with her friends, she (the oldest daughter) would have to hire and pay a babysitter!
Parentification can take many forms, but in conservative cultures with strict gender roles, particularly if families are large, this is the most common. Here are some features:
- Rigid Gender Roles. Girls may be expected to handle care-taking of siblings or other family members, prepare meals, serve the needs of the men in the family, or handle domestic duties as an assumption. Boys may be expected to contribute their labor or financial gains to the family pool of resources as minors. They may be expected to “man up” or take on protector roles regarding their siblings.
- Obedience. Conservative homes are more prone to expect deference to parental or male authority. This can lead to the expectation that children are there to serve and be loyal to the family, not the other way around.
- Religious Reinforcement. Some religious teachings reinforce the use of guilt of shame as well as the need to sacrifice for others to encourage children to be treated as adults. Conservative religions reinforce the need for women and girls in particular to sacrifice or help others rather than seeking their own interests and growth.
- High birth rates. Having larger families goes hand in hand with parentification if resources are limited. Older siblings often become the de facto caregivers in these situations, primarily female children, and it can sometimes lead to full-time unpaid labor that limits their social or educational opportunities.
Emotional consequences of parentification in a culturally conservative context can lead to some negative outcomes such as their value being tied to service, not their identity. They also may grow up believing that love is a losing transaction and requires that they give everything they have and expect nothing in return. They may experience chronic exhaustion or avoid caregiving as adults. They may struggle with boundaries, having a hard time saying no because they associate refusing to help with being a bad person. Girls in particular can be acculturated to manage family harmony rather than developing as adults.
Now obviously, this is not to say that children can’t babysit their siblings or other children, that they can’t be given chores, and that they can’t be entrusted with some increasing adult responsibilities over time. Where the line is crossed is when these activities are tied to their emotional survival, where guilt and shame are applied to coerce their “adult” behavior, where the roles of parent and child are reversed, or where the responsibilities are not age-appropriate.
I recall as a teen being strongly pressured into babysitting on a “religious” basis. I disliked babysitting and I had a job from age 16, so I routinely turned down requests and I only ever really got asked if parents in the ward had exhausted all other options. My mother would pressure me to help them out so that the parents could go to the temple or because they weren’t that active in church, so this service might somehow make them more likely to be active. It was portrayed to me as a religious duty, a social imperative. I had no younger siblings and didn’t feel comfortable with babies, so I firmly drew the line there, but I did occasionally get roped into these gigs by my mom’s guilt trips. It definitely didn’t make me want to become a mother as an adult. On the contrary, the coercion made me really question the entire concept of parenting. (Fortunately, voluntary adult parenting really is not that much like coerced teen babysitting). I have often joked that my babysitting mostly consisted of trying to get the kids to tell me where their parents kept the baby aspirin. That stuff was delicious!
Parentification can exist in more liberal-leaning households as well, in which parents treat children like a peer or therapist, oversharing emotions. It can occur in single-parent homes due to necessity. In immigrant families, children may be relied upon to translate or help parents and grandparents navigate an unfamiliar culture. In high-achieving families, emotional neglect may be masked by overachievement; the child is treated as the parent’s trophy rather than being allowed to be a child.
Parentification creates psychological impacts that last well into adulthood:
- Anxiety. Constantly scanning for emotional threats or needs of others
- Low self-worth. Only seeing one’s value in relation to serving or fixing others
- Guilt or shame. Feelings of failure when they are unable to manage others’ emotions or conflicts
- Suppressed identity. Lacking developed preferences, needs, or boundaries
- Depression or burnout. Avoiding caretaking roles or finding oneself emotionally drained in them
As with all psychological patterns, those who experienced parentification are also likely to re-create these familiar dynamics as they create their own families as an adult. They may find an emotionally unavailable partner to care for. They may develop co-dependency.
- Have you seen parentification in Mormon families?
- Have you experienced it?
- How have you avoided it as a parent?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
My daughter had a friend in high school who was the oldest daughter (she did have one older brother as well) of 10. The father had a high paying job, so the mother stayed home to raise the kids. The father also had high profile local Church callings, which are time consuming, but I think he still did what he could with what little time he had remaining. The mother seemed to me to be quite devoted and functioned at a high level as a parent. Both parents were very conservative Mormon parents: no dating until 16, her daughter couldn’t wear the track team’s official tank top because it was too immodest (yet the son could!), all the kids had to wear garment-compatible clothing even though they weren’t wearing garments, etc.
Despite having what seemed like quite a devoted mother, this daughter was asked to do quite a bit of babysitting. There were many, many times that she was unavailable to participate in activities with my daughter and others because of family duties like this. The thing from the post that resonates with me is that this daughter was disliked by a lot of her peers (and my daughter could find it difficult as well) because she was so motherly in the sense that she felt it was her duty to make sure everyone, boys and girls, on the track team (and high school, in general) perfectly followed all the rules. She would scold and lecture her fellow students/teammates if she observed the slightest infraction. In fact, her nickname was the “team mother”, a nickname that most people her age would despise, but my daughter indicated that she felt that this girl actually kid of liked having. If she did this at school, then I rather imagine that this is how she behaved at home as well. Needless to say, this girl was pretty much ignored by all the boys, even though she was otherwise quite smart, attractive, etc.
Yes, this girl was also very smart. In high school, she said she wanted to be a doctor, and I believe she was quite capable of achieving that goal. However, after starting college, she quickly switched to nursing, not because she feared she wouldn’t be able to get into medical school, but because she felt her role was to be a caregiver at home just like her mother (and she herself) had done during her childhood years. It breaks my heart to see someone with that potential and desire give up their dreams largely (or entirely) because of her conservative Mormon upbringing.
Hawk, I suspect that rather than being Parentified, you were raised by siblings, which is another damaging situation as children do a bad job of raising children. Being raised by siblings is very damaging, but that isn’t being talked about in the media, like its counterpart of raising the younger siblings. Parentification is kind of the latest fad. But focusing only on that ignores the damage to younger siblings and the whole family dynamics of dysfunctional parents. Your siblings expecting you to be as grown up as they were did make you grow up too fast, and that is one part that is similar to parentification, but you were not responsibly for their care like the parentified child would be. But, maybe the siblings got married and left you to care for aging parents, so if you were actually caring for your parents at 10, then that is parentification. Not saying it didn’t hurt you, just growing up too fast isn’t parentification. But victims of bad parenting would recognize themselves if the media paid attention to the fact that being raised too much by siblings is harmful. The dynamics in the family are messed up when parents abdicate responsibility of parenting to their own children, usually because they are not able to parent because of some problem. It can be alcohol, physical abuse of the mother, depression or illness, working too much, parents who are too old and tired, or even sexual abuse of children. The problems in the family are bad enough, but being raised by children is hard.
I was the parentified child in my family, which is strange because I was a middle child. The first three of us are close in age, with the two youngest being 3 and 7 years younger than I am. But when we all stopped having a baby sitter, instead of putting the oldest in charge, the oldest girls (me) was expected to “baby sit” not just the younger children, but my two older brothers. If my older brothers chores were not done I got punished even if I had done mine because I was “responsible.” The two siblings that I helped raise were more damaged by the family situation than even I was because I got married young and got out before my oldest brother was injured and my mother totally abandoned the two youngest.
It is the responsibility of caring for others that makes a child parentified. It can be something an oldest girl is rewarded for, so she takes it on for parental approval or copying her mother and in turn mothering other children even at school. Or it can be necessity when the parents cannot handle the parenting. It is more or less damaging depending on how much the child is choosing to step into the roll and how much is family necessity because the parents cannot or will not be responsible themselves.
Anyway, I could write a whole book on this both from the role as a social worker and seeing how it damages both the parentified child and siblings, and having gone through it myself.
Every parent has different circumstances (financial, emotional, physical, etc.). But there is no doubt that a parent can NOT provide the same level of support, both in terms of quality and quantity, to their kids when there are 6-8 of them vs 2-3 of them. Something has to give. I’m not saying parents should not have 6+ kids. What I am saying is that you’re fooling yourself if you believe those 6+ get the same level of support that 3 get. So there are tradeoffs. But unfortunately we have operated for the last 75 years inside an ideology that preached “the more the better”.
I remember listening to a woman talk about how delightful her youngest child (of 6-7 kids) was – a 4 yr old daughter. She said her daughter was so entertaining, so interesting, so fun to talk to, she loved taking her places, being with her, etc. Then she mused, “Were all my kids like this but I didn’t know because I was always so busy with the next one?” Another woman looked her directly in the eye and said, “Probably, yes.” Ouch!
Anna: yes you make a valid point. I was more of an only child, not raised by my siblings, despite being the youngest of 7. By age 11 I was home alone with my parents. I only have a few memories of my siblings being in the home, and they are all related to the stresses of our age gap.
My mother had a tendency to bring me into her grievances as a confidante, including her complaints about my dad and his dad who lived with us in the summers. She also ranted a lot about her childhood, her parents, her aunt, people in the ward. I was constantly trying to manage her emotions. That aspect made me feel like part peacemaker, part therapist. And yet if I ever had emotions that were inconvenient, I was called needy and told to get over it.
I remember not being allowed to join the ward choir because I had to watch my younger siblings. I missed out on my last year of YW camp so that I could watch my siblings while my mom attended camp as a leader. Lots of voluntold free babysitting for temple date nights for lots of families. On the other hand, I also have keen memories of my mother telling me to stop trying to parent or boss around my siblings.
My kids are latchkey kids, starting when the oldest two were 4th and 1st grade. Now the youngest are 6th grade and 3rd grade. It’s been difficult with some of the 5th/6th grade immediately afterschool activities to find backup care for the younger child, but I have been adamant not to deny the older child opportunities because of the need to babysit. Similarly with summer care; the oldest is old enough to keep her siblings all day but I’m not blocking her from sports practices or her camps. She does not want to be in charge all week so I pay for other camps.
Hawk, you are correct that being therapist for your parent is a form of parentification. It makes you responsible for her emotional well being. Instead of turning to her spouse, or an adult friend, or professional, she was dumping her emotional problems on a kid. So, you as child end up responsible for caring for your own parents. There is a role reversal, with the parent acting like an emotionally needy child, and putting too much pressure on a child to be emotional support for the parent’s problems. So, yup, you were a parentified child, even as the youngest.
I guess one point here should be that it isn’t always being put in charge of younger siblings. It is more about the emotional abandonment by the parents and the responsibility that is not age appropriate being placed on a child. And if your siblings were already out of the home and your parents were not emotionally available to help you through problems, then nobody was raising you but yourself. And it is tough to have to raise your own parents, especially when they don’t ever grow up.
My mom did that to me too. Told me her marital and financial problems. I tend to want to defend her that there was physical abuse and she was herself abused as a kid and she was depressed because she couldn’t cope with the bad marriage, blah blah blah. But it was her inability to be the responsible adult that left me abandoned with the sexual abuse. I was emotional support to both parents and put in the position of “wife” to my father because he was worse emotionally than my mother. But the truth is that both parents totally flunked responsible adulthood.
To bring this back to a Mormon topic, my mother did try to reach out to her parents and the church for help. Her parents told her she had made her bed, now she had to sleep in it. The church was even worse, because not only did the church point blank refuse help, the church blamed her for being physically abused, because that is what the church does. They refused any help if she divorced. The church abandoned her and left her helpless to even keep a roof over our heads. Should I mention the snow drifting through the holes in the roof and melting as it found the semi warm air inside, and the church wouldn’t even send over a few elders to help her put on shingles. Yeah, of course I know all this because she dumped it all on me.
And since I learned to take care of others emotionally, I became a social workers. Many parentified children grow up to become nurses or social workers.
Ultimately, everyone is ultimately (to one degree or another) a victim. IMO it does little good to regularly go back and rehearse these events. Rather, one should simply create the best life they can for themselves and loved ones and move on. Life and Nature are inherently cruel. We’re never going to change that.
Grizzbear55 were you specifically made to raise the rest of your sibs while your parents were busy doing church, work and other things? If not PLEASE don’t tell those of us who did to “just get over it”. You have no idea what we went through.
My dad was made the bishop at age 30 when I was only 7. My mom played the organ for sacrament meeting and was in the RS presidency. Our ward was mostly made up of “newlyweds and nearly deads” , so they were gone so much of the time. During sacrament meeting I wrestled with two sibs who continually fought with each other and a brand new baby brother. Another brother joined us later on. At least our building had a cry room at the back of the chapel. It was my salvation.
While my other friends were going to movies, concerts and sporting events I was forced to stay home and watch my younger sibs. After a while these friends quit asking me to go hang out with them because they knew that I had to watch my sibs. As we got older my only sister who was only 2 years younger than me begged my parents to be able to watch over our 3 brothers. The answer was always “No”, and she began to wonder what was wrong with her because our parents didn’t seem to trust her to care for them. This did a serious number on her self esteem. The worst part of this situation was the fact that my parents NEVER asked me if I would watch the other kids. It was just expected.
My mom and dad were 19 and 22 when they got married. Frankly, they were too young and immature to get married. Whenever they quarreled, which was very often, they would both come to me separately and tell me about how unreasonable the other person was. When I tried to explain why I found it inappropriate for them to use me as their marriage counselor I was punished. I couldn’t wait until I could leave home so that I could be in charge of my own life. The only positive thing to come out of this situation is the fact that my sibs love and implicitly trust me. I was basically their mom and dad all rolled up in one.
My story is not unique. Plenty of other Mormon girls who I met in college and afterwards in my YSA ward had similar experiences. Raising younger siblings in large families appears to be very common in the church. This ought not to be.
grizzerbear55 has commented here about he’s a victim because he’s a man and has to do ‘man things’ and yet he doesn’t think the patriarchy is part of the problem for this because . . . who know. So, basically he’s here to be . . call out other people, I guess because . . . I don’t know, he’s not included in this particular situation so it must not matter. I don’t know doesn’t make much sense. Sort of a lame way to deal with things, just saying ‘Well, that’s how it is, but I don’t like it either, but we can’t change it either, so let’s just come here and complain every now in the comments about other people’s experiences when they voice them or when they offer suggestions because they just don’t understand me or the world and like to claim victimhood when I’m perhaps the bigger victim, but I’m better then those people because I can take it sort of.’ Good luck, man. There’s a better world out there that you could help make!
Grizzerbear, you have obviously never had to figure out what the hell is wrong with you because you just can’t function. When you grow up with BIG problems, instead of the petty run of the mill things you obviously grew up with, you HAVE to go back to childhood and figure out what the hell went wrong, so that you can even BEGIN to fix it and go on with life. You don’t walk on a leg that got broken and was never set correctly so it healed all wrong. The doctors have to figure out what happened so they know where to rebake your bones, so they can be aligned properly and finally have a chance of healing correctly. It is a long and complicated healing process. And goody for you that you had the kind of childhood where you were not so damaged that you could not just put it behind you and go on with life. It is not just us feeling sorry for ourselves. It is us trying to fix the god damn mess our parents put us in. Lucky you, now kindly shut the hell up.
Everybody else, please excuse my French. But lucky people who like to blame others for not being so lucky make me sick. They think they are being strong and they are only being judgemental asshats.
grizzerbear55: Yep, you’re right that everyone is a victim in one way or another. That doesn’t mean you have to wallow in victimhood, which is what I think you incorrectly assume is happening here. And it also doesn’t mean you have to just “rub some dirt in it” or whatever stoic manly alternative you seem to be recommending. “Suck it up, buttercup” is frankly how my mother’s own development was stunted (as a child of the Great Depression), so it’s not a wonder that she had a hard time dealing with her own and others’ emotions. It’s not a matter of blaming others or throwing a pity party for oneself. The more we understand ourselves and others, the more we can live fulfilling lives and end dysfunctional cycles rather than perpetuating them. Without this understanding, development becomes stunted at around the age where we learned that we wouldn’t be supported and that our feelings weren’t valid. Instead of living 80 years, you can fall into the trap of living the same year 80 times.
There’s a reason that the meme “some men will do anything to avoid therapy” has become a trend. The more I understand myself and others, the less of a victim that makes me, and the less likely to repeat bad behaviors I learned as a child. But stuffing feelings down isn’t strength, and it doesn’t lead to development. Wallowing is not productive, and neither is denial.