4 Signs You May Have Been 'Parentified' As A Child

It’s common for parents to gradually give their kids more responsibilities as they grow up. When those responsibilities are age-appropriate, that can be a good thing and help the child build skills like accountability, independence and teamwork. But when a child is saddled with adult responsibilities, it can turn into a damaging phenomenon known as “parentification.”

Parentification is essentially when the child and caregiver swap roles. So the kid is emotionally supporting the adult (known as emotional parentification) and/or managing the logistics of the household (known as instrumental parentification). Emotional parentification tends to be more harmful than the instrumental type.

″[It’s] the phenomenon that happens when a parent relinquishes the role of parent and a child feels the need to step into that role,” Kristene Geering, a parent educator at the family resource Parent Lab, previously told HuffPost.

“So instead of the parent taking care of the child’s needs, the child takes care of the parent’s needs,” she said.

Expecting your kid to be a contributing member of the household by putting away their laundry, cleaning up their toys or feeding the dog is not the same as parentification. Parentification is when the burdens placed upon the kid are excessive and prolonged,putting “an emotional toll on the child and getting in the way of developmentally appropriate social, emotional and academic endeavors,” Dr. Khadijah Booth Watkins, associate director of the Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital, previously told HuffPost.

Examples of parentification might be if a child is expected to act as their parent’s therapist, be the caregiver for younger siblings or the peacemaker during