The Parentified Child: Survival through Misalignment

What is Parentification?

Parentification is best defined by roles in the family system being reversed, where we see children, most often the oldest, sacrifice their own needs to ensure everyone else’s in the system are met. It can be common for children to care about the emotional well-being of their parents and siblings. However, parentification takes this notion much further, where these children feel responsible for caretaking their parents and siblings.

Parentification is divided into 4 types:

Emotional Parentification: The child acts as a confidant to the parent, a counselor, and even a mediator in conflicts or during divorce. They listen to the parents’ problems and hear inappropriate disclosures that they should be protected from. 

 Instrumental Parentification: This is where the child takes on practical support managing key functions for parents with day to day chores and overall household responsibilities such as paying the household bills, cooking, cleaning et al, managing adult responsibilities. In extreme cases, the child may be forced to limit time in school to take on a job to help with the family’s bills. 

 Sibling Caretaking: While taking care of younger brothers and sisters is common, it is not a child’s responsibility to raise their siblings. In parentification, the child is tasked with taking care of siblings much more than simply helping out around the house. 

Parental Caretaking: When a parent is mentally or physically unwell, they may rely upon their child to caretake them. This is a reversal of the parental relationship. This can even blend into a form of codependence when the child becomes responsible to help a parent who may be physically or emotionally suffering and try to support the needs of a parent that go far beyond what a child should be responsible to do. 

One great television example of this comes from the popular show, Shameless. Critics and viewers note the significant parentification of Fiona, the family’s oldest child, on Shameless. Critics highlighted her stepping up to raise her younger siblings since she was a teenager, while her parents struggled with addiction and being in and out of their lives. This show highlights a concerning pattern of parentification where roles in the family become significantly misaligned. 

Development

A family system with a parentified child does not develop suddenly. Oftentimes, cycles of generational trauma impact the system, where those who typically would be in the parental role are incapable of carrying out parental tasks. Past trauma can also impact relationships between parents and children, resulting in enmeshed boundaries and an emotional over-reliance on each other.

Impact and Consequences

There are several negative consequences that parentified children face when put in this position. This specific family constellation is not sustainable for parentified children, as the overload of responsibility can lead to excessive burnout and identity confusion. In addition to managing the day-to-day tasks, parentified children are also expected to provide much of the emotional support to the siblings in the home, while often not receiving support on their end. This can cause these children to feel more alone and lack outside support from their friends, who may struggle to understand the severity of their struggles (Chojnacka, 2020). In addition to further isolation, research also shows how parentified children’s struggles with attachment can lead to significant struggles with romantic relationships in the future, where their old habits of caretaking and communication inconsistencies resurface (Gavcar & Gavcar, 2026).  

How to help

If a family therapist were to receive a referral for a family such as this one, one of the most significant first steps is to validate the struggles the parents have gone through in the past and commend them for wanting to make a change. In addition, commending the parentified child for their efforts to keep the family stable is critical to making them feel supported and seen. Utilizing elements of Structural Family Therapy, clinicians can help the family identify new boundaries and relationship dynamics that they feel comfortable implementing to encourage the parents’ control and leadership of the household.  

Written by Sam Kelly Editorial Revisions by Corryn Ling, Marketing Director

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Sources & References

Chojnacka, Barbara. (2020). The Loneliness and Isolation of the Parentified Child in the Family. Paedagogia Christiana, 45(1), 83–99. 

Gavcar, E. G., & Gavcar, E. (2026). When caring becomes a burden: Childhood parentification and its links to relationship styles, depression, and anxiety in young adults. BMC Psychology, 14(1). 

Wells, John. (Executive Producer). (2011-2021). Shameless (TV Series). Showtime Networks.