The Loneliness and Pain of the Parentified Child

Parentification is a phenomenon that occurs when there is a reversal of roles between the parent and the child. This can be in the form of a functional role reversal, whereby the child takes on practical tasks that are normally attributed to parents, or it can be psychological, whereby the child attends to the parents’ emotional needs. Parentification, psychologically, is a form of childhood trauma, mainly characterised by either emotional or practical neglect (Hooper, 2007). It usually leaves devastating consequences on the individual’s psychological wellbeing and their capacity to engage in fulfilling close relationships in adulthood.

I will here attend to a specific aspect of parentification, which is the parentified child’s experience of it, specifically the experience of loneliness, a sense of solitude, and abandonment experienced by the parentified child, as well as the experience of the lost childhood (see also Chojnacka, 2020). Individuals who were victims of parentification carry within them some of the most profound experiences of aloneness, deep sorrow, isolation, and feeling lost. These experiences are often buried deep within the unconscious, but continue to influence the person’s adult life, their sense of self, and their close relationships—often with devastating consequences.

The Parentified Child’s Experience of Loneliness and Lost Time

As the child is given a role of their parent’s caretaker or the caretaker of their family, the child is not only given a role that goes beyond their emotional and practical capacities, but also invaded and violated from the perspective of intergenerational boundary between the parent and the child.

Through parentification, the parent invades the child’s integrity and violates the child’s identity. The child’s individuality is hijacked. The child is taken hostage. Their focus turns away from themselves towards the parent, leaving behind a trail of desolation and pain.

The parentified child needs to attend to the parent or risk rejection and abandonment. As such, parentified individuals often feel hostage to their parents even as adults and experience immense difficulties with boundaries both in relationships with their families of origin and in other close relationships.

If left in a situation where the child needs to decide whether to fulfil their parent’s needs or face rejection, abandonment, isolation, blame, anger, disapproval, the child will inevitably chose to please the parent. However, when the child is left in such situation, the choice is no longer a choice. The child cannot chose between meeting the needs of the parent or facing rejection but is rather forced into it.

As the child faces this dilemma, they will turn away from their own authentic needs—the needs they are desperately looking to the parent to meet—and focus on their parent's needs. In this process, the parent's needs prevail. The child's needs, conversely, are disavowed and pushed into the unconscious where they don't need to evoke an experience of pain, anger, and sorrow.

From that moment on, there is only the parent that exists—the child becomes an empty shell; a vehicle of soothing the parents distress, meeting their needs, tending to their every move. This is an experience of psychological abandonment. The child is thrown into the void of desolation, feeling alone, unseen, and inexistent. The parent may be physically there, however, the parent’s lack of acknowledgement of the child results in an experience of immense solitude and isolation. The child feels alone, left to their own devices.

In that moment, the child is stuck in complete dependency on the parent and is not only not encouraged to individuate but also denied the right to individuate and become their own person. Namely, as the child’s role becomes one of meeting the parent’s needs, the child begins to need the parent and their needs so that they can have a sense of self and self-worth.

The child’s needs are associated with selfishness. As an adult, such individual will usually feel selfish for meeting their own needs and attending to themselves as this will feel as though they are actively hurting others.

Individuals who were victims of parentification and struggle with dependency will not only live with an ever-present experience of being alone in the world, but also an experience of regret for having lost their life or a period of their life. They will usually report having lost years of their lives, regretting having done so. The experience of lost time is one of the core experiences that emerges in psychotherapy, accompanied by sadness, despair, and anger. A deeper look into this experience often uncovers its unconscious roots, which go back to the loss of childhood as the individual had to put themselves aside in order to meet the needs of the parent.

Parentification Causes Identity to Depend on Relationships

As parentification causes the person's identity to depend on relationships, they take on the role of the caregiver in order to feel like they matter, exist, or are worthy. Without others, or in the case of failed relationships, feelings of loneliness, inadequacy, self-loathing, worthlessness, or even an internal experience of emptiness may emerge.

Because parentified individuals are often excessively self-sufficient and self-reliant, these feelings may be foreign to them and may only emerge into consciousness when their close relationships rupture.

The Need for a Guide

One of the characteristics of healthy parenting is that the parent provides guidance to the child. In a healthy parent-child relationship, such guidance is provided through the parent's role in meeting the child's needs and supporting their emotional separation and individuation.

Healthy parents treat their children as separate individuals and encourage their psychological separation and individuation. Parentifying and dependent parents, on the other hand, nurture and use the child’s dependency for the parent’s own need gratification and keep the child forever psychologically dependent on the parent.

Because a parentified child's role is for them to meet the needs of the parent, the parent's expectations are that the child will be ‘guided’ by their parent's needs. Because of that, the parentified child feels lost without others' expectations or guidance. As adults, when their relationships fail, they may feel lost, directionless, and confused. To get away from this experience, a person may find themselves in relationships where they either attend to others or are controlled by them.

The Parentified Child’s Lack of Capacity to Process Their Emotional Experience

Another characteristic of healthy parenting is that the parent performs a function of soothing and emotional regulation when the child is in distress. Because a child cannot make sense of stressful or traumatic experiences on their own, this function lies with the parent. The parent's role is not only to soothe but mainly to the child process and reframe the experience from one that is emotionally overwhelming into one that is emotionally digestible for the child.

A parentifying parent, unfortunately, does not have the capacity to support the child in distress. Often a parentifying parent will not only put their feelings and needs first and, as such, disregard the child's feelings. They may also be afraid or uncomfortable with he child's expressions of authentic feelings. As a parentifying parent refuses to accept the child's emotional experience, the child gives up on the parent and disavows their own feelings so that they do not pose a threat to the parent. In this process, it is not only the feelings that are disregarded but also the child's authenticity and individuality.

Because the child is left without the parent's support to process their stressful experiences, the child needs to rely solely on themselves. For instance, the child may ruminate over the experience in solitude and do so for so long that they construct a narrative that makes sense to them. However, such a narrative is usually a form of infantile fantasy.

For instance, a child may experience their parents' arguments as something they caused merely by existing. The child may feel guilty and powerless to solve it. They may attempt to ‘solve’ the issue by withdrawing into solitude and not existing for the parents. This self-made narrative of their existence being in the way of their parents' happiness will then continue to influence the child's life in adulthood. They may experience themselves as being too much, ‘a mistake’, ‘a problem’. They may become attached to solving others' problems at their own detriment and may engage in unhealthy relationships to ‘cure’ others—either their romantic partners or other people close to them.

Because the child is left to their own devices when dealing with their trauma, parentification is experienced as traumatic in itself. It induces a sense of solitude; the child experiences themselves as on their own. Additionally, the despair over their parent that the child feels in such situations is buried alongside the sense of loneliness but continues to influence the person's experience into adulthood. As such, in adult relationships, the person may feel unseen, unheard, and misunderstood, which may lead to despair and an experience of aloneness. They may have an experience of living 'together alone', hidden behind a glass wall, without being properly understood. There is often a sense of loneliness to their experience even though they may have a wide and rich social circle.

Different Experiences of Parentification but Similar Experience of Loneliness

The Child Soothing or Comforting the Parent

The parentified child may take on a role of someone who soothes and comforts their parent when the parent is distressed. They may constantly need to listen to their parent’s complaints, alleviate their sadness or miserly and comfort them when they are feeling down. In this situation it is not only that the child is taking on an adult role of soothing the parent and meeting their emotional needs but also fearing terrified of doing it as they feel unequipped for the task. The prospect of failure brings about the terror of rejection and abandonment. The feelings of terror, impotency, and confusion that arise, however, are quickly pushed out of awareness as they could otherwise be too emotionally devastating for the child.

Parentified Child as a Mediator in Parental Conflicts

Another example is a child that has to intercept, diffuse, or mediate a conflict between their parents and potentially take care of their siblings whilst they do that. Such child may take on a role of the entire family’s parent.

When a child is constantly concerned about the interactions between their parents, fearing that those conflicts may escalate to the point of the parents separating or the family braking up, they may grow up in constant crippling fear of abandonment, anxiety, and overwhelming responsibility for their parents’ feelings.

In that experience they are alone. They have no one to confide in. Their parents would normally need to take the role of a sanctuary when the child is distressed. Sadly, this is not an option for a parentified child. The person that would need to soothe them is the person that the child needs to soothe. So, they are left with no one.

This experience is, again, one of isolation and loneliness. To deal with it, the child may push into their unconscious all the pain, sorrow, and anger for their parent not living up to their role.

Parentified Child Saving the Parent from Depression

When a parent is struggling with depression, parentification may take a form of the child feeling implicitly pulled to ‘do something about it’ or to ‘help the parent feel better’. If the parent is suicidal, the child may develop a sense of omnipotence in being able to save their parent. The parentified child may, as an adult, be aware of this, however, there are also cases when this is completely out of one’s awareness and may have been an automatic response to the family dynamics.

This is a distressing experience for the child because they are either confused about the reasons for the parent’s passive and withdrawn state or feel responsible for it. In this experience, they usually feel terrified because of the concern for the parent.

Parentified Child as a Scapegoat for the Destruction of the Parent’s Life

It may also be that the child takes on blame for the parent’s difficulties in their life. In such case, the parent may feel that they do not have their needs met and blame the child for that. The child may, in turn, take the blame for the parent’s unmet needs and accept the blame for the destruction of the parent’s life.

For instance, the child may be implicitly or explicitly, consciously or unconsciously, blamed for having destroyed the parent’s life by being born. Merely by existing, the child may feel like they are destroying the parent’s life.

When a child is, explicitly or implicitly, blamed for destroying or hindering the parent’s life, the child will grow up with a sense of shame for their own existence. And what makes the shame unbearable is the fact that the child cannot do anything about it; they cannot disappear and not exist.

So, what the child may do is reduce themselves to be the parent’s emotional servant, completely dedicated to the parent’s needs. Because they were never allowed to exist, they may build their identity around being unseen.

The Child’s Experience of Parentification

The child's experience of parentification is that they need to be in charge of an adult matter which seems beyond their coping capacity. The child may feel terrified of failing to live up to the role. They may feel that if they fail, they will be left without their parent. This evokes terror of abandonment, which they can only escape by attempting to do the best job they can in taking care of the parent and soothing them. The result is that they completely disconnect from their emotional experience and their inherent needs as a little person.

As they do this and disconnect themselves from their own needs, they also experience the parent as disregarding them, dismissing them, not seeing them, which evokes both sadness, feelings of loneliness, and feelings of anger or resentment for the parent. All these feelings are pushed out of the child’s consciousness. This is the only way the child can deal with the immense sadness, fear, and anger.

Someone subjected to parentification will often only through psychotherapy get in touch with the immense loneliness, feelings of being on their own, sadness for having been unseen, feeling unimportant and non-existent, and experiencing immense resentment or anger towards their dependent, parentifying parent.

Parentification and Adult Romantic Relationships

Because parentification causes the child to give up their own needs to attend to their parents' feelings, this causes them to continue depending on their parents into adulthood. Even though a parentified child often grows up to be excessively independent, self-sufficient, and self-reliant, underneath this exterior, they are deeply dependent. As an adult, such a child may find it hard to emotionally disconnect from one or both parents, or from their entire family of origin.

They may also find it challenging to engage in romantic relationships, as they may struggle to find a balance between loving their parents and loving their romantic partner. To their adult partner, someone who is pathologically attached to their primary family as an adult may seem more invested and closer to their parents and siblings than to their romantic relationship or their own family.

Their inability to psychologically separate from their primary family stems from their inability to separate and individuate during childhood (see also Wells & Jones, 1998), resulting in them remaining a parentified child who will forever meet the needs of the parent. Namely, a needy and dependent parent has difficulty letting go of the child they depend on. Such a child may remain psychologically childlike even as an adult.

Dependency will also be evident in their close relationships where they often take care of their romantic partners to avoid experiencing feelings of abandonment. They may find themselves in codependent relationships with partners that are needy and dependent themselves.

Because parentification causes the child to neglect their authentic needs, by not having those needs met, they end up growing up stuck in their infantility. Their outlook on the world, relationships, and adulthood tends to be childlike and lacking maturity.

Conclusion

We can see that, although on the surface, parentification may appear to result in excessive independence and self-sufficiency, this is merely a response to trauma. In reality, parentification causes fundamental dependency, issues with identity, and difficulties in close relationships. It is often accompanied by experiences of loneliness, directionlessness, regret, and meaninglessness.

Parentified children were robbed of their childhood—the childhood that they will never get back. The experience of having lost their childhood and much of their adult life is one of the most painful realisations that a victim of parentification can have as an adult. But what can be even more painful is the need to come to terms with the lost life. This, however, is an essential element in the process of resolving their unhealthy attachments to their families of origin and their attachments to past trauma.

Ales Zivkovic, MSc (TA Psych), CTA(P), PTSTA(P), Psychotherapist

Ales Zivkovic is an MSc in Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy, a Provisional Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst (PTSTA-P), and a Certified Transactional Analyst in the field of Psychotherapy (CTA-P). He is a member of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP). Ales previously worked with individuals and groups in the UK National Health Service (NHS) and is currently a psychotherapist, counsellor, and supervisor in his private clinical practice in Central London, UK. He works with individuals, couples, and groups. In clinical setting, he specialises in the treatment of issues pertaining to childhood trauma, personality disorders, and relationship issues. He also specialises in online psychotherapy. Ales developed a distinct psychotherapeutic approach called interpretive dynamic transactional analysis psychotherapy (IDTAP). More about Ales, as well as how to reach him, can be found here.

Related:

Parentification and the Childhood Trauma of the Parentified Child

Effects of Childhood Trauma on Adult Romantic Relationships

References:

Chase, N. D. (1999). Burdened children : theory, research and treatment of parentification. Sage Publications.

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Earley, L., & Cushway, D. (2002). The Parentified Child. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 7(2), 163–178. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359104502007002005

Hooper, L. M. (2007). The Application of Attachment Theory and Family Systems Theory to the Phenomena of Parentification. Research on Social Work Practice, 15(3), 217–223. https://doi.org/10.1177/1066480707301290

Wells, M., & Jones, R. (1998). Relationship among childhood parentification, splitting, and dissociation: Preliminary findings. The American Journal of Family Therapy, 26(4), 331–339. https://doi.org/10.1080/01926189808251111