In this episode, Catherine talks about a little-known issue called “parentification” and how we can protect typical children in families with disabilities from experiencing its effects.
Listen now in your favorite podcast app!
Quick Links:
Lost Childhoods: The Plight of the Parentified Child by Dr Gregory Jurkovic
The Holistic Psychologist—Dr. Nicole LePera,
Preventing Parentification November 2022 Webinar
Transcript:
Many years ago, a pastor’s wife jokingly said to me that her goal as a parent was to get her kids to adulthood needing only a little therapy. Knowing this godly woman as I did, I was initially shocked to hear this comment, even made in jest.
The truth is that no one will ever be a perfect parent, and no one ever had perfect parents. But even otherwise well-meaning parents can unwittingly place burdens on one or more of their children that leave deep emotional scars, sometimes to a diagnostic level. Parents of a child with disabilities who also have children without disabilities are especially vulnerable to dependence on the ‘typical’ siblings in ways that are not age-appropriate or emotionally healthy for those children.
The challenges for families living with disabilities are often daunting.
Several Key Ministry writing team members have written about the importance of meeting the needs of the typical siblings who are part of families where there is also a child with disabilities or other special needs. Though none of these prior posts or videos used the word ‘parentification,’ an important aspect of meeting the typical children’s needs is to prevent them from taking on a role within the family that is the proper responsibility of the parents or adult caregivers, especially when it is easy and tempting to do so to reduce your own burdens.
Parentification is essentially placing adult-sized burdens on child-sized shoulders.
This might mean giving children responsibilities for tasks before they are physically or emotionally mature enough to handle them. Sharing personal struggles inappropriately with a child, and sharing your struggles about the child’s other parent (whether married or divorced from this parent) are also commonly seen in families where this occurs.
Parentification represents a chronic lack of proper boundaries from a parent to a child.
The book “Lost Childhoods: The Plight of the Parentified Child” by Dr Gregory Jurkovic describes some common characteristics of parentified children: pseudo maturity and extreme helpfulness, but at the same time, they “…often suffer from depression, suicidal feelings, shame, excessive guilt, unrelenting worry, social isolation and other internalizing symptoms such as psychosomatic problems. Conduct disturbances may also be part of the clinical picture...” Teachers and other adults in the child’s world frequently overlook issues with conduct, because they are inconsistent with who the child appears to be most of the time—that is, very helpful and mature, displaying ‘precocious self-reliance.’
Dr. Nicole LePera, who goes by the online handle ‘The Holistic Psychologist,’ said, “Parentification is an extremely common family dynamic where children are expected to: manage their parents’ emotions or issues (most common issue is marital problems), take care of the home and siblings on a regular basis, or act as a peer to a parent. Many parents aren’t aware they’re doing this for several reasons: 1) they were parentified themselves; 2) they’re overwhelmed and lack support; 3) they don’t know or understand the language and culture so they depend on their children.” Based on these descriptions, it’s easy to see how families with a child with disabilities as well as typically developing children can stumble into this relational pattern.
The goal of this podcast and the upcoming webinar are not to bash anyone or place any greater burden on you as a parent. Rather, whatever your role is - parent of children with and without disabilities, the typically developing child, or a ministry leader connected with families with disabilities - our goal is to inform you about this issue, and equip you with strategies for prevention, as well as tips for repair.
So what do you do to prevent parentifying your children? Or what do you do if you think you’ve already done this? And how can ministry leaders help?
Tips for Preventing Parentification:
Set and maintain proper boundaries with your children. From their earliest days, it’s important to see your children as individuals, not just an extension of yourself. Dr. Jurkovic stated that the balance of fairness between children and their caregivers is an ethical issue. Without proper boundaries and respect of themselves as individuals, a child’s sense of identity may be improperly linked to what they can do, rather than who they are in the family. Improper boundaries can be a breeding ground for later challenges to parental authority.
Get help for your own mental health needs. Children absorb far more understanding of the challenges and dynamics within their families than parents often realize. When a parent has poor mental health, children often naturally step in to fill gaps. Finding a healthy outlet for your stress is critical, not only for your own mental health but for the mental health of everyone in your family.
Tips for Ministry Leaders:
Help parents with children with disabilities parent well. Church facilities can be used to provide parenting classes, respite events, and small groups for both adults and children, to give both children and adults opportunities to flourish in a supportive environment.
Recognize your limitations and build relationships with mental health professionals. The challenges within families with disabilities, whether mental health conditions or disabilities visible to the eye, are often multi-layered. Even well-meaning people can fall into this trap of parentification, when they have physical, emotional, financial and other needs that are not being met.
Tips for Repairing the Effects of Parentification:
If you are concerned that one of your typical children may be ‘parentified’ but are unsure, a common behavior pattern in parentification is ‘triangulation.’ Triangulation pulls a third party into an inappropriate role (for example, when a child becomes a mediator of conflict between two parents). Instead of having an argument with your spouse, a parentified child may be unwillingly pulled into the argument by you or your spouse, and asked to side with one of their parents versus the other one.
If the previous paragraph is uncomfortably familiar, family systems therapy is often a good place to start to change these dynamics.
As the name implies, this kind of therapy often involves the whole family, so that destructive patterns of behavior can be stopped and healthy patterns can be reestablished.
If you recognize that you were a parentified child, take heart: adults with this kind of experience can be extremely resilient, creative, funny, resourceful, and adaptive. As with all things we leave in God’s hands, there are gifts we can extract from the pain God allows in our lives. Make the most of these gifts.
Dr. Jurkovic brought up the possibility that ‘the career choices of many helping professionals…psychotherapists and ministers, stem from their role as caretakers in their families of origin” and that such careers are subconsciously an attempt to correct some of their own past. There does seem to be some truth in this statement! There’s a reason that the quote ‘all research is me-search’ exists.
We hope you will join us for our November 2022 webinar, when we will discuss this issue much more deeply with a couple of special guests. If you’re not able to join us, as with all of our webinars, you can watch the replay available in early December 2022.
