When Growing Up Parentified Shapes Your Parenting

How to recognize the influence of your own childhood on your parenting.

Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer

Key points

• Children have intense emotional needs.
• Parents need to meet their own needs in order to help their children.
• Adults who have been parentified can learn better self-care in order to help their kids emotionally.

Having children is both an immense joy and, at the same time, a terrifying endeavor. You feel that you’ve prepared. You’ve bought the diapers, the burp cloths, and the silly booties they pull off within seconds of you putting them on. You’ve read all the latest parenting books, overnight becoming the expert in sleep regressions, teething, and potty training. Here’s the thing: If you grew up parentified as a child, absorbing and managing the emotional needs of your caregivers, the sheer bottomlessness of need that comes with a child at every stage will be both familiar and yet floor you, bringing out the unmet needs you may have had bottled up inside from your own childhood. How do you cope without replaying the same dysfunctional parenting you experienced?

Research on parentification tells us that parenting behaviors can influence child well-being. We know that the use of punishment (Peris, et al. 2008), the level of parental involvement^1,2 and the amount of parental supervision a child receives² are all parenting behaviors relevant to understanding parentification. These parenting behaviors can also have an impact on the expression of early adolescent depressive symptoms.³ If we know that how we parent is an important factor in childhood experiences of parentification (especially if we were parentified ourselves), how can we begin to formulate an awareness of our needs in order to better care for the emotional health of our children?

Know Your Triggers

One important skill is knowing your triggers. Our kids are learning how to regulate their emotions; they are works in progress. This doesn’t mean living through this process, especially with kids who experience big feelings and epic meltdowns, is easy emotionally as the parent. If you have experienced less than ideal parenting yourself, you may not have the emotional reserve to call on when needed in these moments, and in fact may revert back to some interaction with your own parents rather than staying grounded in the here and now. So think about it: Does yelling trigger you? Whining? Hitting or name calling? Tune into yourself in these moments and figure out what you need.

Identify Your Own Unmet Emotional Needs

This leads to another important skill, perhaps one of the most important for parentified adults: identifying your own unmet emotional needs. You did not get what you needed from your parents; this much you know. But what was it that you needed? Often parentified adults don’t have a sense of their own needs, because they were always in service to the needs of the caregivers around them. Recognizing what you didn’t get can help you identify what it is you need. Here are some examples: Reassurance, nurturing words or touch, a tolerance of mistakes and the encouragement to try again. Identifying what you needed in these moments can help you know what to give your child when they need it.

Utilize the Power of the Pause

I do mean this literally. Stop and look around you, at yourself and your child, both with curiosity and empathy. This seems simple, but it is really hard, especially in high stress moments when your kid is having a hard time. Taking this brief pause (and a few deep breaths) can really help you think more clearly about what the next step is. Do you need a break? Another adult to step in? A change in the setting or activity? Taking this moment is also modeling something for your child: that hard moments might merit a step back before moving forward.