Being my Mother’s Mother.

Meet Annie. She is a 12-year-old girl and of late, her home has been marked by increasing conflicts between her parents. Her mother, Leila has a drinking problem, although Leila herself wouldn’t call it a problem (because who doesn’t drink more than the recommended glass of wine, right?) and she often confides in Annie about her extra interest towards Annie’s home tutor (“you should call Joshua sir home more often”). Leila is extremely critical of Annie’s father who spends just as quickly as he earns and has a lot of loans to his name. As her mother is constantly inebriated and unable to stand still, let alone cook and her father is never home, it is up to Annie to do the housework, school work, take care of her younger siblings and do a part time job to earn money to feed them. Annie is not sure how long she can take this anymore.

Parentification is a term used to describe when children are asked to step into the roles of adults, whenever adults are physically or emotionally unavailable. It is often a forced role reversal, done to take over the responsibilities of rearing a younger sibling or the household. The child becomes the caretaker, peacemaker or emotional support to a parent, usually at the loss of their own childhood.

There are two types of Parentification-

1. Emotional Parentification

This is when the child becomes a therapist for the parent and the parent uses the child to confide in them about their marriage problems or extramarital affairs.

2. Instrumental Parentification

Here the child takes on the responsibilities of the household such as finance, housekeeping or taking on the responsibility of a younger sibling. In Annie’s case it is both as Annie has become the mother of not just the household but also to her own mother.

Parentification, like any other enmeshed relationship lacks boundaries. It usually takes place, needless to say in a dysfunctional household where the child becomes the scapegoat for everything chaotic that is going on.

Children who were forced to become adults earlier than they were supposed to lack the “playfulness” of childhood.

As this role is extremely stressful to carry, these children are often

prone to stress related disorders even later on in their life and tend to carry an immense fear of commitment, adults or even deeply intimate relationships. They could be prone to violent behaviors and as a result of being exhausted with being the emotional and physical servant of the house, often have less time to focus on their own academics resulting in low grades.

The opposite of craving these same dynamics as their childhood in their adult life could also be true. It becomes difficult for them to develop an identity of the self, as their self usually revolved around a parent or a parent’s emotional crisis. This co-dependency ensures a constant repetition of similar dynamics as healthier dynamics may seem boring or unfamiliar. Their entire lives suddenly start to revolve around taking care of others and it is not uncommon to find these “adult-children” often choosing roles of being a caretaker or maintaining the peace such as healers as the dynamics look familiar.

How does one change then?

1. In the case of Annie and hundreds of other adult-children, a technique called Inner Child Healing is often used. Inner Child Healing often looks at the wounded child inside an adult and seeks to meet their emotional needs which were denied in childhood.

2. Another technique could be allowing the child in therapy to reparent themselves. This would require asking the child to identify the anger and frustration they felt being an adult in a child’s body and then looking at themselves self-compassionately. A child in such a dynamic might lack the ability to have boundaries as they might be made to feel guilty for saying no so the therapist could work with them to assert themselves, ask for what they want and to start by setting boundaries with people in their life, primarily the adult to whom they had an enmeshed relationship with.

REFERENCES

Newport Academy. 2022. How Parentification Impacts Teen Mental Health. [online] Available at: <https://www.newportacademy.com/resources/mental-health/parentification/#:~:text=%20Two%20Types%20of%20Parentification%20%201%20Taking,primary%20language%20of%20their%20resident%20country.%20More%20> [Accessed 16 January 2022].