Role Reversal in Childhood
Growing up is hard. Many children do not find joy in helping take care of parents, siblings, or doing chores. Feelings of not wanting to help can be universal. What happens when a child takes on too much responsibility in a family? The first and most important question is what is too much.
Adults will have many positive and negative memories from childhood. Adults can have negative emotions resulting from experiencing neglect as a child. Negative emotions can result in adults struggling with depression, anxiety, and loneliness. The focus of this neglect is emotional neglect. Many families face hardship. Families may struggle due to having a single parent. Families may have financial struggles. Caregivers may struggle with mental illness or substance use. Emotional neglect is when a child's emotions are not supported by their caregivers.
Family hardships can result in a child taking on adult-like tasks. The task can be chores or caring for a caregiver or sibling. The task can also involve care for the caregiver's emotions.
What does it mean to be a parentalized child? Everyone has a unique experience growing up. Even children raised in the same household will have different experiences. Each child has their own personality. Everyone has their own needs. What is hard in childhood is that children have very little power. The power in the relationship is with the caregiver. The caregiver has their own unique personality along with emotional and physical needs. There is no perfect caregiver-child relationship. This is a give-and-take relationship.
An infant child cries. How does the caregiver respond to the child? Do they pick up the child and begin investigating their needs? Is the child hungry, cold, tired, or have a dirty diaper? The younger the child the simpler the needs. What happens when an infant child cries and the caregiver is sick, tired, busy, overwhelmed? At times the chronic neglect of a child's needs can begin very early. How does the caregiver respond to the child as they get older and their needs increase? At times as the child ages, role-reversal can begin to occur. The child may do tasks in the home that are burdensome. This may be because the child is asked to do them. It may also be because the child sense they need to be done and does them. The caregiver may be unable to understand the child's emotional needs.
Role-reversal is when the child begins to meet the needs of their caregiver or siblings. They are doing tasks that would normally be done by an adult caregiver. Each family has its own struggles. Each family has adult tasks that children do to meet the needs of the family. Not meeting the emotional needs of the child can lead to problems for these children. These children were silenced by their caregivers. These children have learned to ignore their own needs and focus on the needs of others.
Silenced children become silent adults. They may as parents silence the emotional needs of their own kids. These adults may identify themselves as caregivers. They may become caregivers to their partners and others around them. Growing up they learned to ignore and not express their own emotional needs. As an adult, this pattern of self-sacrificing can led to problems in relationships. Not expressing one’s emotions can lead to anxiety.
The Developmental Implications of Parentification: Effects on Childhood Attachment Jennifer A. Engelhardt Teachers College, Columbia University
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