#parentification

[mooredanxieties]

Apparently "walking on eggshells" around abusive parents doesn't just apply to parents who will yell and throw dishes when they're upset. Apparently it also applies to emotionally neglectful parents who will breakdown the moment you tell them how their behavior hurt you, and how you avoid sharing your own pain to spare them the emotional burden of acting like a parent. Who knew haha

[enmesheddaughterparentified]

Are you normal or do you have hypervigilence problems because you always had to be aware of your family members moods growing up in order to deescalate situations before the arose

[poemsandghosts]

grieving the version of myself I was never allowed to be

[burgerfiend]

not fair 2 b born a homewrecker

[solerer]

I might be projecting but to me, when I look at Katara, I don’t necessarily see someone who was parentified by her family so much as I do someone who stepped up but then, when she went to step down, no one was willing to take the burden from her.

Kind of like that myth with Hercules and Atlas. Hercules takes Atlas’s burden but when it comes time for Atlas to take it back, he leaves Hercules holding the earth.

Like after her mother’s death, motivated by grief and such to be sure but still— Katara did the noble thing. She stepped up for her family! Cooking, cleaning, chores, responsibility, etc. But then after everything, no one cared to notice or take back the burden.

It’s not so much that they forced her to fill her mother’s role as they left her out to dry. And it’s not like she can just stop cause then no one’s doing what needs to be done and everything falls apart. If she drops the world then it breaks. Then the cycle repeats with her friends and the rest is history.

Maybe I feel so much anger for Katara about this whole situation is that, because she wasn’t “actively” parentified, if she complains about having to do everything then people will just say “no one asked you to do that” or “that doesn’t need to be done anyways”. So not only does she have to hold the world, but no one will acknowledge that she’s holding the world. If they do then they’ll just tell her to drop it but she can’t cause it’s the world.

For that reason, one of the conventions that I like seeing in Zutara fics is that Zuko joins the group and just acknowledges that she’s holding the group together. If you want to talk about fantasies then let’s talk about the female fantasy of someone proactively noticing when something needs to be done and just doing it without being asked.

[coniferouspines]

Teen Ford who finds Stan suffocating, but imagine it’s because of parentification.

Ford was always the favoured child, better behaved, highly intelligent. Even though Stan was the one to physically stand up to bullies and defend Ford, Ford was the one who got told by his parents, “keep your brother out of trouble. Stan isn’t as smart as you”.

And Ford is capable. Being so much smarter than other kids his age, he comes across as self-sufficient, causing his parents—who were already rather hands-off in parenting—to distance themselves more, assuming Ford can take care of himself.

Except they also distance from Stan. Stan, who craves validation from their parents. Who can never seem to please their father and seeks affection from their mother so much she begins to brush him off. And Ford, seeing how disheartened his brother is, wants to make him feel better.

It starts with encouraging comments. “Good job, Stanley!” “I’m proud of you, Stan!” “You drew that? That’s amazing!” “You’re a good kid, Stanley.” “I like what you did there!”

Ford means well; he’s just trying to help. But Stan has no other source of affection, no one else who says nice things about him. So Stan ends up leaning on Ford too much, looking to Ford for affirmation and affection. He stops trying as hard to impress their parents, and starts trying to impress Ford.

And Ford doesn’t know what to do. He’s glad to be able to help Stan, but now Stan is turning to him about problems that it would be better for their parents to handle. But their parents pull away from them, and suddenly Ford finds it’s his responsibility to make sure Stan does his homework.

Ford’s responsibility to make sure Stan remembers to brush his teeth. Ford’s responsibility to get them to go to bed at a reasonable time. Ford’s responsibility to look after his own twin. And Ford, unwilling to leave Stan to drown on his own, does.

They grow up. Stan protects Ford and Ford becomes Stan’s pseudo-parent. Stan doesn’t recognize anything is wrong. He’s happy with the way things are. He craves Ford’s praise and validation, and doesn’t realize the toll it’s taking on his brother.

But Ford begins to resent Stan in their teen years. He resents their parents for being so distant. Resents his teachers and everyone for having such high expectations of him. The pressure on Ford to be someone great, to become someone who will make their family millions, weighs on him heavily. And Stan feels like an extra weight around his ankles, dragging him down.

Ford lets the resentment fester. He feels far too responsible for Stan at this point to just cut things off. But Stan is becoming suffocating to him, and Ford wants to be free. He wants the chance to be someone for himself, not someone for others. He wants to go to university, not sail away on a ship that isn’t even sea worthy.

Even as Ford tries to slowly distance himself from Stan, Stan doesn’t know how to let go. He’s developed a strong codependency on Ford over the years, and he doesn’t know what to do on his own. Ford is his only lifeline with their parents having pulled away from them.

But Ford can’t handle it. And the pressure grows and grows until it bursts between them, resulting in a screaming match that nearly turns into a physical fight. Ford is determined to go to university, and he’s not taking Stan with him.

Stan feels like his world is crashing down. He had no other plans. No idea what to do with his life outside of Ford. He takes his anger out on the table that holds Ford’s perpetual motion machine. The machine breaks. Stan fixes it.

Except he doesn’t. Ford gets rejected by west coast tech. Stan gets thrown out and disowned. And Ford, who’d been more of a parent to Stan than their own parents, closes the curtains in Stan’s face.

Ford feels guilty but relieved.

Stan feels devastated and lost.

[katherinetheok]

Parentification in Austen

So many people reading my post about Fanny Price having rickets and i love to see people talking about the idea. One of the people who reposted it (@gcballet) got to talking in the tags about disability which is obviously a major theme in Mansfield Park (which makes sense given the number of chronically ill relatives Jane Austen herself had) but also mentioned Fanny's parentification in that book. Which then got me thinking about parentification more broadly in Austen's works. And to be clear, I know some people think "Parentification" is a buzzword for "children being expected to help out" or "children being expected to be mature" or anything like that. It most certainly isn't, especially when used in a professional context, and it's not what I mean. Parentification is extremely unhealthy to a young person, and it can really screw with their sense of self, among other aspects of mental health it can do a number on.

Children forced to take care of their sick or mentally ill parents. Very young children being forced to take care of younger siblings before they have the knowledge and skills to do so. That is parentification and it shows up a LOT in Austen if you go looking. It was definitely a phenomena Austen was aware of and paints negatively, and whether she condemned it or not, I think she found it wrong just based on how she paints it.

Starting with Mansfield Park. Before moving to Mansfield, Fanny was helping her mother with the care of the house and all her siblings, despite being a small child herself (I've even seen speculation that part of the reason Mrs Norris might have suggested that they take in Fanny instead of any of the others is because it would be depriving Mrs Norris's hated sister of her most helpful/able child and and forcing her to take on all that extra responsibility herself). Then, when she gets to Mansfield, the physical labor may be less, but she's still a full-time babysitter to Lady Bertram: fetching and carrying and running errands and messages; arranging her sewing work so it will be easier to do; and just generally keeping her entertained, happy, and calm. The way others see her is so strongly tied up in those duties that even her favorite (and most loving) brother William is convinced that her return to Portsmouth will magically make life in the Price household quieter and more orderly and comfortable than it has been since her departure a decade ago. Lady Bertram's desire to have Fanny back after Tommy's injury isn't about Fanny or Tom, but about her ladyship's personal comfort and peace of mind.

Fanny's not the only character to get that treatment to a greater or lesser degree, either. Susan Price becomes Fanny 2.0 both at Portsmouth and then later at Mansfield. She probably considers Mansfield a lucky escape, but she's still a child babysitting a grown woman (I am deliberately not getting into whether Lady Bertram was in any way disabled because an adult who needs a caregiver needs an ADULT one).

In Mansfield, it's not just the girls being parentified, either. I'm going to leave aside William Price being sent at 12 to undertake the life of a sailor (a very dangerous and uncomfortable life that left his father disabled and bitter). Children in hard, dangerous jobs is a different discussion to parentification. At that time, I doubt anyone saw that as anything other than an apprenticeship he was lucky to have landed, and there was no taking care of adults involved for him. If anything, he was (HOPEFULLY!) being taken care of and educated by the other adults on ship. At the very least, he doesn't seem to have been required to support his parents and siblings to any great degree (he probably does give some money to his parents, but he feels no guilty about using some of his money to buy Fanny what was probably a rather expensive amber cross.

But Edmund, despite living a much safer, easier life than Willian, does seem to have been stuck with more of a paternal role. When Sir Thomas leaves for Antigua, not only is it Edmund who is relied on to keep his siblings in check (including his elder brother who by the standards of the time should have been the de facto head of house and who got zero pushback for being an irresponsible wastrel instead), but he is the one his mother relies on to, among other things, deal with the servants (which may even mean he's directing his fathers stewards and by extension all the incoming and outgoing cash and possibly even some of his father's tenants as well). As silly as it seems for him to try to stop the others from having their play, he is the one who was left in charge. And, with everything else he would have had on his plate, he probably wished his aunt or mother would have put their foot down and saved him the hassle. All this is part of the reason I've always said that one of the major themes of Mansfield Park is neglect. The younger generation are either left to run wild or forced to be the adults in the room. There is no in-between. ~~~~~ But parentification shows up in other Austen books, too. Although i won't go on about them in quite as much length, I do just want to point out some obviously examples of it that occur to me off the top of my head. And I also want to point out that none of these make the parents in question bad people. I quite like some of the parents mentioned. Sense and Sensibility: No hate for Mrs Dashwood because child parentification is not always the result of evil or neglectful children, but because Mrs Dashwood seems to think she lives in a romantic novel, 19 Elinor does most of the intellectual heavy lifting for the family, including reminding her mother that they live on a budget now, and trying to keep Marianne from setting her life on fire. When Marianne and Willoughby are making spectacles of themselves in front of the whole neighborhood and Mrs Dashwood finds it very sweet and harmless, it's Elinor who needs to remind her the risk to Marianne's reputation, trying to protect her sister in a way their mother should be. When Marianne wants to chase Willoughby to London, Elinor warns her mother against it. Her mother ignores her and things go to shit almost immediately. And it's Elinor there in London to pick up the pieces for her sister.

Pride and Prejudice: I won't be going in detail into my opinion on Mr Bennet (it is not high), but the one thing we can all agree, I hope, is that he didn't do much to take care of his kids. When his wife didn't bother to educate the kids, he didn't try to force her, and he didn't hire a governess or tutor. He actively encouraged his kids (and everyone else) not to respect his wife, and the result is that none of the kids listened to a thing Mrs Bennet said unless it was something they wanted to hear. This left the only two children he actually likes (Jane and Lizzie) to try to keep their younger sisters in check (Jane by example and advise, Lizzie by cajoling, and by trying to make her sisters and parents see reason). They do their best, bless them, but it is seldom enough. When Lydia wants to go to Brighton, Lizzie begs her father not to allow it. She knows Lydia will make a fool out of herself AT BEST and tells her father so. And Mr Bennet, contender for Father of the Year, flat out responds with "look, she's going to make an ass of herself at SOME point, at least this way she's doing it on someone else's dime where I don't have to watch" ... Cue Lydia running away with a serial seducer who fully intends to leave her ruined and alone and facing a life of prostitution. And when Lizzie tries to comfort her father over it later, his response was "yeah, you were right. i should have restrained her. but don't worry, i'll get over it" 🤦 Whatever you think about Mr and Mrs Bennet, Lizzie and Jane were the parents in that family. Emma: So, in Emma's case, it's not a sibling she's taking care of, it's her own father. He's a sweet, loving old man without a mean or pushy bone in his body. And he is needy like a fretful toddler. I won't even get into whether there's actually anything wrong with his health or not because that's not really the point. The point is that for much of Emma's life, she's lived with a father who needs constant reassuring and cheering up, and the fact that she doesn't MIND consciously doesn't change the fact that that responsibility of hers has gotten so far into her head that she can never imagine leaving him, not even to marry. Her own sister thinks she'll never marry while their father is alive. By the end of the story, there's a compromise. Emma is allowed to get married, but the condition is that she stays at home and continues to be her father's fulltime caregiver while her husband moves in with them. Persuasion: Much more subtle than the others (especially given her older age), and I know some people will argue that Anne Elliot isn't parentified. To that, I can only point out that after her mother dies, she spends literal years trying to remind her father to behave well and not overspend, all while trying to cope with her own heartbreak and the complicated business of growing up into her own person. When the family gets too far in debt, she once again leads the efforts to economize, even if she's ignored at every turn. When her adult sister, with a husband and servants gets sick, it's Anne who is expected to drop everything and look after her. She is always forced to be the voice of reason (a voice which is seldom heeded) and is always expected to look after everyone else, even an injured child whose parents are Right There. She has all the responsibilities of motherhood and none of the respect, (to borrow and heavily modify a line from another of Austen's novels).

Northanger Abbey & Lady Susan: None. Wait! None at all? In the two books featuring overtly evil parents? omfg 🤯

[traumasurvivors]

Parentification is a form of abuse where a child is forced to take on the role of a parent. It’s more than just helping out or doing chores. It happens when the responsibilities placed on a child are far beyond what’s appropriate for their age.

There are two main types of parentification:

Instrumental parentification – The child takes on adult tasks like cooking, cleaning, caring for siblings, or even managing a parent’s needs.

Emotional parentification – The child becomes the emotional support for a parent, acting like a therapist, mediator, or even a stand-in partner. They may be exposed to adult problems like money stress, relationship issues, or inappropriate emotional sharing.

A key difference between normal helping and parentification is how it’s treated:

Occasional help with appreciation or rewards? Usually healthy.

Constant, expected, and normalized with no space for the child’s own needs? That’s harmful parentification.

Effects on Children: Parentified children often:

Learn to suppress their own needs and emotions

Feel responsible for everyone else’s well-being

Struggle with expressing vulnerability

Believe love is conditional on their “usefulness”

Long-Term Impacts: As adults, they may experience anxiety, depression, C-PTSD, or personality disorders. They might become hyper-independent or fall into codependent relationships, often repeating caregiver roles in friendships or romantic relationships.

Parentification can happen for many reasons such as illness, addiction, divorce, abuse, or a single parent under extreme stress. Sometimes parents aren’t even aware of the harm they’re causing.

It’s important to recognize that parentification is real trauma. Children deserve love that isn’t conditional on what they can provide. Healing starts with acknowledging that what happened to you wasn’t fair, and you are deserving of support and care now.

I have a longer post on my website here.