The Challenge of the Parent/Child Couple

I once referred a female client to a psychiatrist for a consult. Her husband had just left her, and she said that she no longer saw the point in living. I was concerned. After seeing her, the psychiatrist was kind enough to call and tell me that he had stabilized her, but he wondered why I had initially told him that she was “childlike.” He found that she was parentified in her family of origin and thus saw her as parental. I answered that it is confusing but parentified adults have a trapped child lurking inside because much of their childhoods were suppressed or stolen from them via their parentification. He found that interesting.

Parentification

Boszormenyi-Nagy (1965) coined the term parentification as part of his larger contextual theory of family therapy to indicate when someone is given age-inappropriate responsibilities. For example, when a child is enlisted to be the mediator between parents in a troubled marriage, or the child of a single-parent household is saddled with the tasks of raising younger siblings. Other examples may include children of immigrants who served as interpreters for their parents, or children of sick or elderly parents who were molded into young caretakers. Nagy saw the value in parentification, especially if it is not chronic, and reciprocity is involved. For example, a parentified child can learn advanced administrative and organizational skills. Most are trained from an early age to be leaders, and leaders they are. In fact, they would have never gotten their special position — the next best thing to the real parent — if their parents perceived them as incompetent.

The Consequences

But there is a significant downside to being parentified. These individuals grow up too fast and tend to be serious citizens. They are usually burdened with worry about whether they are doing a good enough job in an almost impossible situation. I once saw a severely parentified teenager that suffered from high blood pressure and migraines, both before he turned age 15. But far be it for me to wax on about parentification, since many contextual therapists know it far better than I do. I would, however, like to demonstrate how this concept operates in the context of a couple and their choice of mate. I see this as a potentially valuable contribution to better understanding a common couple dynamic: The parent/child relationship.

Mutual Parentification and Mate Choice

In my clinical experience treating couples, I have found that those partners with a parentified background tend to choose others with a parentified background. But why two parental personalities in the same relationship? Is this not counterintuitive? What I have found, however, is that although both partners might have been parentified, the parentification has manifested differently. Borrowing from object relations theory (Scharff & Scharff, 1991), one parentified child has held on to the parental part of themselves and projected the less responsible, needy child part onto the chosen partner. This way they can continue to be parentified but experience playfulness vicariously. The other partner has saved the missing childlike self and projected their parental part onto the other partner. This way they can keep the playful, childlike part and project the parental part onto their partner so they can be taken care of — something they missed growing up.

Recommendations and Solutions

You might say this sounds complicated, and you would be right. But if I am on to something, it is solvable if both partners can first accept the fact that they are not vastly different from each other. That is, both were parentified, robbed of their childhoods, have a deprived internalized child inside, and each has learned a unique way of coping with it all. If partners can see this perspective, then they can own their own projections and learn how to better cope with their parentification. The parentified mate may learn to be less controlling and become more playful, and the childlike partner may become stronger, more confident, and feel more comfortable taking on more responsibility. I propose that the famously referred to parent/child dynamic should be re-named: parent-child/parent-child dynamic. This might be more accurate.