Parentified Children and Emotional Labor

Parentification — the process of forcing a child to take on the role of a supportive adult within their family — can seem like a confusing term at first. Rather than a process in which kids learn empathy and responsibility within their family unit, this process occurs without choice (keyword here: forcing) and involves an emotional role reversal between parent and child. These kids grow up with an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, not just toward their parents, but toward everyone around them. This can be exacerbated by environmental factors within the home, including addiction¹ and parental mental health issues², which often act as driving forces behind the parentification process.

What does this look like in adulthood when more complex relationships and increasing responsibilities emerge?

It looks like a predisposition to taking on an enormous amount of emotional labor. As women, we are no strangers to emotional labor. In her book The Managed Heart, author and researcher Arlie Russell Hochschild calls this kind of work, when done in private, emotion work or emotion management, which she defines as “the act of inducing or suppressing feeling in order to sustain outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” (Hochschild, pg. 7)³. Children will exhibit beliefs about stereotyped gender roles early⁴, internalizing their parents’ sense of what is an "acceptable" expression of their gender identity, i.e, girls are expected to be more emotional, caring and sensitive while boys are expected to be less emotional and act with more "reason" — patriarchal ideas, yes, but they still proliferate. Further, women of color⁴ tend to engage in this type of invisible and unpaid labor most frequently and are often dealing with multiple intersectional identities that further marginalize them. Societally, women are expected to carry the mental load⁶ of both our households and our workplaces, balancing the emotion work required from coworkers, partners, and children. While boys and men can also be parentified and become adults who engage in emotional labor, for women, this is especially burdensome. It’s just the default expectation of us.

So, what’s the connection? How does a parentified child develop into an emotionally laboring adult? Parentified children excel at anticipating the needs of others, jumping in whether asked to or not, and taking on unrealistic amounts of responsibility to the point of burnout. They are more likely to engage in tasks related to emotional labor, such as planning the parties, sending out the cards, organizing the raffles, and remembering, organizing, and cataloging the various details of their family and work lives. They often struggle with setting clear and appropriate boundaries, or even identifying their own needs. In my practice, I have often seen the oldest adult child in the family, especially in cases where one or more parents was an alcoholic, describe going from being a parentified child — getting a hung-over adult out of bed for work, for example — to becoming a super spouse/partner/employee who makes themselves indispensable and depended upon at work. I don’t just mean they are good at their jobs or that they take on a lot; they take on everything, and others look to them to do so. Why do they do it? The most obvious reason is so that no one else has to, because in the life of the parentified child, no one else ever did. The more complex answer is about control, and how having it makes people feel safe, especially those who have grown up in dysfunctional environments where parentification was rampant. And though the consequences of not organizing a work party are minimal, not getting a hungover parent out of bed for work could have dire consequences for a child's financial and even physical safety. This is how childhood responses inform our adult relationships. Left unexamined, experiences of parentification morph into strong tendencies to engage in emotional labor as adults.