Much food for thought in this essay about parentified children. The concept explains what many of us have endured in our childhood, assuming it was normal because we had no baseline of normal:
The parentified child who supports the parent often incurs a cost to her own psychic stability and development. The phenomenon has little to do with parental love, and much more to do with the personal and structural circumstances that stop parents from tending to the immense anxiety and burden that a child might be experiencing on their behalf. The parent is often unable to see that their child is taking responsibility for maintaining the peace in the family, for protecting one parent from the other, for being their friend and therapist, for mediating between the parents and the outside world, for parenting the siblings, and sometimes for the medical, social and economic stability of the household.
With my parents, the root cause was marriage without emotional readiness for it. Two people thrown together because the families thought it made sense. Neither of them had completed their journey to becoming fully functional, self-reliant human being before they became parents. The rest is history. All around me, were families very similarly configured. Women married off end of high-school or half way through college. Motherhood coming at them at a time, they were not yet done with needing a mother. The dependence carried into how they raised children, the baggage they saddled them with unwittingly. Now the thing has a name
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