In the literature that discusses abused and neglected children you will find the term “parentified child.” What this Latinate mouthful refers to is a child that circumstances have forced to grow up too soon and assume adult responsibility for younger siblings. Adults is this child’s life are at best inadequate, at worst simply not present either because they are frequently absent or have abandoned their children altogether.
I was such a child. Our father was often in jail or prison. Our mother simply left us alone without any substitute care or protection at all. She did this a number of times and according to her older brother and her younger sister, once left us alone for an entire week. So I had to become a caretaker of siblings of four years, three years, and eighteen months. I was five years old. It was a big job that I carried out more or less successfully.
If my childhood took place today and not decades ago, my reward for looking out for my younger siblings would be to be labeled a “parentified child”. In today’s literature of child abuse and adoption I am described as a difficult creature. When I and the siblings I cared for are fostered or adopted, I resist turning over my responsibility to two strangers I have not yet learned to trust. Rather than have social workers and foster or adoptive parents appreciate the role I played, I am made to feel I am standing in the way of forming new family bonds.
My siblings and I had nearly ideal foster parents who soon adopted all four of us at once in less than a year. But even they, with graduate work in psychology, failed to understand or appreciate the role I had played. Instead of patiently understanding and supporting the transition I was making as I began to trust them, they resented having what they saw as a rival eight-year-old parent in the house.
The Most Difficult Part of the Transition
I think the most difficult part of the transition to a new foster home for me was learning to accept that as these new adults became our parents, relations with my siblings would change. The bonds that had helped sustain us through years of neglect and shared danger began to weaken. My siblings began to act as normal siblings do, at times cooperative and loving, but also at times competing with each other and challenging me. I saw this rejection of the parental role I had played as a rejection of me and I took it hard. I describe that conflict and its resolution in my book Children of the Manse.
I think social scientists and social workers like to use scientific sounding Latinate words because they think it makes them seem more professional. But pinning a label on a child such as “parentified” also has other effects. It works to turn an individual and unique child into an abstraction. It creates a false sense of understanding that somehow removes the need to listen carefully to a particular child. Also, since the label “parentified child” seems often to be used in a pejorative sense, it has the additional effect of seeming to blame the child for behavior he could not avoid.
I am not opposed to classification when that helps to clarify and understand as long as it does not obscure the uniqueness of each child or seem to blame the child for his behavior. There are better words to describe the likes of me and other children who have had to grow up too soon than the pseudo-scientific and Latinate label “parentified child.” I would suggest using “child-parent” instead.
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