“God, she acts like such a child,” a group of girls sneers at their 18-year-old classmate, Corinne, who laughs obnoxiously during a school assembly. Noses to the sky, they walk away thinking they are the epitome of class: so mature, so grown up. Meanwhile, Corinne dashes home to care for her younger sister, who trekked home from middle school alone hours ago. Corinne tends to her sister’s needs, then to her own responsibilities: homework, chores, grocery shopping, applications, paying bills, preparing for the week, among others. Where are her parents, you might wonder? Well, when Corinne was 11, her dad died in a work accident, and for years, her mother entered a state of catatonia, neglecting responsibilities, including her children. Corinne would fall to her knees and plead for her mom to get up and pay attention to them. After weeks turned into months, she stopped trying and took matters into her own hands. It was not by choice; it was survival. Corinne is now a legal adult, but she has been navigating adulthood for ages.
What Corinne experienced at age 11 is known as child-parentification, defined as “a type of reversal when children take on the roles and responsibilities of an adult” (Bakitas et al., 2025). Having to grow up too soon, in other words. Some people mistakenly attach age to adulthood. They believe the transition from child to adult is a switch that magically flips when someone turns 18, 21, or 25. While age, legality, and/or brain development can be helpful indicators of maturation, they are not holistic ones.
Holistically, growing up is the time when one becomes self-sufficient or takes on responsibilities for others (Bakitas et al., 2024). This shift can come by choice or by force. For some, it happens early. For some, it never happens. No one can speak to the “ideal” time to grow up, given the many factors that influence that change, but for those who had to grow up early, their experience was not ideal. These children were thrown into the deep end and told to sink or swim. For Corinne, swimming meant serving as the mother figure for her sister on top of for herself – a role she had no preparation for. For others, parentification looks wildly different, but it maintains the same familial role reversal. If this phenomenon sounds familiar, you might be among the 1.4 million young carers in the United States. Read more to learn more about parentification and what you can do to ameliorate its more negative consequences.
Understanding Parentification’s Effects on the Psyche
If you were subjected to childhood parentification, how do you reinstate boundaries, rest, and play – tools that were compromised – into adult life? The first step is to be self-compassionate. Setting boundaries, reinstating play, and prioritizing rest is uncharted territory. There was no compass to guide the way or any example set by competent role models. Besides, you were too busy making up for what your parents couldn’t provide to be concerned with play and rest. While you may lack the skills, you can now fill the gaps. You aren’t behind your peers. You simply weren’t granted the luxury of “figure it out.”
Next, acknowledge where those gaps are and learn how they impacted the psyche. When you internalize at a young age that your value revolves around your ability to care for others, you may feel worthless if you have no one to care for. That empty feeling stems from a self-worth that has become conditional on your “usefulness” to others, and this distortion can bleed into relationships where, instead of being perceived as valuable for doing something you have been primed to do, you’re actually perceived as over-functional or suffocating – a notion that contradicts your core beliefs. Bakitas et al. (2024) put this sensation nicely: “[parentified children’s] sense of self can become tied to their caregiving role in such a way that they become compulsive caretakers.” To overcome this compulsion, the objective is to internalize the idea that self-sufficiency is enough.
Reinstating Play and Rest
If survival takes precedence over fun, there is no opportunity to explore your playful side, let alone time to learn when it is not socially acceptable to be playful. Similarly, if action overrides leisure, there is no opportunity to explore the benefits of rest. Why was Corinne acting so “immaturely” at the school assembly? It’s simple. She was never able to express herself that way after age 11, so her playful behavior comes out in settings where her peers have learned to suppress it. For Corrine, play became associated with irresponsibility rather than rejuvenation, and rest with laziness rather than restoration.
How can one reinstate play and rest after suppressing them for so long? It is important to note that your lines of thought (e.i, play is not productive and is thus irresponsible) are learned survival logic, not dysfunction. Learned behavior can be unlearned. This is the principle of neuroplasticity: “the brain’s ability to change and adapt throughout life by modifying its structure, functions, or neural pathways.”
(Fisher, 2025). To utilize neuroplasticity, you must acknowledge and accept resistance. Play might feel useless or unsafe initially, and letting go of inhibitions to play can feel triggering. The concept of ‘play’ as frivolity must evolve to be ‘play’ as emotional regulation, nervous system repair, and identity formation. This reframe gives play a purpose that can help someone whose values orbit around productivity. You might divide play into bite-sized categories. Here are some examples of sample categories:
● Creativity: art, writing, music, designing a fantasy business venture
● Movement: dance, exercise, games, walks
● Novelty: Learning a new skill without expectation of mastery (e.i, archery)
● Pointless pleasure: doing something that brings the soul happiness
Incorporating rest follows the same formula. We start by acknowledging the barriers. Parentified individuals “may show tendencies towards perfectionism, workaholism, and overachieving,” so your mindset is likely, ‘I need to be doing something productive with my time’ (Borchet et al., 2021). We want to reframe that productivity-oriented mindset to be, “resting is productive because it restores my energy and makes it easier to be productive when I have to be.” Then, if you are uneasy with unstructured time or with being still, it could be helpful to physically structure rest into your days. You might also incorporate grounding or meditative practices into your leisure time. Doing so would help alleviate anxiety and regulate the nervous system. Leisure is thus given a concrete purpose until it becomes internalized that resting in moderation is an act of productivity. The overarching objective of reinstating rest into daily life is to challenge productivity-based self-worth, separate rest from failure, and reframe rest as functional rather than wasteful.
Reinstating Boundary Setting
Rebuilding boundary-setting might be the hardest task of the three, as boundary formation is directly disrupted by parentification (Bakitas et al., 2025). Parentified children have learned that their boundaries come second. Lacking skills in this area can manifest as an inability to say no, an overemphasis on accommodation, a sense of responsibility for others’ dysfunction, and a pervasive fear of disappointing people (Borchet et al., 2021). The good news is that there are multiple ways to reinstate boundaries in your repertoire. First, you must internalize that setting a boundary does not mean rejecting another person’s needs. Discern between feeling compassionate and being personally responsible. Empathy is natural towards those we see struggling, but feeling empathy does not mean that struggling people are your charity cases. Practicing phrases such as “I’m not available for X,” “I can help with X but not Y,” or “I’m not available now but maybe later” can help showcase kindness while remaining assertive. The objective is not to take away from the warmth you have to offer but to offer it discerningly. Setting boundaries is not rejection. It is self-prioritization.
Risk Factors
Before introducing the final steps, it is crucial to review the risk and protective factors for parentified children. In her blog, Danielle Dellaquila (2025) references the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study (Felitti et al., 1998), noting that “people exposed to six or more ACEs contributed to a 20-year reduction in lifespan… [and] lifelong impairments by causing disruptions in brain development.” Our case example, Corinne, faced four ACEs – emotional neglect, living with a family member with a mental illness, loss of a parent, and physical neglect. This combination puts her at substantial risk. Outside of ACEs, parentification also carries risk of “high levels of anxiety, depression, personality disorders, or psychoactive substance overuse” (Borchet et al., 2021), as well as “lower school performance/attendance, poor peer relationships, and poor self-concept” (Bakitas et al., 2025).
Protective Factors
Mercifully, protective factors exist for parentified people, with higher resilience levels being common (Bakitas et al. 2025). Christina Bradley (2023) defines resilience in minors as “the ability to cope with a distressing event or crisis, adapt to change, recover from setbacks, and return to a stable internal baseline.” With a parentified child, if both parents are alive or one parent is capable and competent, these factors may enhance the child’s resilience if their basic needs are met. However, Bakitas et al. (2025) are quick to note that parentification is “unique to the individual experiencing the phenomenon, as well as to the context they find themselves in.” Their distinction is important because resilience is not guaranteed by parentification. Resilience only emerges when other protective factors are present. For Corinne, resilience was likely not boosted by the severity of her ACEs/risk factors. Fortunately for her, “closeness with a [sibling] may constitute an important protective factor,” so her bond with her sister, though forced, meets that protective factor. (Borchet et al., 2025).
Next Steps
The final point to make is that play, rest, and boundaries are integral parts of one’s identity. The primary issue with premature parentification is that one’s identity is shaped around role function. Borchet et al. (2021) note that, “Individuals with the experience of parentification come to therapy due to mental exhaustion and breakdown caused by the feeling of being unable to continue helping their loved ones.” The goal of therapy is to reframe that service-oriented identity as one that distinguishes between preferences and duties, and to establish a sense of self centered on identity exploration rather than caretaking. Humans do not possess one singular identity. Rather, we are multidimensional beings with ever-evolving identities that coexist simultaneously. Caretaking, whether you want it to be, will perpetually be a piece of your identity if you were subjected to parentification. However, you are not sentenced to have it define you. It can be reshaped within your core belief system to align with the other identities you will learn to form.
