What Is Parentification?

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Divorce poses a risk that when parents lose adult support, they may begin leaning on their children for it.

Parentification occurs when children take on adult roles, including providing adults with emotional support.

Support from friends, therapists, and child-centered attorneys can help restore healthy family boundaries.

So often, when we as family law attorneys caution newly separated or divorced parents to keep their children “out of it,” clients interpret this as a warning not to argue in front of their children. Or not to bring their kids into arguments for support in a he said, she said-type of discussion. They are correct to assume this, and I’m happy they do. Though parents may not have a name for these behaviors, they usually say they recognize the harm they can cause.

My conversation with newly separated or divorcing parents, however, would be incomplete without my underscoring one more behavior they may not realize they’re doing that is far less noticeable: leaning on their children for emotional support, something known as emotional parentification.

Especially common after a divorce, when the adult partner has suddenly lost their primary emotional support system—or in troubled marriages where this type of support has dissipated over time or never existed at all—children, including young ones, become emotional caregivers to their parents way before they have the life experience or skills to do so.........

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