Have you ever been told you’re mature for your age, or had to play therapist for your parents? Are you the mediator in your family, or were you the child who felt they always had to walk on eggshells to circumvent their parent’s emotional outbursts? If so, oh do I have the term for you, one that I came across as I thought about my own family dynamic. Parentification is what happens when children are tasked with bearing the adult labor of caring for and helping regulate the emotional baggage of their parent(s). A child who is parentified is forced to emotionally mature in order to handle responsibilities that are meant to be relegated to the adult(s) raising them. This imbalanced dynamic also affects the parent(s) involved, as they in turn become dependent and reliant on this child to act as a partner or even a parental role model for them. 

Children who are raised in emotionally volatile and difficult environments learn that their parental figure’s needs take precedence over their own, and become conditioned to sacrifice their health, happiness, and need for personal fulfillment to appease their emotionally stunted parent(s). As they redirect their energy to handling interpersonal problems within their household, they internalize the belief that their wellbeing is not as important as their “usefulness” to their family. For some of these children, meeting the needs of their parents becomes intuitive, second-nature. They typically become adaptable and compassionate, taking on the role of a psychologist or therapist and learning to navigate their relationships by always being aware of others’ needs and anticipating their reactions. While this may sound good on paper (talk about a well-developed emotional intelligence quotient!), the ramifications are much more complicated than that. Parentification can create more negative effects as opposed to positive ones for a child’s emotional development.

Beyond childhood, though, parentification has devastating consequences for the affected children well into adulthood. As these emotionally inept (and often inappropriate) behaviors are normalized within their family unit, these children grow up believing that “relationships that were unhealthy – even violent and abusive – were not meant to be broken away from but repaired,” as psychologist  Nivida Chandra, founder of the mental health initiative The Shrinking Couch, writes for The Guardian. Chandra goes on to explain that “parentified adults form relationships based on how valuable they can be to others… they struggle to receive support in return… They struggle to claim space in the lives of others, uncertain if the person will stay should they have an ask of their own.” Our childhood comes to inform so much of how we grow to handle interpersonal conflict, and parentified kids are much more susceptible to ending up in abusive, toxic, or manipulative relationships because they are accustomed to seeing these dynamics play out at home. Moreover, they feel responsible for handling the emotional labor of the relationships they’re in, often degrading themselves or betraying their own needs to accommodate and prioritize the desires of others.

Lindsay C. Gibson, a notorious clinical psychologist who has extensive expertise in these familial dynamics, writes more about the effects of parentification in Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents: “These children may learn to put other people's needs first as the price of admission to a relationship. Instead of expecting others to provide support and show interest in them, they may take on the role of helping others, convincing everyone that they have few emotional needs of their own. Unfortunately, this tends to create even more loneliness, since covering up your deepest needs prevents genuine connection with others… They often settle for emotional loneliness in their relationships because it feels normal to them, like their early home life.”

Of course, this psychological phenomenon isn’t exclusive to any particular group or type of children – anyone can be affected by parentification if these dynamics rang true for them growing up, or if this is their situation at home. But I can imagine this topic especially resonates for a large number of immigrant children like myself.

My immigrant experience is far from unique, nor does it encompass or represent the one of every first-generation migrant, but it does inform so much of how I navigate my life. I’ve written about it extensively on a personal level (hell, I even made a short comic about it once, though that one was also tied to my relationship with queerness and that’s a whole other conversation). But in all my time exploring how my upbringing and my lived experience has shaped my identity, I had never deeply considered how my childhood – and now my young adulthood – are influenced by my family dynamic in this way. 

There’s an additional layer of expectations that a lot of us immigrants carry, especially when it comes to having to validate our family’s sacrifices and making them feel worthwhile. Uprooting your entire life to go struggle in a foreign country, particularly if you have to do it with no support system and no room for failure the way my family and I did, is no easy feat. Without getting too much into it, I grew up tying my self-worth to what I could offer or do for others, and to what I needed to do to “earn” affection from them (and I still struggle with these feelings to this day at my ripe old age). I poured myself into academics and devoted all my energy to overachieving, all to prove that it would be “worth it” for my family to have been living through abuse and uncertainty. And I know I’m not the only one: El Camino College student Angela Osorio, for instance, writes beautifully about her own experience with the weight of these expectations for The Union, and how she felt that she had to be a good student because she owed it to her parents, who sacrificed so much for her to have more opportunities. Paired with the need to regulate others and fit into neat boxes for their sake, a lot of us become hollow people-pleasers, struggling to create and uphold boundaries or to determine our sense of self and our own worth. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

To the immigrant child who was parentified: you’re not alone. It’s hard to not feel like you are responsible for others, or that your worth depends on how well you can reassure others and how much you can do for them (I’m far from overcoming that, or even acknowledging it myself). But I hope you’ll try to give yourself a little more credit than you do. It’s important to remember the sacrifices and struggles that have brought you to search for a better life, and to care for your community – you deserve to look out for your own needs, too.