Some of these dynamics are nearly unavoidable. However, too much of them and you get a child acting more like a parent than a child. This process is called parentification - and it's not good.
Single parents need to be aware of how much they are asking their children to be parental in their behaviors.
This can be challenging.
- In one sense, children can help with emotional support from time to time, however, too much of that is no good.
- Children should help with chores around the house; that's a good thing. They should be given reasonable and age appropriate tasks.
- Single parents must constantly be aware of boundaries, re-define those boundaries, and expand them as needed.
Certainly the dynamics for single parents are going to be different than in a two-parent hosehold, so don't expect them to be the same. However, being careful not to parentify your cildren is one of the important tasks of single parenting.
2 comments:
Hi,
I can relate to this article. When I was a young adolescent, my mother told me her boyfriend was impotent at the dinner table! That was not my business and it sounds like it might be parentification as well...
-Anonymous
I can remember hearing/reading something about this phenomenon twenty years ago, only then it was called "espousement" and not parentification, as it is today. (I couldn't find the word espousement used in the context of how parentification is today when I did a google search.) I notice the literature on it doesn't seem to be all that abundant today, anymore than it was twenty years ago. These traits that seem evident and observable in others (or ourselves) are only theories, however, and it should not be taken as absolute truths.
Espousement, or parentification, I think, also occurs not only in single parent families, as some of the available literature suggests, but also in two-parent families where boundaries have been crossed, or when distressed circumstances occur - like during or leading up to a divorce, for instance, or when one parent is sick, or when one parent's needs are not being met with their partner.
I wonder if some of the symptoms might also be that some kids do things to escape reality - like later on, they get into drugs, or they escape through fantasy or not wanting to grow up. The literature suggests that a common response is for kids to become overly responsible by having too much responsibility thrust upon them at too early an age, or because they've become their parent's confidant.
I wonder if we see some of these characteristics in children who've become "mommy's little man" or "daddy's little princess"? Not to say that all parents who treat their children in this way are guilty of helping develop "parentified" children, but I think whenever parents are overly dependent upon their children to meet some of their emotional or physical needs, or when parents share too much information that is not appropriate for chidlren to hear, there is the possibility of these traits (exhibited in what the literature terms "parentified children") developing in kids.
Just my three cents..
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