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When we think of childhood, many of us think about a simpler, easier time in our lives, when we had few responsibilities and more freedom. However, if you are an adult who grew up parentified, your adulthood likely feels like an extension of a childhood fraught with worry, responsibility, and caretaking. If you’ve ever been with a group of adults where everyone is waxing nostalgic about being kids, and all you can offer is a tight smile and a vacant stare, you’re not alone. Mourning the loss of a childhood when you grew up parentified is a necessary step in moving into a healthier adulthood, as the process of recognition, mourning, and acceptance helps you to acknowledge what you didn’t have while focusing on what you want to build for yourself or for your own children in the future.
Recognizing the loss
Experiences of loss don’t always have to include death. The loss of a job, a relationship, or physical functioning—these are situations in which we may experience grief and struggle with transitioning to a new reality. Parentification often involves creating safety by hiding one’s true feelings to maintain the stability of a parent. Subconsciously, our brains know that if we have a stable parent, it ensures our survival. This drive towards survival causes children to take on adult roles to maintain some sense of stability in the family system.
If you were this child, what you may be realizing now as an adult is the enormous toll that this process of surviving has taken on you, the strain that constantly pushing your true self down to maintain equilibrium has caused you long-term. It’s not uncommon for me to hear clients with these experiences muse that they really don’t know who they are outside of the role they’ve played in their family, a role that they often repeat in other spheres of their lives. Never getting to be a kid is a profound loss on many levels, including the loss of oneself, the ability to have fun without responsibility, and an interruption in the process of identity development, to name a few. Framing it as such provides a path to empathy, one that leads away from the dismissive experiences you may have had in childhood.
Mourning the loss
When you can recognize the loss of your childhood, you can more effectively process the emotions that may come up, including anger, sadness, and even resentment towards people who had healthier emotional experiences, even if those people are your own children. Processing resentment is a part of mourning a lost childhood, and rather than feel shame at having these feelings, you can view them with curiosity and compassion. Changing the way you parent your own children as you reflect upon how being parentified has affected you is significant to having a corrective experience, a helpful aspect of processing loss and disappointment (Jurkovic, 1997).
Acceptance and Building the Future You Want
When you accept that this was the childhood you had, it frees you to ask the question: Now what? What healing needs to take place, and how can I move forward to create a different future for myself and or my own children? You may go through a long period in which you practice giving yourself the things you needed and didn’t get. This might be physical things like treating yourself to something you weren’t allowed to have, or more emotional things like asking for a hug, more space, or quiet alone time. Accepting your lost childhood and embracing your motivation to build a different future involves acknowledging and embracing those parts of you that have been convinced that you don’t deserve a break from the status quo, that change always means uncertainty and a lack of safety. Even positive change can be difficult to navigate, especially alone. Reach out to a qualified therapist who understands parentification and family systems work to help you move forward.
