Breaking the Cycle of Blurred Parental Boundaries
August 23rd, 2012
Destructive parentification is a behavior in which a parent transfers the emotional or physical responsibility of parenting to their child. Some parents turn to their children for emotional support and expect their children to fill emotional voids. Other parents who engage in destructive parentification may expect their children to fulfill physical obligations such as caretaking. These behaviors diminish the appropriate boundaries between a parent and child that are necessary for a child to develop his or her own identity. Additionally, boundaries that are blurred can expose children to events and circumstances that they are emotionally and physically unprepared to handle. This type of parentification can have significantly negative outcomes for children. Research has shown that children who are the victims of parentification, which is considered a form of abuse, have higher rates of externalizing and internalizing problems in childhood and adolescence than those who do not experience parentification.
When victims of parentification become parents themselves, the risk of the cycle continuing is extremely high. However, few studies have examined how maternal behavior in adult victims of childhood parentification affects future generations. To explore the relationship between maternal behavior and childhood psychological development, Amy K. Nuttal of the Department of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana assessed 374 pairs of mother-child participants through the first 3 years of the children’s lives. The mothers were evaluated for childhood parentification in their own families of origin and and for mixed histories of emotional abuse, sexual abuse, or physical abuse.
Nuttal found that the women with destructive parentification were less responsive to their children at 18 months than those with no history of parentification. The unresponsiveness was predictive of externalizing behaviors in the children at 36 months. When Nuttal examined the effect of the father’s presence, she discovered that the participants who maintained a relationship with the father of the child had significantly lower levels of prior parentification than those who had no relationship with the fathers. Nuttal also found that previous parentification directly predicted low levels of maternal warmth in the participants, which indirectly predicted negative developmental outcomes for the children. She added, “This finding suggests that facilitating the development of maternal contingent responsiveness among mothers with a history of destructive parentification may promote more adaptive child development in the next generation.”
Reference:
Nuttall, A. K., Valentino, K., Borkowski, J. G. (2012). Maternal history of parentification, maternal warm responsiveness, and children’s externalizing behavior. Journal of Family Psychology. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0029470
Related articles:
Welcome to Your Child’s Brain: Interview With Sandra Aamodt
Importance of Coping Skills, Part 2: Building Resilience
How to Teach Children Emotional Intelligence
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Comments
I have seen this so many times in young moms particularly, who have had to grow up too soon and now they are forcing this on to their young kids as well. When you get into this pattern of behavior that has become fairly common, then no one is allowed to be a child anymore. Everyone is continually seeking someone to care for them, and they forget that at a certain point you have to leran to take care of yourself. So unfair for those who have been caught up in this, but the chain has to end somewhere.
I think the parents who do this are not ready to be parents themselves in the first place! When you treat your child like a parent it shows that you want to be treated like a child yourself! You are not ready to PROVIDE care, rather you are SEEKING it.And that is a horrible thing to do to a child.
It is the lack of awareness and a resolve to be a good parent that can often lead to this.Also,being a parent is a great thing but only if you are ready for it.Just taking the plunge without giving it enough thought can often have disastrous results.
it is not a clear case of perpetrator and victim but can sometimes be a victim victim one too..If one parent is an addict or displays some other problem then there are handed that the other parent will start to exhibit such behavior of wrong parenting.they feel helpless and may end up transferring the responsibilities onto their kids.it needs to be treated in a way that a victim is and not always like the person is at a fault.that way there is far more chances of the entire problem being fixed.
When children are given these responsibilities from a young age and are required to be the smart one in the home, that is setting them up for such a tough life. Who wants to feel like they have practically had to raise their own parents and yet this is exactly what happens to so many children in these situations. The parents, or the supposed adults I guess I should say, should be the ones taking care of them but they find it to be the other way around. How can that be healthy for the child who has been forced into this role?
it is a real stretch of the imagination for me to think about having a child yet not having the capability to develop a real and nurturing bond with that child
i have wanted a baby for so long now that i would practically give a limb to have one, and there are all of these other people who have them who don’t wnat them at all
and then when they do have a child that they don’t want then they turn around and screw up their lives for them because that’s the only thing that they knw, they are repeating the same things that were done to them
how could you ever foster the growth of maternal caring and nurturing when this is the kind of person that you are talking about?
i know that working with them to try to establish some bond would be a great first step toward making that child relationship healthy, but how many generations do we have to wait for that circle to be broken?
Never send a boy to do a man’s work. And yet people unload their responsibilities onto their children. I have seen such parents and it angers me to say the least. Such people do not deserve to be parents, there are so many people out there that can be great parents and have no kids, and you are just wasting this great blessing!
SHouldnt all this be a part of parenting 101?I mean who doesnt know you shouldnt do that to a child!if you are incapable of handling those responsibilities how in the world do you expect that young child to be able to?i think it says so much about you as a parent.stand up for yourself and change,youre only contributing to a cycle that can destroy several lives on its way!
Babies are having babies and like it or not that continues to be one of the biggest concerns that we have still not been able to stop. We need more sex ed from parents, from the schools, so that people know what causes them to get pregnant (duh!) and how to avoid unwanted pregnancies. Until we get control over this problem that still plagues our society then there will always be issues with people having kids who have no business having kids and perpetuating this strange parent/child confusion that seems to exist in so many families.
its easy to blame a parent doing this but that is not the solution to the problem.as this study has told and something that we need to understand is that people tend to do this if they were subjected to the same in their own childhood.so they need to be seen as victims first and then as perpetrators.if their victim part is healed then the perpetrator part would automatically go away too!
If the parents are blurred as to what their roles are then imagine how the children in these homes feel!
All of the other kids that they know are being taken care of, being allowed to have a childhood, and these children are so confused because this isn’t what they experience at home. In their lives they are the ones taking care of the adults and that leaves them not really knowing what their role is supposed to be and in a situation where they are not old enough to emotionally handle the role that they have been given.
“Destructive parentification” sounds like a term any of us would want to avoid!
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