It's OK to 'Parentify' Our Kids

Ever heard of “parentification?” Neither had I, until I came across it on a local parenting blog. A flustered mom of a baby and a toddler asked why it seemed that moms with multiple kids often seemed more relaxed than moms with just one or two.

I chimed in, posting that I—like so many other moms I know with big families—found parenting peaked in difficulty with three. After three, it just gets easier. Busier, yes, but easier.

I’d say we all agree that it’s easier because the older kids help. There is someone to feed the baby a bottle while you stir the pot or vice versa. Someone to play kickball with the toddler in the backyard while you make a call. And before you know it, someone to babysit while you run a quick errand.

As I shared with this mom, I get more sleep with five kids than I did with one. I mentioned that on an occasional Saturday morning, my 13-year-old daughter, who is an early riser, sometimes gets the toddler out of her crib, changes her diaper, gives her a snack, and turns on a cartoon long before I surface.  

Based on the vitriolic reaction that I got from that statement, you would think I had proudly announced that I was raising Cinderella. The outraged response from readers genuinely surprised me, and that’s hard to do as someone who is well aware of the bunk parenting pop psychology out there. (See my post on “gentle parenting” here.)

The unifying theme among angry respondents was that in asking and allowing my children to help with their younger siblings, I was doing something called parentification. I was also accused of dooming my eldest daughter to a life of yet another condition I’d never heard of called Eldest Daughter Syndrome, wherein she suffers a life of distress having been conditioned for, of all things, caregiving.

This is bonkers.

And yet parentification is apparently a real term used by real parenting “experts.” I burst out laughing when I read The Cleveland Clinic’s page on parentification, which is, to use their actual quote, “when a child takes on the responsibilities typically reserved for the parents such as childcare, cooking, and cleaning.”  

Got that, parents? If you ask your older kid to babysit a younger sibling, help with dinner, or clean a toilet, you are essentially emotionally abusing your child.  

This is not to deny that there are real-world examples of children who are forced to take on responsibilities in the home that are beyond their maturity level because of neglectful or absent parents. (If anything, nothing pushes a child into adult emotional territory more than divorce.) But being forced to fill the role of a mother or father is simply not the same as changing a sibling’s diaper or helping cook a family meal.

In fact, new research suggests that what pop psychologists call “parentification” may actually influence children in a positive way. As family policy writer Stephanie Murray documented in a Substack post, not one but two studies have found that “childhood ‘parentification’ is associated with a stronger desire to have children.”  

She adds, “The connection doesn’t appear to be driven by some sort of maladaptive caregiver syndrome.” Rather, she writes:

[T]he link between parentification and the desire for kids was ‘fully mediated by positive childbearing motivation,’ the study reads. ‘It appears that the participants who were more involved in family caregiving in their childhood and adolescent years had a more positive image of family and parenthood, which translated into a stronger desire to have their own child.’ As such, the authors conclude that ‘early caring activities, especially when they evoke feelings of satisfaction and appreciation in the child, may play an important role in shaping childbearing motivations and desires.’

This makes total sense. Because, contrary to the messages of our hyper-individualized society that emphasizes self-expression above all else, we humans don’t need to be “conditioned” for caregiving. We are already hardwired for it. The urge to care for others and find deep meaning and satisfaction in doing so is an essential part of what makes us human. It is a quality that women possess and express in a particular way, despite our culture's best efforts to encourage us to abandon it. It is why so many women continue to prioritize family over career despite unprecedented academic and professional opportunities, and why we gravitate towards careers that involve caregiving or cultivating others. It’s not a defect or a reflection of the patriarchy; instead, it is at the heart of who we are as women. All the hand-wringing in the world about “elder daughter syndrome” in The Atlantic won’t change that. 

And it won’t change the reality that family is the first vessel in which we learn to live out our humanity. Caring for others and helping around the home beginning at a young age doesn’t detract from one’s childhood. Rather, it helps to build a foundation for an adulthood marked by deep and meaningful interpersonal relationships and service towards others. And undoubtedly learning the basic skills of home life in childhood help one to feel more confident as an adult in forming a family of one’s own. 

Parentification seems like just the latest iteration of the “expert class’s” efforts to undo the family through psychology. “Like gaslighting and narcissism before it,’ one writer put it in The Cut, “parentification is a pop-psychology term in the ascent.”

That’s unfortunate. Because it seems to me that whether the goal is to boost the birthrate or simply raise happy kids that want to one day have some of their own, we should go ahead and 'parentify' the heck out of our children. 

Ashley E. McGuire is a Contributing Editor at the Institute for Family Studies and the author of Sex Scandal: The Drive to Abolish Male and Female (Regnery, 2017).

Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or views of the Institute for Family Studies.