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Expert Analysis
Parentification, Infantilization, and
Adultification: How Might They Impact a
Family Law Case?
Elisa Reiter, Daniel Pollack, and Jeffrey Siegel | July 26, 2023
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
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The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
In “My Heart Leaps Up,” poet William Wordsworth portrays his
childhood joy at observing a rainbow, concluding that he hopes to retain
that childlike wonder until he dies. While childlike wonder is a good
thing, parentification, adultification and infantilization, by contrast, may
occur during the pendency of a divorce, a modification case, or in cases
involving Child Protective Services, and may not be good things.
Each of these theories may impact on a child’s natural development, yet
not one is found in the DSM-5-TR. We address such issues, and how they
may impact not only on family law matters, but on a child’s relationship
with other family members, and in their own partnerships in adulthood.
There may not be visible, explicit trauma, but, just like an ultraviolet light
will kill certain bacteria and viruses, parentification, adultification, and
infantilization can dampen a young person’s healthy childhood. Veering
away from any politicalization, the term “parentification” has been used
to explain a child’s premature acceptance of responsibilities for their
parents, and within the family dynamic, of younger siblings. Nancy D.
Chase notes that parentification “entails a functional and/or emotional
role reversal in which the child sacrifices his or her own needs for
attention, comfort and guidance in order to accommodate and care for
logistical and/or emotional needs of the parent.”
There is considerable confusion between the terms adultification and
parentification. Asking a 16- or 17-year-old to take responsibility by
maintaining good grades, getting a job to help pay for gas and car
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insurance, and acting appropriately constitutes good parenting. Asking a
child to help with chores is not parentification. When a parent needs help
during short periods of illness or disability, or when a parent needs help
with minor household repairs or upkeep, such requests are appropriate
and can assist with the child’s self-esteem and self-image, building the
child’s reliability and responsibility. Such growth is important as the
child matures into early adulthood.
Benjamin D. Garber, Ph.D. opines: “Adultification occurs when a parent
prematurely enlists a child as an ally, peer, friend, or ‘emotional
partner.’” (p. 103). There are times that adultification can be a good
thing. To determine whether a child has been adultified is based on a
number of factors, including:
1. The child’s age at the time the adultification is noted;
2. The family’s history of healthy interaction, if any;
3. Birth order;
4. The history of conflict between the child’s parents, and of the
child’s exposure to such conflict of personalities;
5. The duration of the exposure to conflict. (p. 104)
The corruption of a child’s normal role in the family unit can increase the
child’s risk of dysfunction—socially and emotionally—when the child
attains adulthood. When a parent begins to rely on the child for
emotional support, especially in times of conflict within the family, and
the parent comes to depend on the child for emotional support and
protection, then the situation has become problematic and may be
characterized as parentification.
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While Dr. Garber notes that the terms “parentification” and
“adultification” are often used interchangeably, he perceives the term
“parentification” to pertain to a notable reversal of the parent/child
relationship. The child becomes the parent; the parent acts like a child,
relying on the child for a variety of items more often attributed to doing
things that a parent would do. Dr. Garber references the case of Mayo v.
Mayo in which the North Dakota Supreme Court held that:
. . .parentification results in ‘pseudo-maturity,’ characterized by children
acting very responsible and trying very hard to be good caretakers…The
parentification manifests itself in adulthood in one of two extreme ways.
The first is codependency, which results when parentified children try to
compensate for the lack of nurturing they received as children. The
second is continuing the self-sacrificing role of the caretaker at the
expense of the reversal. (p. 106).
Parentification may be observed in high conflict cases when a parent
may “enlist” a child in that parent’s war against the other parent. When
the child becomes the mouthpiece for the parent, the child’s needs fall
secondary to the parent’s demands for assistance in engaging with the
other parent.
During the 20th century, social scientists began to use the
term infantilization to refer to “the ways in which treating humans as
helpless can prolong or encourage their dependency on others.”
A parent who was very dependent on their former spouse is likely to
seek support initially from extended family and friends. However, those
children often grow tired of being pulled into the fray, and return to their
own lives. This scarcity of support—albeit self-inflicted—leaves the
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parent with only one resource: the child. Transferring their dependence
and reliance to the child means that the child must turn their attention
from their own peer group relationships to attending to and protecting
the parent. The result? The child is set up to fight the other parent in
place of the parent they must protect.
In a study of 19 women, each of whom perceived that she experienced
parentification in their respective childhoods, authors Shirley Schorr and
Limor Goldner conclude that “parentification can be considered a form of
emotional abuse and neglect.” Schorr and Goldner assert that there is a
difference between parentification that is adaptive, or moderate, and
parentification that is unhealthy or morbid. Setting appropriate
boundaries is an appropriate part of the parent-child relationship.
Sometimes, though, parents rely on their children too much, resulting in
“pathological parentification.” How do the parent-child boundaries
become so challenged as to result in a pathological result? It occurs when
“parents turn to their children for concrete instrumental help with
housekeeping chores or for emotional nurturance, support, comfort and
closeness.”
Parentification is not all bad. For instance, suppose a mother relies on
her 9-year-old child to change the mother’s dressing for an abdominal
infection that is draining. Such a request can play upon the child’s natural
curiosity and caretaking ability, enhancing the child’s empathy for others
who are experiencing an illness or some type of physical issue. The child
may have to endure not only their parent’s pain, but learn how to
maintain their parent’s hygiene in order to keep the wound clean, and
learn coping skills in the face of the parent’s illness. Pathological
parentification is “characterized by poor parental care, which is
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manifested by placing exaggerated, overburdening, long-lasting
emotional responsibility, and instrumental caregiving on the child, which
the child perceives as an intolerably heavy burden and unfair.” (Schorr,
p. 2).
What is at the core of whether a relationship is termed healthy or
unhealthy? Attachment theory. As Schorr and Goldner note:
Even though individuals who were parentified as children often maintain
their positions as caregivers in adult relationships, these individuals are
inclined to compensate for their childhood losses by turning to their own
children for their own nurturance, narcissistic, and relationship needs.
(Schorr, p. 3).
In the context of family litigation, judges, ad litems, attorneys, child
custody evaluators, and jurors, must ask themselves whether the
burdens placed on children are appropriate, or break through
inappropriate boundaries. An obvious example: A child who is abused
sexually, and told that they must keep their parent’s incest a secret, will
suffer a painful experience, one that can color the child’s adult
interactions and their ability to parent and trust a partner in the future.
In Schorr and Goldner’s research, they found two recurring themes: “the
participants’ external reality, and the second relates to internal factors.”
(p. 6).
External factors leading to parentification include:
1. Lack of parental competence;
2. Mental or physical disabilities for the parent;
3. A parent’s loneliness;
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4. A parent presenting as being child-like and in need of protection;
5. On-going exposure to physical and/or emotional abuse between
the child’s parents or other family members;
6. Economic hardships;
7. Displacement – being forced out of a long-term relationship or
living arrangement;
8. A parent imposing duties befitting an adult rather than a child, due
to the parent’s inability to provide for the home; and
9. Death of a parent.
Internal factors leading to parentification include:
1. Blurring psychological boundaries;
2. Taking on nurturing roles to assure a parent’s stability;
3. Speaking in adult language;
4. Triangulation in an attempt to preserve the familial unit;
5. Being psychologically manipulated, such as vying for status as the
favorite child;
6. Overt or covert acts of aggression or abuse of the child, of a parent,
or of a child’s siblings;
7. Neglect in the forms of alienation, rejection, denial of physical
and/or emotional love;
8. Merging and enmeshment, or “parental expropriation of the self as
of an early age.” (pp. 6-8).
Think of a child who is having to cope with a fragile parent, e.g., a parent
who has been diagnosed as bi-polar. In the event of a divorce, or in a
subsequent suit to modify the parent child relationship, the fragile
parent can feel threatened. Such a child is so busy taking care of their
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needy parent in light of a threat to the family’s stability, the child chooses
to refrain from expressing their own feelings, to assure that the child
does not hurt their needy parent’s feelings. Such a child could view their
own environment as threatening, questioning their own self-worth.
Children who have suffered from parentification often find themselves in
need of acting as their own parent in order to cope with any feelings of
vulnerability or insecurity. Children may be left to raise themselves.
Think of CPS cases where the parents involved have children from
numerous relationships, are addicts, suffer from mental health disorders,
and engage in self-medication in lieu of adhering to treatment protocols.
Parentification in such a context may lead to the perpetuation of social
and economic stratification. Those who have suffered abuse often repeat
the abuse, absent significant counseling and modeling of other, healthy
behaviors.
One would hope that questions about parentification, adultification and
infantilization are a standard part of a child custody evaluation. Is a child
asked to shop for food or clothing for the rest of the family unit? Is the
child forced to work on the family budget, or to work simply to meet the
family’s economic needs? Will parentification, adultification and/or
infantilization lead to issues for such individuals as they enter
adolescence and adulthood? As Sara Tomek and her colleagues noted, we
have yet to determine if “parentification and infantilization are separate
constructs or rather two extremes of the same dimension.”
They also observed that if parentification is present in a given case,
family therapists must consider certain items in working with families
where such dysfunction is present, including:
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1. Is the behavior “culturally sanctioned and consonant with family
values”;
2. Digging deep to ascertain if parentification is occurring,
particularly with children who are “reluctant to disclose – or
underreport”;
3. Whether outcomes are “immediate” or “emerge over time”; and
4. Whether there is any ability to reframe the parentification in “a
positive, culturally relevant family system by helping parents to
perform their parental roles and responsibilities to their children,
crossing generational boundaries with their children,” as well as
“compelling age-inappropriate activities among their children.”
(pp. 12-13).
How do mental health and family law professionals assess for
parentification, adultification or infantilization? It is no simple matter to
measure subtle undertones of emotion. Often, tests that can be included
in a child custody evaluation are subject to criticism as not being
sufficiently reliable or valid – yet reliability and validity are essential
when a Daubert challenge is raised. Forensic testing is essential, along
with home visits and interviews of each parent, review of collateral
documentation. As Bill Eddy writes in Splitting:
The best defense against … a postdivorce battle is to continue to keep
records on parenting behavior and to have other people witness that the
child is doing well with you. . . try to provide as much stability as
possible for the children and your ex-partner. Ease them into
changes…Outside court, it is very important to find a stable balance in
relating to your former partner: Avoid being too close or too rejecting.
(pp. 272-274).
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Children may be the recipients of a quiet tsunami of well-intended, but
nonetheless inappropriate expectations cast upon them. The parent who
uses a child as a shield is manifesting high levels of dependency and
emotional immaturity. Without an intervention to move out of the
parentified position, the child becomes enmeshed in their parents’ battle;
absent understanding, the other parent may lose their relationship with
the child. Attorneys, evaluators, children’s advocates, and judges must
use child custody evaluations and their own observations in assessing
whether a party to a case has engaged in parentification, infantilization
and adultification.
Elisa Reiter is Board Certified in Family Law and in Child Welfare Law
by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization. She has served as an Adjunct
Professor at SMU. Mrs. Reiter is a Senior Attorney with Underwood
Perkins, P.C. in Dallas, Texas. She is also admitted to practice in the
District of Columbia, Massachusetts, and New York.
Contact: ereiter@uplawtx.com.
Daniel Pollack, MSW, JD is a professor at Yeshiva University’s School of
Social Work in New York City. He was also a Commissioner of Game
Over: Commission to Protect Youth Athletes, an independent blue-ribbon
commission created to examine the institutional responses to sexual
grooming and abuse by former USA Gymnastics physician Larry Nassar.
Contact: dpollack@yu.edu.
Jeffrey C. Siegel, Ph.D., ABPP is a forensic and clinical psychologist in
Dallas, Texas. In practice since 1981, he has been conducting child
custody evaluations for over 40 years in multiple states and has provided
court testimony over 300 times. He is board certified in Clinical
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Psychology and Family Psychology through the American Board of
Professional Psychology and is a Fellow of the American College of
Forensic Psychology. Contact: jeff@siegelphd.com.
Original link:
https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/2023/07/26/parentification
-infantilization-and-adultification-how-might-they-impact-a-family-law-
case/