The significance of children fulfilling parental roles: implications for family therapy

This article describes how family therapists can routinely address the important, but often overlooked, issue of how some children may play parental roles in families. In some situations such as inadequate or absent parenting, a child is drawn into the parental subsystem and becomes identified as a 'little parent' in a process known as parentification. As well as gaining competence in caring, this experience may also become destructive to children in a number of ways. This includes loss of childhood and, as children are unable to fulfil the parental role adequately, low self-esteem, depression and other symptoms. The concept of family attachment scripts is used to understand the implications of a child crossing adult/child boundaries which can lead to looking after parents and siblings. Family therapy techniques help to redress the role reversal and enable the parents to take appropriate responsibility in the family. Work also focuses on how to prevent transmission of parentification down the generations. Therapists have often been parental children. How this can influence their work is illustrated by a specific case.