Parentifying A Child Is A Form Of Emotional Blackmail

Why does “parent–child role reversal” occur?

Parentification​ is when a child is forced into an adult role, taking on a parent’s emotional needs or family responsibilities. It takes two forms — emotional and instrumental — and reverses the parent–child hierarchy. Often seen as emotional blackmail, it can produce a “false self” and lasting guilt.

1. The family lacks psychological boundaries

A user on Zhihu once shared that her mother told her “everything” from the time she was small. Her mother disclosed her father’s affair, the problems in her parents’ sex life, and even the fact that she had once, for a fleeting moment, wanted to kill her father — she hid nothing and held nothing back. For as long as the daughter could remember, her mother told relatives that her daughter was her “little bestie,” that the two of them could talk about anything, and that her words were full of pride and satisfaction.

But only the daughter knew how heavy and painful that “bestie” role actually was. When she heard those things, she was not yet ten years old — she had never even held a boy’s hand — yet she had to chew over the sordid details of a failed marriage alongside her mother.

This kind of mother appears close to her daughter, but in reality she has no psychological boundaries whatsoever, and to the child she is nothing short of a nightmare. Every single time, after emptying all her grievances, resentment, and despair, the mother would regain her composure and be able to carry on with her day. The daughter, meanwhile, sank into ever more intense mental anguish, feeling as though she were dragging a drowning person along, gasping for air — and that person treated her as the only straw within reach, and would never let go. She had to save her, had to bear her weight, yet felt herself sinking deeper and deeper, utterly exhausted.

Between parent and child, the most important thing is boundaries. When a parent treats a child as a best friend and tells them “everything,” it is the most severe form of exploitation and violation of that child.

2. Parents offload their anxiety onto the child

The British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion said that the essence of a relationship is who projects anxiety onto whom, and who bears anxiety for whom.

Good parents, besides providing food and clothing, serve another crucial function — they metabolize the child’s anxiety. Immature parents, however, not only fail to metabolize their child’s anxiety; they turn the child into a container for their own emotions from a very young age.

Many parents have stalled completely in their own growth and feel enormous anxiety about fitting into society, so they push their children to compete as a way of offloading the anxiety inside themselves. They have all kinds of psychological needs and wishes, but lack the confidence to fulfill them through their own efforts, so they force their children to fulfill them instead. The child is the person they love most; if the child achieves it, it is as if they themselves have achieved it.

But in doing so, parents effectively strip the child of their self, while creating a huge internal conflict: if you say the parents don’t love the child, all their attention is focused on the child; if you say they do love the child, they can’t even see who the child really is — so how can that be called love? The child is left tangled between anger and guilt toward the parents, causing severe internal depletion.

In a healthy relationship, the stronger party bears the anxiety of the weaker one; in a pathological, reversed relationship, the stronger party dumps their anxiety onto the weaker one.

What consequences does a false parent–child relationship have for the child?

1. The false self

When parents are highly anxious and demand that the child conform to their own fantasies to soothe them, the child will loyally repress their true self and revolve around the parents’ feelings, forming a “false self.”

A false self can come with a high IQ and good social functioning, but it is a thick, hollow shell without a soul. The true self is tightly locked inside that shell, enduring enormous anger and pain. And once it erupts, the consequences can be terrifyingly severe.

2. A tendency to fall into helplessness and depression in adulthood

Young children lack the capacity for reality testing and cannot accurately gauge their own abilities. If parents constantly pour out their troubles to the child, conveying the message: “I have a serious problem, I need you to help me, I need you to resolve it for me,” the child will feel it is their solemn duty and will believe they must do everything in their power to save the parent.

But what happens when a problem that even an adult cannot solve is stuffed into a young child’s tiny heart? A child is, after all, just a child — there are things they simply cannot do. They cannot make their parents love each other, cannot make their mother happy, cannot change the atmosphere at home. The child is likely to develop a feeling of “I can’t do anything right, I’m worthless,” and then sink into a terrible state of helplessness and self-blame.

Growing up in a “little adult” family: how to break free?

So, for someone who grew up in this environment, what can they do to make themselves psychologically stronger?

1. Create physical distance from your parents

Some people say that every time they go home and spend time with their parents, they are drained of all their energy, as if they’d been seriously ill, and it takes many days to recover. Others say that every time they receive a voice message from their mother, they have to spend ages mentally preparing themselves before they dare to open it.

If you have reached the point where “anxiety and fear come flooding over you the moment you have contact with your parents,” then for now, you can simply not see them.

Reconciling with your parents can help you complete self-acceptance and integration, and it is beneficial to you. But for someone who doesn’t yet have the strength, not reconciling can be a form of self-protection — it keeps you away from the harm your parents cause and carves out an independent space in which to repair yourself.

2. Try to honor your own feelings, not other people’s

This is the most important one. If you always consider other people’s feelings, it means the person living inside your body is someone else, not you. It may have been your parents at first; later it becomes your partner, friends, colleagues, even strangers. You habitually put others’ feelings first, and when someone else’s feelings conflict with your own, your first instinct is to give up your own.

Now, you can try to take your own territory back. At first you may think: “If I only consider my own feelings, am I being too selfish?” But that accusation of selfishness is also someone else’s voice. Only when you belong to yourself do you have any warmth left over to give to others — otherwise, what you give isn’t love at all. When you become better at loving yourself, you will have more strength to love others. The precondition is learning to love yourself first. Loving yourself is not selfishness. Remember that.

Finally, I want to say to everyone who, from childhood, took only their parents’ feelings as what mattered: change is hard, but it is still worth doing. As Albert Camus said: as long as I can embrace life, what does it matter if I embrace it clumsily?

Take it one step at a time.