The loss of childhood: when you had to grow up too soon

“At twelve I knew what the electricity cost and when Mum had to take her tablet. What I don’t know is when I last played.”

It is said in passing, almost with a smile, like an interesting detail from a CV. The person who says it is reliable today, capable, the one colleagues call when something goes wrong. Friends confide their worries in them. Relatives ask them for advice. Only when they are alone does a tiredness sometimes wash over them that they cannot trace to any source. And a sadness they feel they have no right to — after all, nothing terrible ever happened to them.

But it did. They did not lose anyone. They lost something they never had: a childhood in which they could be a child. In this post I want to write about parentification — what happens when a child takes on an adult’s role too early — and above all about grieving for something that never was, because this is a grief the people around us almost never recognise.

What parentification is

The term was brought into family therapy by Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy and Geraldine Spark in their book Invisible Loyalties (1973). They used it to describe a reversed relationship: the child looks after the parent — practically or emotionally — instead of the parent looking after the child. You will also find a short explanation in the knowledge base under parentification.

The psychologist Gregory Jurkovic later distinguished two forms, which in real life are often intertwined:

• Instrumental parentification — the child does the practical tasks of adults: cooking, minding younger siblings, sorting out paperwork, interpreting for their parents at official offices, caring for a sick parent.
• Emotional parentification — the child becomes the parent’s support: comforting them, listening to their marital problems, regulating their moods, acting as their confidant or even as a substitute partner.

The second form is almost invisible from the outside. A child who cooks for their brothers is at least noticed as good and helpful. A child who sits on the bed every evening listening to their mother talk about how unhappy she is with their father is, to everyone else, simply “very mature for their age”. And it is often exactly this praise that later makes it hardest for them to see a loss in their own story.

How many children experience this is hard to say, because emotional parentification does not show up in statistics. For practical caring, though, there are figures: the 2011 census in England counted around 166,000 children between the ages of five and seventeen who regularly cared for a family member. Experts agree the true number is higher — many children never report it, because it seems normal to them or because they fear the consequences for their family.

Helping at home is not the same as losing your childhood

Before going further, an important distinction. A child who helps tidy up, minds a younger sister while Mum goes to the doctor, or takes on more than usual while Dad is ill is not necessarily parentified. Age-appropriate responsibility is good for a child — it teaches them they belong to a community and gives them a sense that they can cope.

That is why Jurkovic speaks of destructive parentification when certain conditions are met: the caring lasts a long time, not only during a crisis; the tasks exceed the child’s age and strength; their contribution stays invisible or taken for granted; and above all — there is no one looking after them during that time. The child gives, but gets neither recognition nor protection in return.

Boszormenyi-Nagy described this in terms of fairness. In every family there is an invisible ledger of giving and receiving. When a child gives far more than they receive, and no one acknowledges it, they are left with a sense of debt that cannot be settled — from either side.

Why it is a loss, even if “nothing terrible” happened

Most losses have the shape of an event. Someone dies, a relationship ends, a job is gone. A lost childhood has no date. There is no moment when childhood ended — it just slowly, unnoticed, gave way to something else. Which is why it cannot be mourned the way we mourn a death.

What is lost is really a whole series of things that should have been there and were not: a carefree feeling, a sense that someone else would take care of problems, the right to be silly, angry, childish. The experience of having your feelings received and soothed by someone, rather than soothing theirs. Time for play, for boredom, for irresponsibility.

Pauline Boss coined the term ambiguous loss for losses that have no clear shape, and Kenneth Doka described disenfranchised grief — grief that those around us do not see as legitimate. A lost childhood belongs to both. I write more about the second in The grief nobody acknowledges. Grieving for a childhood is doubly unacknowledged: those around you do not recognise it, and often neither do you.

How it shows up in adulthood

Parentified children grow into adults who are easy to love. They are reliable, empathic, organised. They can read a room before anyone speaks. They do not cause trouble. Which is exactly why it takes so long to see what it costs them.

A meta-analysis by Lisa Hooper and colleagues (2011) showed that parentification in childhood is associated with more psychological distress in adulthood — the link is not large and does not mean every parentified child will suffer, but it is consistent. In the therapy room it tends to show up in a few characteristic ways:

• You find it hard to ask for help. A request feels like a burden you are placing on others, or an admission of weakness.
• Your own needs feel excessive. When you are tired or sad, the first thing you ask is whether you have the right to be.
• You feel other people’s moods more strongly than your own. You know how your partner is before they do. How you are, you often do not.
• Rest and play do not come easily. You fill free time with chores, or become restless when you have it.
• In relationships, you look after people. You often end up next to people who need rescuing — I write about this pattern in Codependency: when you rescue someone else and lose yourself.

This list is not a diagnosis. It describes an adaptation that was once wise. A child who had to look after a parent did the best they could to keep the family going. The problem is not that they learned it, but that as an adult they cannot put the role down, even when they no longer need it.

Where it comes from: when a parent cannot cope

Parentification is almost never the result of parents wanting to exploit their child. Most often it happens when a parent cannot cope themselves: because of illness, depression, addiction, divorce, the death of a partner, poverty, migration, or simply because they too were put in an adult’s role as children. I write about one of the most common circumstances in Growing up with a parent’s drinking.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we look at this across generations. Christian Gostečnik describes how unprocessed emotions are passed down from one generation to the next: a mother who, as a girl, was not allowed to be sad because she had to comfort her own mother will often unconsciously seek comfort from her daughter. Not because she is a bad mother, but because she knows no other kind of relationship. Once we understand this, the search for someone to blame calms down a little — responsibility remains, but it becomes more human.

This is also why this post does not discuss roles such as the hero, the scapegoat or the invisible child. Those roles describe how a family arranges itself around distress; I write about them in Roles in the family. Here I am interested in something else: what remains in a person once they put the role down — the empty space where a childhood should have been.

Grieving a childhood that never was

When an adult who was a parentified child starts to talk about it, anger often comes first. At parents who did not see. At relatives who praised instead of helping. At a school that only noticed the good marks. The anger matters and is justified — it says that something happened that should not have.

Beneath the anger, though, there is usually sadness. And this is harder, because it has no object. You cannot visit the grave of a childhood. You cannot look at photographs and remember how lovely it was, because there was not enough that was lovely. You grieve for an image: for the girl who could have played without a care, for the boy whom someone might have asked how school was, and who would have been interested in the answer.

So grieving for a childhood does not mean the story changes. It means it can finally be felt. As with any grief, it does not follow a straight line — I write about why the classic stages do not describe reality in The stages of grief are a myth, and you will find a general explanation in the knowledge base under grieving.

A conversation in therapy sometimes goes like this (a composite, not a real person):

“It wasn’t that bad. Other people had it much worse.”
“Maybe. What would you say if another twelve-year-old girl told you this story?”
“That it … that it was too much for her.”
“And for you?”
“For me it was normal. That’s just how it was.”
“Perhaps it was normal. And too much at the same time.”

That moment, when a person looks at themselves with the same compassion they would feel for someone else’s child, is often where grieving begins. It is not dramatic. Sometimes it is just tears that have not come for a long time.

What helps

Grieving a childhood is not something you resolve in one evening. It is a process that moves slowly and keeps returning. But a few things make it easier.

Naming it. Simply giving the experience a name often brings people relief. “I wasn’t just good. I was a child who looked after an adult.” A name moves the story away from a personal failing towards something that happened.

Separating the skill from the role. The ability to read others, to care and to organise is real and valuable. There is no need to throw it away. But you need to choose when you use it — and learn that it is not your duty in every room.

Learning to receive. For most people this is the hardest part. When someone offers help, do not turn it down straight away. When someone asks how you are, try answering truthfully. Understanding boundaries can help here — not only how to set them with others, but also where your own responsibility ends.

Compassion for the child you were. Many parentified people treat themselves the way they learned to: strictly, demandingly, without patience. Kristin Neff’s research shows that self-compassion is linked to less anxiety and less self-criticism — and that it can be learned.

A new relationship with your parents. Some people decide to talk to their parents about what happened; others do not. Either can be right. Because the relationship with parents is often still alive — and often still parentified — it is worth thinking about separately. More on this in Adult children and parents: can the relationship still be repaired?

Exercise: a letter to the child you were

The exercise takes twenty minutes. Do it somewhere quiet, when you have some time to yourself afterwards.

1. Find a photograph from the period when you started looking after others — or simply picture what you looked like then. How old were you? What were you wearing?
2. Write down three things you did then that a child your age should not have had to do. No softening, no “it wasn’t that bad”.
3. Write down three things you needed then and did not get. They can be small: someone to pick you up from school, someone to tell you it was not your job.
4. Write the child a short letter from where you are today. Start with “I can see that you …” and say what you see. Do not advise them; just notice them.
5. Notice what happens in your body when you read the letter aloud. Whether it is sadness, anger, emptiness or nothing at all — write down what is there and keep the letter.

If the exercise overwhelms you so much that you cannot settle, stop. That is not a failure — it is a sign that this work is better done with support, in therapy, where someone is with you.

Where this view does not apply

I want to be honest here, because parentification has become a fashionable word and is easily misused.

Not every responsibility in childhood is a wound. Research also shows the other side: children who cared for others but were recognised for it, and had at least one adult who looked after them, often develop real competence and compassion without lasting harm. Jurkovic himself stressed that fairness, not the amount of work, is what decides it.

Culture matters. In many families, including in rural Slovenia, children have always worked on the farm and looked after younger siblings. The measure is not how much a child helped compared with today’s city children, but whether they still had room for their own needs and feelings.

A name is not a verdict on your parents. You can acknowledge that you lost your childhood and at the same time know that your parents did what they could. Grief does not require a culprit. If the idea of parentification leads you only to blame, you stay in the same role — still occupied with your parents rather than with yourself.

Not everything is parentification. If tiredness, emptiness or sadness are with you every day, it makes sense to consider depression or burnout as well and to talk to a doctor. A childhood story can explain a great deal, but not everything.

When to seek help

Many people with this experience live good lives and work through it on their own, with the help of a partner or friends. Therapy makes sense when you notice the same pattern repeating in relationships, when you cannot rest, when every request floods you with guilt, or when the sadness you have pushed away for a long time starts coming back in waves.

In therapy this work does not happen as an analysis of the past, but as a new experience: a relationship in which someone can finally look after you, and you do not have to earn it. For people who have spent their whole lives looking after others, this is often oddly uncomfortable at first. And that discomfort is an important part of the work.

If something in this post has overwhelmed you and you have no one to talk to, you can call the Samaritans helpline in Slovenia on 116 123 (24 hours a day) or the Mental Distress Helpline in Slovenia on 01 520 99 00 (from 7 pm to 7 am).

What to remember

• Parentification means a child looks after a parent over a long period — practically or emotionally — instead of the parent looking after the child.
• It becomes harmful when it lasts, exceeds the child’s strength and there is no one looking after the child.
• A lost childhood is an unacknowledged loss: it has no date, and often even the person themselves does not recognise it.
• Grieving does not change the story, but it lets it finally be felt — and lets the role be put down.
• The skills you learned remain yours; what you mostly need to learn is how to receive.