Q: I need to reframe my relationship with my aging parents. Growing up, they needed a lot from me. As immigrants, they depended on me, their only child, to navigate places and issues that were beyond me, and I was left to take care of most things on my own - school, college apps, getting my first apartment. They just weren’t able to help with those things. They also needed me to regulate their near-constant anxiety. To make them feel safe (so that I could feel safe), I had to be problem-free, with no negative emotions, no challenges, no needs. It ran so deep I never told them about the abuse I suffered from another family member. My parents took care of my material needs with generosity. I know they loved me the best they could and made a lot of sacrifices. Still, being their guide and emotional support wore me out.
The problem is when I visit my parents or they visit me now. I realize that they are elderly and have lots of needs. But I feel angry and resentful every time I have to provide guidance or explanation or reasons they can relax. It’s exhausting and it’s no longer my job. It never was. I feel like I can’t just help my parents like a normal adult child. I battle my own deep sorrow at having taken care of them and received little care myself. It’s making me stay away from them even as their needs increase. I guess what I’m asking for is a way to look at it all differently so that I don’t feel angry when they bring me their phone to fix or ask me to explain why their car seems to run out of gas so quickly. Helping them feels so heavy from my past, but I’d really like it not to.
- Distant Daughter
A: It’s not uncommon for children of immigrants like you to be parentified, or given responsibilities that your parents should have handled. In being mature, self-sufficient or doing adultlike things at a young age, you learned to reject your own needs. Instead, your parents’ emotional safety and security superseded your own - even at the cost of keeping abuse a secret. It’s true that your parents probably do love you and they probably did do their best, but this rationalization still ignores the impact their behaviors had on you.
While you may be taking space from your parents, it’s clear that this, on its own, isn’t actually making you feel better. Instead, it may actually be deepening your resentment and anger. It’s possible that in being so preoccupied with what your parents feel, or have needed from you, over the years, you have developed an extreme disconnection from your own feelings and needs.
Things feel “heavy” because you are still carrying so much. What can you release? Often when we’re angry, we are actually masking a more vulnerable, primary emotion. I encourage you to take some time to sit with your emotions, and try to identify what else you are feeling. Maybe you’re disappointed? Or feel abandoned? Or struggle with how unjust and unilateral the relationship is? Make space for these feelings to breathe. Let them tell you what you need right now.
There is an inner, younger version of you who desperately wants to be loved and cared for. Research suggests that parentification can be a form of emotional neglect. Since your parents didn’t, and can’t, meet your emotional needs, how can you find other relationships to depend on? Or a professional you can work with to process these experiences, including your past abuse if you have yet to? Consider how you can tend to, and reparent, your inner child. This may be sitting with your feelings, writing a letter to younger you, or looking at older photos of yourself and giving yourself the compassion and emotional validation you didn’t get.
If you want to “look at it all differently,” you’ll have to start to approach things differently. Right now you’ve been approaching your relationship with your parents focusing solely on them. Parentified children often become extreme people-pleasing adults, and you want to challenge the narrative that you are only worthy when you are being useful to your parents. How can you integrate other things into your relationship - like being more open about your life, or doing an activity to maintain quality time but minimize chances of helping them with something?
Even more, be honest about how you are enabling this dynamic. You want to help your parents like a “normal” adult child, but I’d encourage you to explore what “normal” helping looks like. Consider, too, if there is a workable boundary you can create for yourself. This could be decreasing how much you talk to them, being less immediately available, or even providing resources to help them learn and do the very things they want you to do for them. By setting boundaries, you stop engaging with your parents from a depleted state.
It’s clear you care for your parents and don’t want to lose the relationship with them entirely, but to help them, you have to be able to help yourself too. This will help you decide what you want to do, not out of obligation or fear of abandonment, but out of genuine care.