Did you grow up in an environment that required you to perform the tasks of a parent? Did a parent make you responsible to emotionally caretake for them?

If either of these questions resonates with you, you may have been parentified as a child. Being responsible for adult tasks or emotions during childhood can have significant long term impacts, potentially putting parentification at the root of any mental and emotional struggles you face as an adult.

Just because you were asked to take out the trash every week or were assigned daily or weekly chores, however, does not necessarily mean you were parentified. Parentification is nuanced, so let’s get into what parentification is and how it differs from simply being taught responsibility.

Parentification is a process of role reversal where the child is required to act as a parent to either one parent, both parents, their siblings, or maybe even the whole family. 

Additionally, parentification can have two different formats: one is instrumental parentification, where the child performs the tasks of a parent; and the other is emotional parentification, where the child takes on responsibility to emotionally caretake for a parent.

Let’s take a closer look at instrumental parentification.

RELATED: How to tell if you were parentified emotionally

People can often be confused about instrumental parentification because the line seems thin between parentification and learning important life skills during childhood.

There are several questions you can ask yourself to help tell the difference. Let’s take a scenario where a parent might ask a child to make dinner once in a while — is that responsibility a problem?

It depends on what age the child is, how much help the parent is providing, and how much responsibility is falling on the child’s shoulders.

In a scenario where a child might be tasked with cooking dinner once in a while, such a responsibility is perfect for a 16-year-old. If a child is 10 and she helps choose a menu and assists a parent with cooking, that’s also no problem.

See if you can spot the difference with these scenarios:

• A child handles the family finances and pays the bills because their parents don’t.
• A child prepares and cooks a meal because, if they don’t, no one in the family eats.
• A child cleans the house because it’s such a disastrous mess that no one can find anything.
• A child frequently helps their younger siblings get dressed, tie their shoes, and pack for school because the parents are absent.

I’ve heard in other YouTube videos that instrumental parentification occurs when kids are told to do these tasks as a requirement and are punished if they don’t. The truth is, parentification often happens in a void, so the child is never told to do it. They know if they don’t get up and prepare a meal or pay the bills, the consequence isn’t punishment — the consequence is not eating or not having electricity.

Comment below with your thoughts and questions on instrumental parentification. Let me know what you think!

And if you'd like to watch the related YouTube video, here it is!