Daughters Who Become Mothers: The Emotional Cost of Parentification

All the women. In me. Are tired.1

It's this poem I think of tonight as sleep eludes me, but the tiredness I feel is more than just a deprivation of sleep. As I move toward the end of an entire year of researching and writing about the Mother Wound, the tiredness I feel is something deeper. It's one where I feel as though I need to just not be needed anymore. One where I am tired of giving. One where I long to lay down all that I have carried—not just this year, but this lifetime—and just rest.

Growing up, I often heard the same remark from adults, teachers, and other parents: you're so mature for your age. It seemed, at the time, a compliment—something I could (and did) wear as a badge of honour; that I was so much more mature than my peers. So responsible. So reliable. So capable. What nobody—including myself—realised, is this so-called maturity wasn't a gift, it was a survival strategy. As psychotherapist Sian Crossley puts it, I had learned to betray my own needs in order to meet the needs of my mother.2

This is the heart of what's known as parentification—a psychological term for when a child is pushed into a caregiving role that is developmentally inappropriate, whether physically, emotionally, or both. In simple terms, a parentified daughter is one who must become a mother to her own mother, reversing the natural parent-child dynamic. In doing so, she is forced to grow up too soon, forfeiting the chance to experience a carefree, normal childhood.

Parentification often arises when a mother is emotionally unavailable, emotionally immature or burdened by her own unresolved trauma. In such cases, she may rely on her daughter to fulfill her emotional needs, casting her into the role of confidante, therapist or peacekeeper. This dynamic is known as emotional parentification.

There is also instrumental parentification, in which the daughter is required to take on practical responsibilities beyond her years, such as cooking meals, managing household tasks, or getting younger siblings ready for school.3

In both forms, the daughter is deprived not only of a nurturing maternal relationship but also of her right to a protected and free childhood. Instead, she is thrust into the role of caregiver and forced to carry burdens far beyond what any child should have to bear.

To survive this premature responsibility, the daughter unconsciously develops a set of coping strategies. These adaptations may look like strength or maturity on the outside, but they come at the cost of the child's authenticity, freedom, and emotional development.

Complex trauma survivor and educator Sara Aird names these survival skills as:

• Hyper-vigilant monitoring and reading of adult’s emotional states

• Repression of their own emotions and needs

• Formation of a “presentable” self that the parents or caregivers approve of

• Adopting the belief that your behaviour is what “controls” adult emotions and responses

• Ability to anticipate and meet the needs of adults

• Becomes overly self-reliant

• Takes on the role of the peacemaker and mediator

• Pushes away the need for play4

When I look at these survival skills, I see my childhood self in every one of them. My mother's trauma, mental health struggles, and addictions impeded her ability to be a parent in any consistent or safe way. As a result, I stepped into the role of both emotional and instrumental caregiver throughout most of my childhood and early teens. While other children were relishing in the carefree sunshine of their childhood, I was busy cooking meals, washing dishes, cleaning the house, and caring for my brother.

Above this, however, was the emotional burden of needing to make sure my mother was okay. The constant responsibility of this meant I rarely went to friends' houses, turned down sleepovers, and skipped school camps—believing that if I was not there to look after her, she could not look after herself.

I realise, as I think upon these things, the way this kind of responsibility made me believe that my presence was essential to my mother's stability, my absence was dangerous, and my own needs were not only secondary, but selfish—patterns of behaviour that did not make me a "mature" or "helpful" child, but a parentified one.

In an article on Psychology Today, therapist Kaytee Gillis outlines ten common traits found in daughters who were parentified:

• Over-responsibility and self-reliance

• Difficulty with vulnerability

• Perfectionism

• Difficulty setting boundaries

• A need to help or “fix” others

• Being told they were “very mature” for their age

• A strong need for approval

• Difficulties with trust

• Guilt and resentment5

'Being parentified as a child causes Complex-PTSD due to the hypervigilance, unpredictable dynamics, and pervasive internal sense that you must perform, prove, and be responsible for keeping things together in relationships. You may experience extreme anxiety at times, a sense of inadequacy and that you can’t trust others because they will eventually let you down—as did your parents. You may not verbalise it, but you can’t trust your parent’s judgement and that causes a great deal of stress and anxiety.'6

The undercurrent of Complex-PTSD is often shame and guilt. For the parentified daughter, these feelings often originate in the early role reversal experienced with her mother. As daughters, it felt dangerous to be angry at our mothers—even when we were hurt, neglected, or left emotionally unsupported. Admitting that our mothers failed to protect, nurture, or meet our needs felt like a betrayal—or worse, a threat to our emotional survival.

For many of us, it felt safer to internalise the blame: to believe we were too sensitive, too needy, too demanding—too much. Rather than risk conflict or disconnection from the very people we depended on, we turned against ourselves. Not because we had done anything wrong, but because blaming ourselves was psychologically safer than acknowledging we were being mistreated. In protecting our mothers from our anger, we abandoned ourselves instead.

This abandonment leads to an internalisation of beliefs such as: I have to be strong all the time, asking for help means I'm weak, when everyone else is taken care of, then maybe there'll be space for me—beliefs we carry into our adult lives where we continue to prioritise others' needs while neglecting our own.

We become women who are outwardly capable but inwardly depleted—women who swallow our anger, dismiss our exhaustion, and bury our grief beneath the performance of competence. We feel unappreciated, overlooked and taken for granted, but have no language for our resentment—only guilt for feeling it. Even in our deepest exhaustion, we struggle to rest; struggle to reach out when we feel we are drowning. Because somewhere along the way, we learned that being needed was the closest thing to being loved.

Over time, the cost of these patterns reveals itself through the body: fatigue, anxiety, depression, insomnia, and nervous system dysregulation become constant companions as we live in a state of chronic fight-or-flight—forever braced and anticipating the next demand, just as we were wired to do in childhood. We continue to care for everyone around us, still holding the ceiling up, still putting ourselves last; all the while suppressing the voice that says, I'm so tired of taking care of everyone… when is someone going to take care of me?

The next morning, I am woken by sunlight spilling through the window, and it feels like a soft kind of hope. I wander into the kitchen and make coffee; greet my sleepy-eyed teenagers as they emerge from their bedrooms. As I watch them move through their morning, I think of something I read last night—words by therapist Imi Lo:

'Adults who have been parentified are highly sensitive, empathic, kind, and intuitive. In a way, those who were once a parentified children can become gifted parents because they have been doing it since they were young.'7

I consider these words as I sip my coffee and observe the small, ordinary joy of my children's presence. What was once survival, I realise, has indeed become a gift. The way I have parented these children—with empathy, grace and compassion—is the very way I must learn to reparent myself.

To allow myself to reclaim what was lost in the years I was never allowed to be a carefree child: play, joy, softness, rest. As child psychologist Robyn Koslowitz writes,

‘Make joy non-negotiable. Healing doesn't only come through processing pain. It also comes from choosing delight.’8

I am beginning to understand that choosing laughter and joy is not a betrayal of what I have survived, but a reclamation. It's a way of saying: I am no longer just what I've carried. I am also who I am becoming—a woman who is learning to laugh more, to play, to soften and rest. A woman who is asking, What does the child in me need today?—and then showing up for her the way no one else ever did.

Next week: Chapter Eighteen: Guilt, Guilt, Guilt ~ The Perpetual Emotion

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