There is much online discourse about the damage of parentifying young kids, wherein youth are given adult responsibilities such as disciplining their younger siblings or being forced to watch after them for developmentally inappropriate amounts of time. Even if you've never been parentified, you can immediately tell that there's something off about it. If a 10-year-old is forced to raise a baby, they might be burnt out of parenthood before they can even become a parent themselves. Parentification takes away the time when teenagers are supposed to be having fun or exploring their own interests and makes it about constantly solving their parent's problems.
It turns out that sibling relationships aren't the only ones that can be harmed by imposing parental dynamics where they shouldn't be. Pseudo-parenting can also negatively impact romantic relationships when one partner tries to parent the other into contributing enough to the household. In a healthy relationship, one partner should be able to ask the other to do something without forcing them to do it or retroactively punishing them for not doing it. The wife in this story is doing the latter, and because she's also bringing home the bacon, she might as well be her husband's mom.
It turns out that sibling relationships aren't the only ones that can be harmed by imposing parental dynamics where they shouldn't be. Pseudo-parenting can also negatively impact romantic relationships when one partner tries to parent the other into contributing enough to the household. In a healthy relationship, one partner should be able to ask the other to do something without forcing them to do it or retroactively punishing them for not doing it. The wife in this story is doing the latter, and because she's also bringing home the bacon, she might as well be her husband's mom.
![[DK]](/data/avatars/s/57/57999.jpg?1720990206){kind=avatar}
