When the Child Becomes the Parent

At some point in our lives, the majority of us experience a role reversal for which we are neither mentally nor emotionally prepared: caring for elderly parents. Adding insult to this injury, the majority of us also lack the practical knowledge that could assist us in easing into this transition, which further delays and complicates our ability to process its emotional impact. How, as a generation that has prided itself on an ability to multitask, did this life stage so significantly blindside us?

The answer is simple – management of our own lives is often so overwhelming that the reality of adding another significant responsibility can be incomprehensible! There is no perfect time for our parents to become our children, and yet it frequently parallels the added responsibilities we assume during our children’s high school or early college years. Unless our parents decline rapidly, we defer decision making about them until there is more time or when the kids leave, or when we retire. Rarely is their decline convenient, predictable or capable of being deferred.

Having lived through this experience twice myself, as well as assisting many of my clients through this journey, be comforted in knowing that eventually the logistics straighten out…. until our parents’ decline once again gains momentum. With each stage of decline we hone our assertiveness skills, our facility in navigating the red tape of multiple helping agencies and resign to solicit help while attempting to assuage our guilt. From the practical perspective, living through this experience often propels us to plan for our eventual demise, sparing yet another generation of children from that particular burden.

Logistics aside, a child becoming the parent to their parent challenges our primary mental framework and defies our sense of life’s order. Regardless of our emotional connection to our parents we believe that parents are adults: strong, capable and healthy. They are not allowed to be children. Few of us were raised with stories that challenged the security of this concept. That is why it is possible to ignore little indicators (repeating stories, memory slippage, trouble finding the words to convey their thoughts and even getting lost) because we can rationalize those events as isolated occurrences. On some meta-level we believe that parents are invincible. To witness evidence to the contrary often creates a significant dissonance between what we see and what we believe. In this instance denial becomes our partner. It isn’t until our parents’ cognitive decline becomes more blatant or is accompanied by a physical illness, a fall, or recurrent hospitalizations do the pieces come together, forcing us to confront this reality.

Even when we eventually make this cognitive adjustment, our parents may not be like-minded. Often they stubbornly refuse to relinquish their roles gracefully, causing our logic and their reasoning to lack synergy. Interactions at this stage may be laced with hostility as power struggles between the parents’ resistance to relinquish their independence versus the adult child’s assumption of the more supervisory parental role escalates. For the adult child life with mom or dad often mirrors their own daily life with their children. The adult child is truly sandwiched between two generations that may seem to demand equal doses of attention but respond with little gratitude. 


Stay tuned….. Tomorrow I will discuss the emotional impact of this transition!!