Growing Up Parentified and the Impact on Decision-Making

Consider this scenario: At work, at home, and with your peers, you are always in charge. You are heading professional projects and making the choices about family schedules, vacations, or after-school activities. You are the person who gathers friends, initiates dinner plans, picks the restaurant, or hosts the gathering. The people around you depend on you to be the assertive decision-maker, because that’s how you are. At least….that’s the way it seems on the outside. On the inside, you’re roiling with anxiety over all the responsibilities you feel that you have been "given" and the enormity of the expectations that come with them.

It seems contradictory—how is it that you feel overwhelmed by decision-making while at the same time are the person most people in your life look toward as a leader? Just because you are the one who makes the decisions doesn’t mean it’s easy or enjoyable. In fact, it may be causing you a significant amount of stress, as the feeling of being relied upon throughout your childhood when you grew up parentified can get dredged up in adulthood when the decisions you have to make have even higher stakes.

Control Makes Us Feel Safe

The more control we have, the safer we feel. This is especially true if you grew up parentified, as your attempts at controlling your environment were based on survival in your family of origin. Despite being tasked with making decisions that were beyond your developmental scope, you may have been criticized for making the "wrong" decision and subsequently internalized the negative voice that causes you to doubt yourself even in adulthood. Overly responsible kids often make anxious and perfectionistic adults, ones who often prioritize a misplaced sense of loyalty to others over their own feelings and needs.

Women and Decision-Making: Whose Choice Is It?

What does this look like for women specifically? Societally, women are often shamed for the decisions they make. Not breastfeeding long enough or at all, staying home or going to work, choosing or not choosing to wear certain clothes, and having children or not having them are all areas of personal choice that the vast majority of society, particularly those (men) in power, have strong and vocal opinions on. In addition, women experience situations in which decisions are made for them at the systemic level, especially important medical decisions that could mean life or death. All this messaging serves to undermine a woman’s autonomy and confidence in knowing what is best for herself, both emotionally and physically.

An Unequal Division of Labor

Traditionally, in heterosexual relationships, men have the most household decision-making power but do the least amount of domestic labor (Van Willigin & Drentea, 2001). Interestingly, researchers have found that women actually experience less psychological benefit from high levels of decision-making power than men (Van Willigin & Drentea, 2001), which suggests that women experience the responsibility of decision-making differently, perhaps as a more overwhelming experience. Heterosexual partners that both contribute to domestic labor tend to divide these tasks up in a highly gendered way. For example, in a study of heterosexual couples in England, couples reported that certain household tasks, such as mowing the lawn or fixing things around the house, should be done by men (Christopher, 2024). In contrast, studies of same-sex couples find that the division of household labor is more egalitarian (Kurdek, 2007; Bauer, 2016).

The Difference Between Deciding For and Deciding With

Parentified adults are used to feeling like they have to make decisions for people, as they often grew up with parents who relied on them to help make family or personal choices due to their parents’ own avoidance of responsibility or struggle with decision-making. In these environments, mistakes and missteps are sources of intolerable shame rather than learning experiences that help us explore and grow. When the parentified child becomes an adult, this history of overresponsibility often results in an overfunctioning/underfunctioning dynamic in intimate relationships, in which the parentified adult ends up doing the majority of the emotional work, which allows their partner to do less. Though this need to control outcomes was a survival mechanism in childhood, in an adult relationship where we are striving for equity, it is a relational pattern that ends up restricting a partner’s autonomy to make their own decisions and lets them off the hook for doing the tough emotional work of relationships. So how can you start making decisions with your partner instead of for the both of you?

1. Recognize and separate your own emotional response from your partner’s. Growing up parentified means that the lines have been blurred in terms of your emotional experience and that of your parents. This makes it difficult at times to identify your emotions and take responsibility for them. Know that you are only able to control and change your own response to someone’s behavior, not change theirs. Tuning in with yourself by taking a pause and breathing before allowing your reactivity to take over can be a helpful tool. If the moment is too emotionally heavy for you, communicate with your partner that you need to take a break to gather your thoughts before continuing the conversation.
2. Learn to tolerate the anxiety that comes with allowing others to have a stake in decision-making. This might be one of the hardest parts of learning to navigate adult relationships as a formerly parentified child. You may be used to trying to control the outcome of events to maintain peace in your home. Keeping your parent from becoming angry, depressed, or hysterical meant the difference between feeling safe and feeling completely unmoored. While this might have been functional growing up, trying to control every aspect of decision-making with your partner, or even the decisions they need to make for themselves, does not encourage reciprocity and growth in a partnership.
3. Communicate, communicate, communicate. Recognize when you are having a reaction and say something. Even if it is after the fact (we all take time to process), it’s important for your partner to understand that you aren’t purposely trying to take away their agency but, rather, are learning how to respect the boundary between their agency and yours. Having open conversations about the models you had growing up and how you are trying to learn different methods of relating to others is an admission that goes a long way in helping your partner understand where you’re coming from.