When A Child Becomes A Parent’s Surrogate Partner

Some children learn far too early that their role in the family is not to be taken care of, but to take care of others. When a parent turns to their child not just for affection or support, but as a replacement for an absent or emotionally unavailable spouse, a boundary is quietly, but deeply, crossed. These children may become their parent’s confidant, emotional support, mediator, or even caregiver.

The child is placed in a relational position they were never meant to occupy. They may be praised for their maturity, but beneath this premature competence often lies a profound emotional cost. While this may not involve overt abuse (we are not referring to instances in which sexual boundaries are crossed), becoming overlooked as a form of childhood trauma, the psychological impact can be profound and lead to enduring and complex consequences for the person we become and how we relate to others.

Parentification and surrogacy

Parentification occurs when the emotional order in a family is reversed—when a child is put in a role that developmentally belongs to a parent. This might involve practical caretaking or emotional support, like managing siblings or household responsibilities, which can be dictated by necessity or shaped by the contours of a specific culture.

Unlike general parentification, the surrogate partner dynamic draws the child into a relational triangle in which they become a substitute for the other parent. This can happen subtly: a father emotionally absent or physically gone, and a mother who begins to confide in her son, lean on him for companionship, and idealize his emotional presence. Or, as psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi put it several decades ago, “a mother complaining of her constant miseries can create a nurse for life out of her child.” The child may be leaned on to soothe a parent’s loneliness, listen to adult problems, or serve as a steady presence in the absence or emotional unavailability of the other parent.

In these dynamics, the child is no longer just a child. They are unconsciously conscripted into an adult role, made to feel responsible for someone else's emotional survival. This can feel deeply confusing. On one hand, the child may feel special—chosen, needed, even powerful. On the other hand, their own development is arrested as they are being asked to forgo their own needs in order to manage someone else’s.

At the same time, the parent is no longer just a parent. The holding and containing functions of the adult — the boundary that protects the child’s development by keeping adult needs out of reach – is blurry or missing. Love is conflated with responsibility, attention with obligation, and closeness with emotional enmeshment. This process entails a loss that is hard to recognize or tolerate, so it often remains unmourned well into adulthood.

The cost of being needed too much

From the outside, a parentified child may appear well-adjusted: responsible, compliant, high-functioning, empathetic. But inside, their emotional development has often been disrupted. The child’s internal world becomes organized around meeting the needs and expectations of an “other” who was supposed to be the source of care and containment. Instead of forming a stable sense of self through being received and understood, the child learns to attune to the emotional states of others as they are shaped by the other’s wishes, fantasies, expectations, and fears. The child’s own desires and longings become disavowed, dissociated, or repressed.

Over time, these dynamics can create and sustain unconscious conflicts: the wish to be close becomes entangled with the fear of being engulfed; love becomes associated with obligation; autonomy with guilt. The child’s own developmental needs—for care, freedom, and spontaneous self-expression—are sacrificed in the service of maintaining the parent's emotional stability. These unmet needs don’t disappear, but may later reemerge as anxiety, depression, a fragile sense of self, or relational struggles.

Because the child felt valued for what they provided, not for who they were, their self-worth may become linked to caretaking and attunement to others. To pull away from these patterns can feel like betrayal; to assert needs may stir up anxiety or shame. In other cases, relinquishing this role may involve surrendering the power we feel over others people’s moods and minds, leaving us in a vulnerable position we may angrily resist. These conflicts are not rational—they live deep within the psyche, where the child’s early loyalties still reside.

Adult relationships and the repetition of early roles

In adult life, those who were surrogate partners to a parent may oscillate between compulsive caretaking and unconscious resentment, reenacting the early role assigned by the parent while harboring unspoken rage at the loss of a protected developmental space. These dynamics often reflect relational templates marked by enmeshment, role confusion, an inhibited capacity for reciprocity, and patterns of idealizing and devaluing others.

As adults, they may be drawn to partners who are emotionally needy, inconsistent, or avoidant. Without realizing it, they recreate the familiar rhythm: being the stable one, the helper, the emotional anchor. But instead of receiving care in return, they often feel invisible, burdened, or emotionally exhausted.

This repetition is rarely conscious. It emerges from internal templates—what psychoanalysis calls internal object relations—that shape how we experience love, dependency, and closeness. When caregiving becomes a pathway to connection, vulnerability can feel dangerous. It may stir up shame, or fear of being too much, or worse, of being abandoned.

How can trauma therapy help?

Complex trauma therapy, and childhood trauma therapy in particular, can offer a path toward recognizing and working through the unconscious roles we carry from childhood. Therapy can allow you to recognize and process the unspoken grief that often lies beneath the ways in which parentification shaped who we are. It can help create a space to mourn the loss of a childhood that was never fully lived, and the absence of a relational environment where their own needs could safely emerge.

Therapy can also reveal the deep ambivalence hidden beneath present-day relational dynamics, as we may both long to be cared for and simultaneously fear becoming a burden of being annihilated by the other’s needs. These unconscious conflicts are not easily resolved by logic. They require time, containment, and a relationship in which you can safely relinquish and reexamine the roles we take and begin to inhabit a fuller self.

Through this process, you can begin to reclaim parts of yourself that were put on hold. You may begin to feel what it’s like to be met, rather than managed—to be received, rather than relied upon. This isn’t about undoing the past, but about loosening its grip on your present, so that new forms of relating—based in mutual care, emotional truth, and a grounded sense of self—can begin to take shape.

If you are interested in exploring this process with one of our Chicago trauma therapists, please do not hesitate to contact us.

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Photo credit: Ryan Stefan