Parenting: Are You Overidentifying With Your Child?

One of the worst things a parent can do to a child is to cause the child to feel that they have to take care of the parent. This robs the child of childhood and creates anger in the child as they grow older. The way this happens is when parents don’t have clear boundaries about the child parent relationship.

There are important developmental steps in every person’s life, and if those steps are not taken, the result can be dysfunction at best and mental illness and disorders at worst.

Children need to individuate, and so, too, do parents. Parenting is a constant balance between protecting, guiding and separating. Empathy is important, and a child who does not develop empathy will have problems bonding and having relationships later in life, however, there is a big difference with a parent empathizing with a child’s hurts — or a child empathizing with a parent’s hurts — and understanding that life is full of hurts and being able to handle them and get over and beyond them is part of becoming a successful person who can live in the world happily, healthfully and successfully.

Parents who over-identify with their child to the extent that they are creating a dysfunctional relationship, have not had a clear separation from their own parents at the same age. This is not the end of the story, luckily. Recognizing the problem is a great step towards healing. Working through the feelings of the separation or the absence of the separation that a parent had or didn’t have with their own parent, and realizing how it’s come to affect them as an adult is another good step towards healing. Once a parent is able to separate from their own parent — they are best able to become parents with clear boundaries and goals in parenting their own children.