Parentification: identification and analysis of educational environments. Biographical perspective

Abstract

Parentification is a phenomenon of reversal of intrafamily roles between children and parents (Minuchin, 1968). Children become persons responsible for the family system, assuming the roles, instrumental and emotional, of adults – parents. The available literature on the subject of research allows for the identification of specific family situations as circumstances favourable for the occurrence of this process. Each family as a group with specific bonds functions in various contexts, which in social pedagogy can be called "environments". This article transmits the category of educational environments to the biographical experiences of parentified people. The author identifies, analyses and describes them using fragments of (auto)biographical narrative interviews. Retrospective approach to family experiences allows, by narrators, to define the distinguished environments as a potential and a biographical reference point that helps to apply individual strategies of coping with difficult, sometimes traumatic experiences, related to the reversal of roles in the family.