Parentified Behavior Again

Someone googled 'parentified behavior' and came up on one of my posts about Yolie and Daniel that I'd written a year and a half ago.

Yolie is still very, very parentified, here she is soon looking at 30, Daniel will be 23 in less than a month, but that simply doesn't matter. She will always absolutely adore her two birth brothers. She's equally as caring to her 38 other siblings too.

I'm older than my own three sibs, but I'm not parentified. Bossy and overbearing certainly, but we had parents. My siblings didn't need me to fill that role.

All of the sibling groups that I've adopted had a parentified child with the exception of one super dysfunctional group from East Texas. They hardly even claim a blood relation to each other at all.

Daniel had just sent Yolie and I a way to track him via his iphone, as we both literally fret when this Army man goes out of town for an away UGA game. That makes Yolie and I the insecure ones, this we agree on, and illustrate it daily by our actions.

But interestingly, Daniel is so incredibly secure that it doesn't bother him at all that we have a need to know he's OK at all times. Only a very sure of himself college man would give his mama and his parentified sister that much room and ammo.

It's been my positive experience, over the years, to not interfere with this phenomena. If a sibling is parentified, they've earned it. In our case it always involved and sprang from their former years of neglect, severe lack, and abuse wherein the sibling bond grew very deep and a leadership role was usually taken on by the oldest sibling.

I mean heck, Sabrina was called Memaw by her sister and two brothers, and now we all refer to her that way.

Edgar was heavily parentified, the older male Latino position, and he so had earned it by his genuine care and concern for his six siblings. He gladly turned the reigns over to me at age 13 when they arrived here, it was a heavy load for him to have carried for so long, but he'd done a great job. In his brothers and sister's eyes though, he is still their main man no doubt, but they've eventually grudgingly allowed me to mother them.