Parentification: Malcolm and Simone Debate How Much Responsibility Kids Should Have for Siblings

This episode delves into the contentious topic of parentification, exploring its various definitions and implications within family dynamics, especially in large families.

1. Parentification encompasses emotional and functional roles, often burdening children with adult-like responsibilities.
2. Historical context plays a significant role in understanding the expectations placed on children within large families.
3. There are potential benefits to parentification, such as developing responsibility and resilience, but these must be balanced against the risks of overburdening children.
4. The cultural portrayal of parentification often differs from its practical implementation, which can lead to misunderstandings about its impact.
5. Finding a balance is crucial; children can take on some responsibilities without compromising their development or well-being.

1: Introduction to Parentification

Malcolm and Simone introduce the topic and discuss its definitions and cultural perceptions. They outline the episode's focus on understanding parentification within the context of large families. Simone Collins: "Parentification can mean different things, but today we're focusing on its role in large families and its cultural implications."

2: Historical Context and Cultural Debate

The hosts discuss the historical necessity of parentification in large families and its portrayal in modern media. Malcolm Collins: "Historically, having children participate in family duties was essential, especially in large families."

3: Psychological Implications

Exploration of the psychological impacts of parentification, weighing its potential benefits against possible negative effects. Simone Collins: "While there can be psychological benefits to parentification, we must be careful not to overload children."

4: Practical Realities and Family Dynamics

Discussion on how practical realities in high fertility cultures necessitate some level of parentification, with examples from friends and historical data. Malcolm Collins: "In high fertility cultures, some degree of parentification is unavoidable for maintaining family dynamics."

1. Understand Individual Limits: Recognize the capacities of each child and assign responsibilities accordingly.
2. Foster Open Communication: Encourage children to express their feelings about their responsibilities.
3. Balance Responsibilities with Childhood: Ensure children have enough time to enjoy being kids without excessive burdens.
4. Educate on Family Roles: Teach children about the historical and cultural context of their family duties.
5. Promote Emotional Support: Ensure parents remain the primary emotional support for their children, avoiding reverse roles.

In this thought-provoking episode, Malcolm and Simone delve into the controversial topic of parentification, exploring its various definitions and implications for raising children in large families. They discuss how the concept is often misused by YouTube commenters and contrast it with the medical industry's understanding of emotional and instrumental parentification. Malcolm argues that historically, children taking on parental roles was seen as a moral responsibility and necessity for maintaining high fertility rates. Simone adds nuance to the discussion, highlighting the importance of consent, aptitude, and ensuring children's safety when assigning responsibilities. The couple also touches on the psychological benefits of giving children age-appropriate tasks and the dangers of creating a culture where kids believe they can shirk responsibilities they dislike. Join Malcolm and Simone as they navigate this complex issue and offer insights on fostering a sense of moral responsibility in children.

People

Malcolm Collins, Simone Collins

Content Warnings:

None

A
Hello, Simone. Hello, gorgeous husband. Today we are going to do an episode on the topic of parentification. So what I've learned, because I wanted to do some more research on this before going live with this episode, is like the actual definition of parentification is not the way it is used by YouTube commenters. Oh, and so we'll be talking about parentification as three different concepts throughout this show.

So first is the way that it is most often used, because where I see this is when we're watching like ultra progressive reaction videos to prenatalist families, that is, families with a lot of kids. Or when we see kids who grew up in large environments with a lot of other kids, their complaint is parentification. We should say kids who grew up in large families, who subsequently deconverted from that, their birth culture, essentially, yeah. So they will say that they were forced to undertake the role of the parent in some of like in helping raise their siblings, that they were in part responsible for raising their siblings. This is the way it is used within pop culture, then within the medical industry, or the way it was originally intended to be used, is actually there is emotional parentification, which means that the parent relies on their child for emotional support that should be coming from their partner.

That is, they are treating their child more like a friend and less like a child. The other category of parentification here is when a child feels the need to take on responsibility because their parent isn't fully responsible. Okay? Example here would be like their dad ran away, their mom's addicted to crack, and they had to raise their sibling. Okay?

This is very different than the way youtubers mean it, which is I grew up in a family with seven kids, and I was responsible for sometimes watching after my siblings, or feeding my siblings, or et cetera. And it's a very important topic to dive into, because so long as parentification, as it is talked about within the YouTube community, is something that is shamed culturally, we will never be able to get above replacement rate again, because taking responsibility for one's family members historically was just seen as an obvious moral good and responsibility of every individual. Right? You cannot raise a large family, especially in a historic context, without the children taking on some of the parental roles. And to understand what I mean when I say this, in the 18 hundreds in the United States, your average American had seven kids.

Average. So that means for every American who didn't get married or had zero kids, there was another American having over 14 kids. Okay? That means for every American who had four kids, the measly tiny number of four kids owe shame to that Baron spinsters, which we only recently got to a few days ago. That meant that there was another family that was having ten kids.

Okay. These were families, the average american family, where the kids were relied upon in part to help with child rearing. And we should note how much this was stalled in a cultural context. So I read the diary from one of my ancestors in a previous episode. It's the episode titled something like kids used to like their parents.

And it was. It's a great episode, by the way. I strongly suggest you check it out. It's one of those episodes where it ended up getting Rev shared, and I was like, I don't even care. Too good, but great episode.

But this previous episode in the diaries, something that was very interesting is it was seen as totally normal and admirable for the older siblings in a family to give up their potentiality in life to expand the potentiality of the younger siblings. So in this family, what happened is you could go work in the local lumber mill and make good money, but you didn't have any chance of upward social mobility. So the older siblings in the family, the two oldest brothers, went to work in the lumber mill and then used the money that they made in the lumber mill to make sure that their younger siblings could get a good education. And today, this would be seen of as horrifying. How could that happen in the frontier time?

It's not like the parents had any money. They were barely scraping by as they had a. In the story, they had some pigs and they had a spin wheel for making dresses. And that was it. Like a one room house and an outhouse.

That was what they owned. Right. You didn't have anything else. And I think that in a historic context, we just forget that because we compare ourselves only to our parents generation, how hard things were. We also need to talk about the psychological benefits of parentification.

But before we do that, Simone, I'd love it if you had any thoughts on what I've gone over so far. Yeah. You're basically just saying this is a practical reality in a high fertility culture, which I think is a really important foundation for this, because most people, when they're looking at perinatalism going forward, would never think parentification would or could be a part of that. And a lot of their priors are based on, okay, how do we raise a kid the way that we raise kids now, which is unsustainable inherently? There has to be parentification.

Yeah, it's interesting. We have a friend who's from a very high fertility Mormon family and who has deconverted and who's actually incredibly successful. It's remarkable to me that she has any complaints about her child. I always am like, people like, were your parents good parents? And I go, I don't know, successful and happy with my life.

So they must have been. They're like, what about all the horrible things? It turns out those must have been in my best interest, or I judge the quality of a parent not by a child's self description of them, but bye. How well the child did as an adult. I'm like, then your childhood clearly provided you with some utility, which, you know, I'm very much a functionalist.

People always make fun of us for that. But she complained. She said, look, my family had eight. I had eight siblings, and I was the oldest, and I always ended up having to take care of them, and it really robbed me of my childhood. And I was like, okay, so which of your siblings would you prefer not to exist?

And she's, that's like apple and oranges. And it's like, no, it's not. The you not getting to do whatever you wanted in your childhood, not getting to live the childhood you saw portrayed in media that promoted unsustainable family practices. Not having that childhood is what allowed those other individuals to exist. Mm hmm.

It's if somebody came and they were like, I really hate these guardrails on roads. They block my view as I'm driving. And it would just be so much more scenic if we could go to a time when they, it didn't exist. I'm like, they save x many lives per year. And they're like, that's really apples and oranges.

And it's, no, it's really not apples and oranges. This is a consequence, you not having the view you want of those things existing, and they exist in order to save lives so that more humans can live fulfilling lives. And you don't want to internalize that. You were the type of person who would deny another human being a chance at life just for your convenience. But you are that type of person.

And I think that's the fundamental thing. And so the question is, how did these memes spread in our society that it is bad to expect responsibility from children? Yeah. And I think what they really stemmed from is the belief that it's bad to expect responsibility from anyone and then especially children, any time when responsibility was forced on them. As I pointed out, the demonification of starship troopers.

Why is starship troopers demonized as fascists? It is a world that presumably has everything progressive said that they want. It is a world where minorities can enter the highest levels of position within society. It is a world with total gender equality. It is a world with total ethnic equality.

It is a world without interhuman wars. It is a world of peace. What's a bad thing? And it's ah, you let it slip. You let slip what you really wanted, which was a world without responsibility.

What is bad about that world is that to vote, you have to sacrifice either by participating in the military or through civil, some form of civil work, which is openness, made clear in the book, and it's not denied in the movie. So we have to assume that this is true in the movie universe as well, that there is always a way to earn the right to become a citizen. Even if you are disabled or mentally disabled or something like that, they create something for you. The key is just that you have to sacrifice. Something that is given without sacrifice, has no value, is in the lines of the movie.

And I think it's true, this is the way people see things, given without sacrifice. And in the Discord server for it. They were sharing a post on Reddit recently, which was like our podcast Discord server. Yeah, our podcast Discord server. I'll include a link in the notes.

It was about how everybody deserves housing, everybody deserves an h vac, everybody deserves Internet, everybody deserves electricity. And it's even if they don't work, regardless of employment, it said. And it's what are you actually saying when you say that? You're saying that people who are not producing anything deserve to have people forced to produce for them, that h vac needs to be serviced, built. Same with that house, same with the electricity.

Those people are essentially working as slaves for the individuals who are doing this, they are being forced to work without remuneration. And they're like, well, force other people to remunerate them. That doesn't solve the problem that now you have turned those other people into essentially your wage slaves. But let's bring this back to parentification, because I think it's a really important issue, and I think an important thing to point to, which we've pointed to in many other podcasts, but still, it bears repeating, is that removing responsibility from people does not impart mental health, good mental health. It does not impart fitness, it does not impart an edge in society, it does not compart, impart competitiveness.

B
So when you remove responsibility from someone, you are pretty much just hurting them. But I also want to draw a line here, because when I see people commenting on parentification, sometimes they do so with some merit. And I think we do have to draw the line of where we think parentification goes too far. There was mention, I think the duggars, at one point, they had something called the buddy system, which I think is great, where you're responsible for your immediately younger sibling or a younger sibling, something like that, where siblings paired up and took care of each other. And they also just generally had older siblings take care of younger siblings.

One thing that they did where I don't think it was imparting the good kind of responsibility was where they gave children tasks that were above and beyond what they could even do for themselves. And I do agree with many people who are critics of parentification that minors are still developing. They're still figuring out their own tasks. Because I don't think that you're actually criticizing parentification. I think you're criticizing basic safety, which is just that.

I think a lot of traditional families might scoff at that. The one thing that I would draw the line at, which I think the Duggars did, is they had some of their children take care of infants overnight, when they had overnight feeding needs, and they were really small. And when you're a teen, you need a lot of sleep. When you're a teen, you don't necessarily know how to do, like, advanced infant care. It can get really complicated.

And you might wait. When they were teens, that's fine. I think it might have been when they were younger kids, too. Teenagers used to have infants. That's true.

But I know I would still draw the line at that. I think that there is. There is a line you need to draw when it comes to things like health, safety, knowing, like child CPR. Like, there's a lot of stuff that's. It's too much to put on a kid.

Really? Yeah. If it was a. If it was like an eight year old doing, that's one thing. Okay.

A
If it's a teenager doing that. No, they can safely feed a kid at night. And I asking that your family takes on some responsibility for their new siblings specific jobs like that, I think is fine depending on how you structured their daily routine. Now, it might be less fine if you have them going to a public school or something like that, where they're expected to manage their time really strictly. But if you have a family like ours where by the time we're talking this morning and kids in their teens, we're going to be much more focused on helping them set up a company um, than going to school in a company that they run and have ownership of.

So I wouldn't be as worried about that. And I think that this is just one of those things where you haven't gotten to the stage yet where our kids are old enough to take on those sorts of responsibilities. I wouldn't be asking to take on those sorts of responsibilities, no. Yeah. So there's a key part of this which also involves consent.

B
So, one, I think that if your child does not have certain self care things together, you cannot expect them to do a good job or be able to take on the self care of another. This is where I disagree pretty strongly with you. I think that having an individual, like, if you want an individual to have their own self care together, the single worst thing you can do to somebody who is struggling with self care is remove responsibilities. I agree. Removing responsibilities.

A
One thing you can do to improve an individual's own self care is increase the number of responsibilities they have. Yeah, but I wouldn't say by putting that on someone else. I wouldn't subject another child to the care routine of someone who doesn't have their own care routine together. I just wouldn't. I also think that their consent is really important with this, that kids should not be given.

B
They shouldn't be forced into gratification without having some kind of enthusiasm for it either. Be that because they get more privileges. Really? I encourage you to really think about what you're saying. Why do you have these feelings?

A
Do you think it is not in the best interest of the kid? Because clearly it is. You've seen the research, right? First, we should know additional kids, just so people know. There's this belief that if you have a ton of kids, you're really hurting the prospects of every kid you do have, which is just not true.

B
Unless you're in South Korea. Unless you're in South Korea, which we did an episode on. But in the United States, kids actually tend to do a bit better, mental health wise and outcomes wise, I think up to about sibling number two or three, and then they begin to do worse, but not by a huge margin. So, for example, if I look at the study associations of birth order with mental health problems, self esteem, reliance, and happiness among children, I can see. See that only children have significantly more total difficulty scores.

A
They have more problems with emotional symptoms, they have more hyperactivity, attention deficit problems, they have more problems with their peer relationships, and they have less pro social behavior. They also have a lower resilience. Teaching your kids to take on roles that they have a responsibility to take on roles within the family unit. For those who are defenseless or need care more, I think is solely a one moral good. You are teaching them good morals.

It is their responsibility within their cultural ecosystem to care for those that have less than them. Okay, this is all family units, as we said, are communist systems. A well structured family unit is from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs. And that is what a family is. And an infant needs more and the teenager can produce more.

You are teaching a good value system interculturally. There. One, two. Giving an individual additional task and teaching them that sometimes they just have to handle something for the greater good of their cultural unit is really one psychologically valuable and teaches them good morals. It reminds me when we started running our company and something that I was raised believing just like intuitively, because it was the way my house was structured, is if you saw a mess, it doesn't matter who made the mess.

It is your responsibility to clean it up. If there was spilled milk or something like that, I was never allowed to say, but my brother spilled it, it's. But why didn't you clean it up? You knew that would cause damage if it stayed there. You knew it was a danger to others.

If it stayed there, why didn't you handle it? When I use that philosophy, I just think that there's nuance to this. And when the health and safety of other people are involved, I think it's really important that when you give adversity to someone and responsibility to someone, that there is something of, when possible, an opt in element of this, you're stepping up for it. And that can mean because you're getting additional privileges? I can mean because when you do that, good things happen.

B
You get additional resources, you get additional power or privilege or something that makes your life also better. But I do think, no, if I agree with this, I do not think capitalist system should be so. Capitalist system exists in the world outside of the family. When you start rewarding things inside the family, every positive action has a reward. I think that creates a really negative psychological framing for your kids.

I agree. I think being mercenary is the wrong way to go. And I. What you can see, huh? Have I changed my mind?

No, you're not. You're not changing my mind. I just think this is a lot more nuanced than you think it is. Like with the Duggar family, were the boys taking care of their little siblings? Not really.

A
Oh, so it was done in a. Jewish, but also like in Jill Duggar's biography. She writes about the fact that she enjoyed it like it was something that she appreciated. Oh, yeah, I love that. The people who read it, like the progressives were like she was brainwashed.

B
Yeah. They refused to believe that it was a thing that she could have possibly appreciated. But there are elements of aptitude, there are elements of capability. There are elements of interest even in families that don't give people the choice. And to act as though you're going to foist upon people responsibilities that they're not willing to take on when there are other helpless people involved I think is deeply morally wrong.

A
As parents, if our kids are not willing or eager to, from a moral standpoint, to take on the responsibility of. Yeah, there are a variety of responsibilities that kids can choose to take on to do their part in the house, even without renumeration, in a totally communist system where they can shine. And I think that giving people that at least market based communism, where everyone steps in to contribute what they're best at contributing is really important. Maybe one kid is going to get really good at fixing things for other people or resolving disputes. One is going to be incredibly into younger childcare or organizing events, but that.

Is still the communist system from each according to their abilities. But. I know, but what you're implying is just foisting upon people responsibilities that will give to a teenage boy. Nobody wants no interest in it. Yeah, I am suggesting that there are certain responsibilities that nobody wants to deal with.

When you create a system or a moral framework for kids where they believe that they don't have to do something because they don't like doing it, you are creating a ball that rolls down a hill which ends in modern progressivism. You cannot. I understand, you're like, I want to make a compromise here, or I want to make a compromise here. And I am okay with making compromise when the safety of another kid is at stake. Okay, when it's something like an infant or something like that, and you do not think the infant will be safe, fine, but I am not okay with saying that I am making this compromise because the kid doesn't want to do it.

The kid should understand that they are seen as a failure in the eyes of the family for not being willing to undertake this responsibility themselves. And that when you're building a moral framework that says, and this is why, this is how all of these systems, when they're trying to, like, why does the urban monoculture, why does the virus teach people about parentification in this way? Why does it use this, me, this idea of parentification because it is a good way to drive a wedge between an individual and their birth culture and their parents. Because all cults, that is the core goal. Even if it was obviously in their best interest, they need to say, you are brainwashed, you were gaslit.

Even when they've left their family, even when they have antagonism to their family. And they're like, yeah, but this thing wasn't bad for me. And they're like, no, you only think that because gaslighting these thoughts is really important to cult in terms of breaking people out of family and traditional cycles. And I think, yeah, I want to know, do you really believe what you're saying? That teaching a kid that they shouldn't have to do something that just needs to be done for, like society, somebody says, I didn't want to clean up the milk, therefore I don't have to do.

You don't see the problem in that, how it. No, you. That's not true with the way that I parent, you know, that I draw lines where I'm like, if you want this, you have to do this other thing. Hold on for a second.

B
That said, when it comes to the care of other people, I think it's really important for there to be an opt in factor and that you cannot put someone who is openly unwilling in the care of someone else. Now, I do think raising families with a responsibility where everyone feels like their personal responsibility for the safety and well being of their siblings is crucial. And that's a culture thing. But I think assigning people like, okay, you now are responsible for this person. And you, even though I know what.

A
Do you do about the things that nobody wants to do, I think that. There'S always someone who is willing, more willing to do something than the other person. And having a market based system for that works out really well. If one kid really hates taking out the trash or cleaning or doing laundry or cooking or watching after a certain kid, they'll trade responsibilities. And I think, well, then the way.

You have it is you have tradable responsibilities that are divided equally. Yeah. So every kid gets a shift on child feeding, every kid gets a shift on trash takeout, and then they can trade individual responsibilities. Yeah, that's one way that I would. Find that market based.

Exactly. That's still. Everybody is equally distributed responsibilities. Yeah, but then people are doing what they have more of an aptitude for. I feel like there has to be, there's an opt in element to that wherever I.

B
Yeah. And the way that you can handle that, if you allow the trading of responsibilities you could have for the responsibilities people don't like. I will do one nighttime feeding in exchange for these five other responsibilities because I like this so much. And that's how it works with most task trading like that. If you help me get an a on this test, I will like biology test.

I will do your math homework for the next five weeks or all two. It's all about value. And I do think that giving people that is really important. Plus it teaches people how to negotiate. And don't you want children who know how to negotiate?

A
Yes, but I want to make sure that we do not create a culture where you say something like, feeding young children is off the table because you can't do it safely. A teenager should be able to do that safely. Oh, no, no. Yeah, yeah. But overnight care for an infant, I think for teens and for kids, sleep is really important.

B
Really freaking important. And I don't believe in compromising that. But it's not as important as food is for babies. I hear you, but parents can get their shit together and take care of their own. You are just such a terminator, Simone.

A
You are so hardworking that you couldn't even imagine not handling everything yourself, which I really appreciate. Many of the stories that I have heard of kids who really resented their parentification, and yes, they were brainwashed into the woke mind virus or whatever, but still the most common complaints are, oh, then got to this point where my mom just got so sick and tired during each pregnancy that then everything fell to me. A lot of it, like, it comes down to not. I was given responsibility that I resent. It was that my parents failed at being parents.

B
And I think that I resent the. Laziness of my parents. And I think that. Exactly. You can't have a system of parentification.

And I think this is a really important point. If the kids don't see the parents going above and beyond, this can't be like the uncle in a series of unfortunate events on the back nippit. We'll take it in the dining room at 08:00 and we'll expect absolute silence. But we've never made dinner before. It's already 738 o'clock.

A
Dinner is served. Pasta puttanesca. Where's the roast beef? Roast beef? But you didn't tell us you wanted roast beef.

B
Where you have some parent who's just like, go do this, go do that. And they're not doing anything themselves. The parent needs to be doing double what indian individual kid is doing. A triple huge, like many times over. And if the parent isn't delivering in that way, then there's no merit to that system.

A
No, I agree with that. And I think that, and I could definitely see this, like accidentally assigning to parents it was parentification. What they actually mean is I just didn't respect my parent because they didn't put in the work of other people. And especially with stay at home moms, I can see a lot of people, I know the number of stay at home moms who also have like staff working in the house, who are also relying on their kids for childcare, which I think is a totally different system than the one that we implement. And I should clarify for people, because a lot of people misunderstand our stance on at least our cultural stance.

I believe that diversity of culture should try different things, but they're like, what? So do you promote daycare? And it's, no, we don't really promote daycare either. We promote working from home in an environment where you can either through sharing with neighbors or through different types of trades, find ways to take care of your kids within a cultural ecosystem of your family. But both parents should always be working because it is just, I don't think, economically feasible to elevate systems where one parent isn't working in today's economy.

And so if you're going to be any sort of a, like, this is how you make things work. Saying that's how you make things work is just comical for the majority of people. Yeah, I agree. Uh, so yeah, the role of actual biological parents is underrated in parentification. I think that you're underestimating the role of child labor.

We need to send our kids to the mines. No, I agree. I agree that giving kids responsibility is crucial. There's that famous meme that minecraft shows that children crave the minds they crave to return to the mines. They want to return, let them back.

B
Yeah, I mean, I think that also, like many kids enjoy it and they want, they want to take care of, especially girls. Young girls really like taking care of other babies. You can see this in other cultures too, where it's like just common practice for, within a tribe, for a young girl to just carry around whatever new baby there is all day while the mother goes back to working or doing whatever. And they don't mind it, they like it. It gives us things too.

So yeah, I'm for it. And I'm not for letting anyone shirk responsibility. However, aptitude and optionality need to be a part of this, forcing anyone into especially consider our kids how anti authoritarian our kids are. There's no way they would accept a system where someone's just, you have to do this. No compromising.

You know what I mean? Yes, but you want to build a system where they're not doing it because they're being told or because of threats, but because you've built a sense of moral responsibility in them. That's right. Anyway, I love you. We love you guys.

A
And we're so happy to be introducing you to industry Americus Collins or indie, if you want to hold her up for the camera. Anyway, I'm excited to have another kid, and I'm excited to start working on more soon.

Love.