Ce travail porte sur le processus de parentification des enfants au Burundi. Il s’inscrit dans un contexte de dislocations familiales multiformes dues à des situations de crises sociopolitiques cycliques souvent à caractère ethnique et politique. Son objectif est de comprendre comment ce processus se met en place, quels sont ses effets sur les enfants parentifiés, et quel dispositif d’accompagnement faut-il envisager. 14 enfants et adolescents âgés de 7 à 17 ans, 7 parents et 1 éducatrice dans un orphelinat ont été rencontrés, à travers essentiellement l’entretien semi-directif et le modelage pour les enfants âgés de 7 à10 ans. Les résultats de notre recherche révèlent que le processus de parentification se présente chez les enfants burundais sous trois aspects principaux : l’exercice de l’autorité parentale, le maternage et le soutien affectif au parent fragilisé. Les enfants parentifiés assument beaucoup de responsabilités qui dépassent leur niveau de développement physique et psychique. Ces multiples responsabilités les empêchent d’avoir le temps de s’amuser comme les autres enfants, mais aussi les empêchent d’avoir de bons résultats scolaires. La parentification des adolescents dits « chefs de ménages » correspond à une sorte de résilience pour pouvoir survivre. Pour y arriver, ils disposent des ressources notamment les images, les paroles, les souhaits hérités des parents constituent des éléments d’étayage sur lesquels ces adolescents s’appuient pour pouvoir prendre en charge leurs fratries. Nos analyses qualitatives montrent que les enfants parentifiés exercent une parentalité précoce. Ils occupent une place parentale sans y être préparés et n’ont pas pu vivre tout ce qu’un enfant peut vivre. / This work concerns the process of parentification of Burundian children. It occurs in a context of family breakdown due to varied situations following the recurring sociopolitical crises mostly with ethnic and political backgrounds. The thesis aims at understanding how the process takes place, what are its effects on parentified children and which kind of support mechanism could be of some help to them. 14 children and adolescents aged 7 to 17, 7 parents and 1 orphanage educator were met, trough essentially the semi-structured interview and the modeling for children 7- 10 years- old. The results of our research reveal that the parentification process for Burundian children is experienced in three ways: exercising parental authority, carering for other children, and providing affective support for frail parents. Parentified children assume many responsibilities that are beyond their age and their level of physical and psychological development. These multiple responsibilities prevent them from having time to care for themselves as children, but also lead to their school education failure. Parentification for so-called “heads of households” teenagers constitutes a resilience mechanism for survival. To achieve this, they resort to different resources, including images, words and wishes inherited from their late parents which provide them with the strength to raise their siblings. Our qualitative analyzes show that parentified children experience early parenthood. They assume a parental position for which they are not prepared but also they miss their own childhood.

The current study set out to explore the affect and significance of differing parental conditions on the experiences commonly reported by young carers. Previous studies on young caring have reflected on the impacts of caring for parents with particular `types' of conditions (normally physical disability or mental health problems) or a specific diagnosis. However, these have not contrasted or discriminated young carers' experiences according to different parental conditions. To address this gap in knowledge, the current study considered the experiences of young carers supporting parents with different `types' of conditions, namely physical disability, mental health problems and substance misuse. The participants discussed the impact of caring on a range of areas such as their education, social life, health, spatial transitions, relationships and role reversals. Additionally, definitional issues were considered. This included young carers own understanding and subscription to the term `young carer' and the significance of this to their identification. In terms of methodology, the study was firmly grounded within the qualitative domain and influenced by a constructive-interpretive paradigm, specifically symbolic interactionism. Within this, the grounded theory approach was used insofar as it provided a method to conduct the study. A range of data-collection techniques were employed. Semi-structured interviewing was the principal method used, with additional data gathered through a self-esteem tool, observations and diaries. The sample consisted of 30 young carers. The results showed firstly that the participants did not necessarily comprehend the term `young carer' or apply it to their own caring roles at home. Arguably, this contributed to their `hidden-ness' (i. e. invisibility) and as a result their needs were overlooked. The need for a new definition which embraces their understandings, together with appropriate awareness-raising programmes within schools and for key social care and health professionals was evidenced and called for. Secondly, whilst the participants shared common experiences regardless of the nature of the parental condition, other issues reported were specific to particular situations. Those most adversely affected were caring in the contexts of parental substance misuse or parental mental health problems. Such young carers were dually disadvantaged, as they experienced the most extreme difficulties, yet their caring roles and needs were least likely to be addressed. The experiential differences reported by young carers in different caring contexts have important practice implications. Nevertheless, the extent to which the experiences reported could be wholly attributed to the caring role, rather than other structural and socio-economic factors was questionable.

abstract: In order to adapt to a new culture and new language, children of immigrant families are faced daily with the responsibility of being the intermediaries between the family and the host culture through their language proficiency (Weisskirch & Alva, 2002). This thesis looks into the experiences of English-Spanish bilingual children as they bridge the gap between the family and the non-Spanish speaking community through their interpreting/translating skills. With an emphasis on children of Mexican-origin, the goal is to further understand and illuminate how these children manage this communication in an adult society, their feelings and thoughts about their experiences, and the child's perceptions about the influence that this experience may or may not have on their future. A sample of seventeen children agreed to participate in a semi-structured face-to-face interview to share their experiences. The data from these interviews were analyzed using a thematic analysis approach (Braun & Clarke, 2006). A priori themes of circumstantial bilingual and adaptive parentification were the initial focus of the research while being open to emerging themes. The children's accounts of their experiences indicated primarily that the Mexican-origin values of familism and respeto (respect) were a significant influence on them when they interpreted/translated for their family. With these traditional cultural values and norms as the groundwork, the sub-themes of normalcy and stress emerged as supportive elements of the circumstantial bilingual experience. Furthermore, the theme of adaptive parentification and the sub-themes of choice, expectation/responsibility to assist, and equality to parents offered further insight on how adaptive parentification can result as the roles of these children change. There was an emergent theme, identity negotiation, which increases our understanding of what the circumstantial bilingual child encounters as the attempt is made to negotiate his identity as an individual who has to mediate language between two opposing cultures. Due to the language brokering responsibility that are bestowed upon these children, it is concluded that communicative support by the parents is a necessary component of the parent-child relationship in order to nurture and develop these children as they negotiate and create their identity to become the successful leaders of tomorrow. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Communication Studies 2013

Parentification, the process of role reversal between parent and child, has long-term deleterious consequences. Using 500 men and 501 women, ranging from 18 years to 55 years old, residing in Korea and the U.S., this study examined the relationship of parentification experienced during childhood and depression in adulthood. The moderating impact of gender and self-care was examined in both the Korean and U.S. samples. Multiple-group analysis showed that the relationship between parentification and depression was statistically significant in all groups (U.S., Korean, male, and female), and self-care was negatively linked to depression. However, self-care did not moderate the relationship between parentification and depression in any of the groups. Further analysis using mixture modeling revealed that there were two distinct classes. The majority class, comprising 94.4% of the sample, contained the individuals who practiced more self-care and were more depressed than those in the other class and showed a significant moderation effect of self-care in the association between parentification and depression in the expected direction. However, the minority class, comprising 5.6% of the sample, contained the individuals who practiced less self-care and were less depressed than those in the majority class and showed a signification moderation effect of self-care in the opposite direction with much greater effect sizes enough to negate the moderation effect from the majority class. In other words, self-care appeared to worsen the relationship between parentification and depression for those in the minority class. Implications for therapy are discussed.

No description available.

South Africa faces a high disease burden and a limited public capacity to provide care to the ill. Research from the UK and sub-Saharan Africa suggests the burden often falls to children, who also take over domestic responsibilities necessary for household survival. To date, there is limited research exploring the relationship between parental illness and children’ responsibilities, or the moderating effect of socio-demographic variables. The thesis is comprised of three research phases. The first is a literature review to summarise existing research and identify substantial gaps, which included limited amounts of quantitative evidence on this topic and a lack of a tool to as-sess child responsibility that had both been adapted to the South African context and included caring responsibilities. The second research phase consists of an exploratory study of n = 349 children living with ill adults in urban and rural communities in the Western Cape province of South Africa to investigate their range of responsibility, which included caring for an ill parent, household chores, childcare, and income-generation. The resulting data were used to create the Child Responsibility Measure, which assesses the range and time burden of re-sponsibilities among South African children. The third research phase is a cross-sectional quantitative survey of n = 2,476 pairs of children and parents from urban and rural communities in KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa. Resulting data on parental health, socio-demographics, and child responsibilities were analysed with multiple regres-sions to determine drivers of children’s responsibility. Among the findings were that parental illnesses increase the likelihood children provide care and have larger responsibility workloads, and girls are more likely to take on all types of responsibility excluding income-generating activities, which were more common in boys. Additionally, while urban children were more likely to provide personal care, rural children had greater responsibility workloads.

Family environment is a significant factor in the development of eating disorders in young-adult females. Clinical experience, research and theories about eating disorders indicate that constrictive implicit process rules within a family are correlated with eating-disordered families. This study identified implicit family process rules that are unique to eating-disordered families and how well these rules predict membership in eating-disordered and non-eating-disordered families. One hundred and two families (51 eating-disordered and 51 comparison families) participated in the study. Mothers, fathers, young-adult female children, and siblings in each family completed the Family Implicit Rules Profile (FIRP). The design included cluster analysis of all 85 rules to determine which implicit rules clustered in eating-disordered families, and discriminant analysis to determine how well the rules from the cluster analysis predicted membership in the groups of eating-disordered vs. control families. Results indicated that two clusters emerged related to eating-disordered families. The first included rules regarding inappropriate protection of parents (ex. "Protect your parent even if they do not deserve it"), not upsetting or inconveniencing parents, the triangulation of a child (eg.. "Listen to a parent when they complain about the other parent"), avoiding pain at any cost, and blaming self for others' anger. Cluster 2 included rules about appearances (eg,. "Do whatever you have to do to look good to others") and rules about keeping family matters private. Discriminant analysis showed that these 15 implicit family rules predicted membership in either the eating-disordered or the non-eating-disordered family groups with 93% accuracy. Implications for family therapy are discussed.

In broad terms, parentification can be defined as a child taking on the role of parent to his or her own parents; though in reality the construct is more complex. Although related constructs (e.g. boundary transgressions, role reversal, ‘hurried child’) have been discussed in the literature for many years, the term ‘parentification’ per se is a relatively new one within the field of psychological research and empirical studies are still limited. When researching in the field of parentification, an issue that is apparent is the lack of adequate measures of parentification available for children and adolescents. The few measures of parentification that exist have been (a) retrospective (asking adults to recall levels of responsibility within their families of origin as adolescents) and/or (b) uni-dimensional (measuring parentification as a single score rather than taking into account different facets such as confidant to one’s own parents, mediator between conflicting parents, ‘pseudo-parents’ to siblings, or excessive household responsibilities). The first aim of the current research was to develop a reliable and valid multidimensional measure of parentification that was appropriate for completion by children and adolescents. The series of studies that follow utilise this newly developed parentification scale to examine parentification of adolescents aged 10-16 years from families undergoing parental divorce. A comparison group of children from two-parent continuously married (not remarried) families were included. A previously validated uni-dimensional measure of parentification, the Parentification Questionnaire – Youth (PQ-Y: Godsall & Jurkovic, 1995) was also used throughout the studies (although in the current sample, this measure was multidimensional, yielding two factors labelled Alienation and Tangible Tasks). Broad research goals of the studies are: 1. to examine parentification (and its association with family functioning and sibling relationship quality) from the perspective of multiple family members, 2. to explore parentification differences between families on variables of age, sex, birth order, family size and parental marital status, and 3. to assess the extent to which parentification affects adolescent psychological adjustment, and how burden of parentification may mediate the relationship between parentification and psychological adjustment. Parents and children aged 10-16 years from 304 families (127 divorcing; 177 married) were invited to participate in a 12-month study of parentification that included questions about demographics, family responsibilities, family functioning, adolescent adjustment, and sibling relationships. In addition, in divorcing families, both parents and one child (target child) were invited to be interviewed regarding their experiences surrounding the separation and divorce. The measure of parentification designed for the current research adapted the multidimensional, retrospective measure written by Mika, Bergner and Baum (1987). This new measure was labelled the Youth Parentification Scale (YPS), and findings suggest that it is a reliable measure of parentification in the current sample of married and divorcing families. Results revealed that children from divorcing families and girls reported higher levels of parentification (across various factors). Results on multiple perspectives within the family were mixed. In general, children were more likely than their parents to report higher levels of parentification within the family, although this effect differed slightly dependent upon parental marital status. Siblings who reported offering support to other members of the family also rated their relationship with their sibling as warmer: this result held true for both firstand second-born children. Additionally, both first- and second-born children agreed that parentification may affect the relative status/power between siblings. While few direct associations between parentification and adjustment existed, negative adjustment outcomes (higher anxiety, higher depression and lower self-esteem) were evident when the burden associated with increased responsibility was taken into account. Taking on the role of confidant to one’s parents, playing ‘pseudo-parent’ to one’s siblings, or feeling alienated within one’s family of origin was associated with higher levels of burden, which in turn led children to report higher depression and anxiety and lower self-esteem. Additionally, taking on a parentified role was associated with higher levels of burden, which in turn was associated with reports of lower levels of family functioning (i.e. lower intimacy, higher conflict, and a more controlling parenting style). The current research has implications for the development and refinement of future measures of parentification for use in empirical studies. The Youth Parentification Scale showed that different facets of parentification do seem to exist, and that offering comfort and support to mothers or fathers seems to have an association with various aspects of adjustment, sibling relationships and general family functioning. Alienation (a factor emerging from the PQ-Y), while not actually associated with increased responsibility or parentification per se, showed associations with parentification that indicate that this may be an important construct to include in future attempts at developing a comprehensive measure of parentification. Additionally, the current research unveiled findings that may have clinical importance. Findings revealed that while children from divorcing families did exhibit higher scores on various scales of parentification, outcomes were not necessarily worse for these children than for children within married families who were similarly parentified. Adolescence is a time of emotional growth when some age-appropriate adoption of adult responsibility is warranted; and in fact for children undergoing the transition of parental separation and divorce, adoption of extra responsibilities may be adaptive, perhaps even protective inasmuch as it may bring the child closer to parents during a time when anxiety about family dissolution is high. Further studies (preferably longitudinal) exploring the adaptive facets of parentification are warranted.

Inledning: Globalt sett beräknas det att en av fyra familjer har minst en medlem med psykisk störning och de anhöriga är ofta de som är de främsta vårdarna. En majoritet av personer med psykisk sjukdom är eller kommer att bli föräldrar. Forskning visar på ett starkt samband mellan psykisk sjukdom hos föräldrarna och psykisk ohälsa hos barn. Syfte: Att identifiera riskfaktorer respektive friskfaktorer som uppträder hos barn som växer upp med en psykiskt sjuk förälder. Metod: En litteraturstudie där 15 artiklar både kvantitativa och kvalitativa ingick. Analysering av artiklarna har skett enligt en tematisk analysmetod. Resultat: Barn till föräldrar med psykisk sjukdom utgör en högriskgrupp för att själva utveckla beteendemässiga, känslomässiga och psykiatriska problem. Det finns ett starkt samband mellan förälderns psykiska sjukdom och stigmatisering samt bristande skolgång. Skyddande faktorer inbegriper stöd, kunskap om förälderns tillstånd, en aktiv coping strategi och en familjefokuserad vård, vilket kan öka familjens och barnens resiliens. Diskussion: Det finns stora behov av tidiga insatser för att stödja barn. Många gånger missas barnen då fokus på vården enbart är riktad till den psykiskt sjuka föräldern. Studien visar att stöd och information till barnen inte är implementerat eller är bristfällig i många fall. / Introduction: Globally, it is estimated that one in four families has at least one family member with a mental disorder and relatives are often the primary caregivers. A majority of people with mental illness are or will be parents. Research shows a significant association between parental mental illness and mental illness in children. Purpose: The purpose of this systematic literature review was to identify the risk factors and the protective factors of the health of children living with a mentally ill parent. Method: A literature study involving 15 articles both quantitative and qualitative. Analysis of the articles has been done according to a thematic analysis method. Result: Children of parents with mental illness constitute a high-risk group for developing problems such as behavioural, emotional and psychiatric disorders. There is a strong relation between the parent's mental illness and stigmatization as well as lack of school attendance. Protective factors include social support, knowledge of the parent's illness, having an active coping strategy and a family-focused care that can enhance the family and children's resilience. Discussion: There is a great need of early efforts and interventions to support children. Many times, the focus from health care is only on the mentally ill parent and many children's needs are missed. This study shows that support and information to the children in many cases is not implemented or inadequate.

Barn till personer med psykisk problematik är en grupp som fått relativt lite uppmärksamhet i samband med förälderns insjuknande. Få studier beskriver hur deras tankar gått under tiden deras föräldrar varit sjuka. Denna studie syftar till att undersöka hur barn beskriver sina upplevelser av att växa upp med en psykiskt sjuk förälder. Genom att granska barns egna beskrivningar på hemsidan kuling.nu kan en organisk bild av erfarenheter, toppar och dalar samt känslor skapa en bild av en vardag få människor pratar öppet om. 41 inlägg publicerade mellan år 2016 och år 2010 granskades genom en kvalitativ konventionell innehållsanalys. Några av de resultat som kan utläsas visar att barnens upplevelser kan få följder såsom ensamhet, mental ohälsa eller utveckling av destruktiva hanteringsstrategier. Genom att söka sig till internetforum finner de gemenskap, kan få information om sjukdomar och kanske hjälp med att bearbeta sina upplevelser. Känslan av att vara den enda personen i hela världen som har en annorlunda förälder kan reduceras eller elimineras.