A few weeks ago I wrote that difficulty has to travel up an organisation rather than down, because when it travels down it accumulates with the people least able to process it.
Several people asked whether the same thing happens in families. It does, but not in the way the question implies, and the correction is worth making first, because it changes what the rest of this means.
The family is not the analogy. It is the original
The idea that one person can take in another’s distress, hold it, and hand back something more bearable did not come from management. It came from a psychoanalyst named Wilfred Bion, watching mothers and babies. A baby cannot process terror. It has no words and no perspective and no sense that anything will ever end. What it does have is somebody who can take the terror, survive it, and give it back in a form the baby can live with.
Isabel Menzies Lyth then carried that idea into hospitals, and eventually it reached leadership, which is where most people meet it now.
So this is not the domestic version of a workplace idea. The workplace idea is the domestic one, lent out.
What travels down, and where it lands
The argument runs the same way at home as it does at work.
Difficulty does not dissolve. It moves. Its default direction is downward, because at every step it is cheaper to pass something on than to digest it, and because the person below has fewer ways of refusing. So it concentrates rather than disperses, and it ends up with whoever has least power to send it back.
In an organisation that is the client. In a family it is a child, and that is the harder version of the case, not the softer one. The client’s capacity to process difficulty is overwhelmed. A child’s has not been built yet.
It has a name, and some evidence
When a child ends up carrying what the adults cannot, family therapists call it parentification. The term comes from Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy and Geraldine Spark, writing in 1973, and it comes in two forms.
The first is practical. The child who does the washing, gets the younger ones to school, manages the money, translates for a parent at the doctor’s. This one is visible, and it is the one people picture.
The second is emotional, and it is the one that does more damage. The child who becomes the confidant, the referee, the person a parent is regulated by, the reason a parent is coping. It does more damage partly because it is harder to see. Nothing is being carried that anybody could photograph.
And here is the part that makes the practical kind survivable, which I think is the most useful sentence in this whole literature. Carrying things for your family is not reliably harmful when the contribution is visible, named, temporary, and fairly recognised. Plenty of children do a great deal and are fine. It turns harmful when it is none of those things, unnamed, open-ended, and simply assumed.
Lisa Hooper and colleagues pooled twelve studies covering nearly two and a half thousand adults and found a reliable association between remembered parentification in childhood and psychological difficulty later. The association is small, a correlation of about 0.14. I want to be straight about that rather than inflate it. It tells you something real about populations. It tells you nothing certain about any particular family, including yours, and it does not establish that one thing caused the other.
The finding that actually matters
Buried in that literature is something more useful than the headline.
What best predicts harm is not how much a child carried. It is whether it felt fair.
And the most damaging arrangement is the one where the child does not know they are working beyond their capacity, because everyone around them keeps saying how well they are doing. How mature they are. How easy. How much of a help. The family is not lying. They are grateful, and they say so, and the gratitude is exactly what stops anybody noticing.
The child who is coping magnificently is sometimes the one carrying the most.
Which is the same sentence I wrote about organisations
That is not a coincidence, and it is the reason both pieces are about the same thing.
Organisations quietly reward the person who absorbs what the system will not hold. They are described as reliable, unflappable, a safe pair of hands, and the description is affectionate and sincere and functions as a request for more. Families do the same, to children, in the same warm voice.
If you read the leadership piece and recognised yourself, there is a reasonable chance you were the brave child first.
Now the part that stops this being a stick to beat yourself with
Everything above is about direction. It is not about volume, and it is very much not an instruction to protect children from all knowledge that life is hard.
A child bringing difficulty upward is the system working. That is what it is for. The child who brings nothing, who is no trouble, who never needs anything. That is the one I would want to know more about.
And a parent does not have to be a flawless container, which is fortunate, because there is no such thing. Children see their parents tired, frightened, angry and out of their depth, and they need to, because otherwise they learn that difficulty is unmentionable, which is its own problem and travels downward just as reliably.
The line is not between a child who sees difficulty and a child who does not. It is between a child who witnesses it and a child who is made responsible for it. Witnessing is a parent saying: this is hard for me at the moment, and it is mine, and I am dealing with it. Responsibility is the child becoming the confidant, the referee, the regulator, or the reason a parent is managing at all.
The chain is longer than your house
One more thing, because it explains a lot of what people bring me.
The chain does not start with you. A parent who is metabolising something rather than passing it on is often doing two generations of work at once, handling what came down to them, and declining to send it further. That is unglamorous and almost entirely invisible, and nobody thanks anybody for it.
It is also the whole job.
And the hard part
An employee can resign. This is where the family case is genuinely harder than the organisational one, and I would rather say so than reach for something consoling. A child cannot leave, cannot appeal, and has no alternative employer. Whatever arrives, arrives.
What to do with this
Not perfection. One question, asked honestly, occasionally.
After that conversation, who was left carrying it?
Not who started it, or who was right, or who was loudest. Who put it down, and who walked away still holding it. If the answer is regularly the youngest person in the room, that is the thing to look at, and it is worth knowing that noticing it is most of the change.
Where to start
The piece this one grew out of, on why difficulty has to travel up an organisation rather than down, is the workplace version of the same argument. There is a containment worksheet on the worksheets page for working with difficulty you are holding rather than passing on, and a reconnecting with your child worksheet for when distance has grown and you are not sure how.
References
Bion, W R (1962). Learning from Experience.
Boszormenyi-Nagy, I and Spark, G M (1973). Invisible Loyalties: Reciprocity in Intergenerational Family Therapy.
Menzies Lyth, I (1960). Social systems as a defence against anxiety. Human Relations, 13, 95–121.
Hooper, L M, DeCoster, J, White, N and Voltz, M L (2011). Characterizing the magnitude of the relation between self-reported childhood parentification and adult psychopathology: a meta-analysis. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 67(10), 1028–1043.
Jurkovic, G J and Thirkield, A (1998). Parentification Questionnaire (revised).