From Parentified to Adultified

When Growing Up Becomes a Performance

I have a client who is 47, accomplished, and respected in his field. He meditates daily, journals before bed, attends couples therapy every other Tuesday. By all appearances, he’s a grown man. Yet each morning he wakes to the same silent verdict: not enough.

No matter what he builds . . . great career, beautiful family, social identity . . . his foundation keeps trembling. There’s always another summit to scale, another wound to outgrow, another piece of himself to fix. He knows how to appear competent, how to care for everyone else, how to hold it all together; but he doesn’t know how to rest.

This is the story of the adultified child.

The Child Who Became the Parent

Long before there was an “adultified child,” there was a parentified one.

Family-systems theorist Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy described parentification in Invisible Loyalties (1973) as the inversion of care within a family; the child who assumes the emotional and/or physical duties of a parent. The child who senses the adult’s fragility and fills in the missing stability.

These children learn early that love is earned through responsibility. As Donald Winnicott noted in his work on the false self, they become attuned to the needs of others at the expense of their own spontaneous life. Safety depends on vigilance. Connection depends on compliance.

The parentified child becomes emotionally precocious, old beyond their years. But what looks like maturity is, in truth, a survival strategy; a premature adulthood built atop unmet needs.

When the Performance Never Ends

The adultified child is what happens when that early parenting the parent performance becomes an identity.

They grow up, move out, earn degrees, lead teams, raise families. They look like adults . . . on paper, in meetings, at dinner parties. But inside, they’re still waiting for someone to notice that they’re faking it.

They don’t know that their relentless drive to “be enough” was born the moment they learned they weren’t allowed to need.

As Gabor Maté writes in When the Body Says No, chronic self-suppression is the body’s attempt to preserve attachment. The adultified child becomes addicted to competence, to mastery, to control; not because they love success, but because failure once meant loss of love.

Even their suffering is sophisticated. They intellectualize their pain, spiritualize their longing, therapize their despair. But beneath the polished language of self-awareness lies a small, frightened voice whispering, “Please don’t leave me.”

The Cult of Competence

Our culture rewards the adultified child. We celebrate productivity, grit, and resilience . . . the very traits that mask depletion. We praise “maturity” when what we’re really seeing is over-functioning.

Terry Real calls this performance-based self-esteem: worth derived from doing rather than being. In such a climate, the adultified child thrives because society mirrors their childhood conditions; achievement equals belonging. They rise quickly and burn quietly. They build empires and then collapse in the emptiness of success.

When they finally seek therapy, they speak the language of optimization. Yet what they long for isn’t improvement; it’s contact. They want to lay down the armor and be held without earning it.

But who is there to hold them when their inner world is populated by children pretending to be adults?

The Missing Parent Within

Here lies the core dilemma: most adultified children don’t have an inner parent.

They have an inner critic, an inner manager, a fixer. But a regulating inner presence . . . the one that says, I’ve got you, I’m here . . . is largely absent.

In Winnicott’s terms, the good-enough mother was never internalized. Without that early holding environment, there’s no template for internal care. So when pain arises, there’s no inner parent to contain it; the psyche reverts to the only strategy it knows; performance, collapse, self-recrimination, repeat.

This is why much “inner-child work” falters. Therapists often assume a competent inner adult already exists, yet the client’s so-called adult is still the overfunctioning child running the show. Until the inner parent is cultivated, the adultified child will continue to mistake control for safety and achievement for worth.

The Unbearable State of Need

At the heart of adultification lies the refusal of the need state.

To need is to risk disappointment. To need is to remember being unseen. As mentioned above, Maté observed that many of us learned to suppress need to preserve attachment . . . a strategy that ensures survival but costs authenticity.

Needs don’t vanish when denied; they harden into symptoms: anxiety, fatigue, intimacy struggles, existential dread. The more we try to transcend the need, the more haunted we become by it.

The tragedy of the adultified child is that they confuse independence with freedom, when true freedom begins only when dependency becomes safe again . . . when the inner child can reach for comfort and actually find someone home.

The First Glimpse of Real Adulthood

Real adulthood isn’t an achievement; it’s a relationship.

It begins the moment we stop performing for safety and start relating to our own inner experience with curiosity and care. The moment an internal parent begins to stir; a voice that is not managerial, but merciful.

For many, this awakening is sparked by contact with a mentor, therapist, or spiritual guide . . . someone who models what mature, attuned authority feels like. It’s not about fixing the child; it’s about installing the architecture of true adulthood inside; a structure sturdy enough to hold both strength and sorrow.

That is the work ahead: cultivating the inner parent who can finally meet the inner child without merging, managing, or dismissing.

When that happens, the performance ends. The adultified self . . . so long enslaved to “enoughness” . . . can finally begin to live.