Abstract
This chapter investigates counselling interactions where young clients talk about their experiences of taking on family responsibilities normatively associated with parental roles. In research counselling literature, practices where relationships in families operate so that there is a reversal of roles, with children managing the households and caring for parents and siblings, is described as parentification (see also Hutchby, Chapter 29, this volume; Kiyimba & O’Reilly, Chapter 30, this volume, for further discussion on family therapy talk). Parentification is used in the counselling literature as a clinician/researcher term, which we ‘respecify’ (Garfinkel, 1991) by investigating young clients’ own accounts of being an adult or parent and by showing how counsellors orient to these accounts. As well as providing understandings of how young people propose accounts of their experiences of adult-child role reversal, the chapter contributes to understanding how children and young people use the resources of counselling helplines, and how counsellors can communicate effectively with children and young people.
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Recommended reading
• Atkinson, M. A. (1980). Some practical uses of ‘a natural lifetime’. Human Studies, 3, 33–46.
• Hester, S., & Eglin, P. (1997). Membership categorization analysis: An introduction. In S. Hester & P. Eglin (Eds.), Culture in action: Studies in membership categorization analysis (pp. 1–23). Washington, DC: International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis & University Press of America.
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© 2015 Susan Danby, Jakob Cromdal, Johanna Rendle-Short, Carly W. Butler, Karin Osvaldsson, and Michael Emmison
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Danby, S., Cromdal, J., Rendle-Short, J., Butler, C.W., Osvaldsson, K., Emmison, M. (2015). Parentification: Counselling Talk on a Helpline for Children and Young People. In: O’Reilly, M., Lester, J.N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Child Mental Health. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137428318_31
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137428318_31
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