Kids who grow up managing their parents’ emotions, or effectively raising their own siblings, carry measurable mental health consequences into adulthood, but the outcome depends heavily on how they come to interpret that early responsibility. That’s the core finding of a new peer-reviewed study published in BMC Psychology in February 2026, conducted by researchers Erdal Görkem Gavcar and Erdoğan Gavcar at Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University in Turkey. The study surveyed 448 university students, average age just under 21, and found that parentification, the technical term for children taking on adult-level caregiving or emotional-support roles too early, doesn’t produce one uniform outcome. It splits into distinct pathways depending on what kind of responsibility a child carried and how they’ve since made sense of it.
The researchers distinguished between two forms of parentification: parent-focused, where a child takes care of a parent’s emotional or practical needs, and sibling-focused, where a child effectively parents a younger brother or sister. Parent-focused parentification showed a statistically significant link to both depression and anxiety in adulthood. Sibling-focused parentification was linked to anxiety specifically, but not to depression at a significant level, a distinction that suggests the two roles leave different marks depending on who the child was caring for.
The relationship style someone develops does most of the damage
The more revealing part of the study isn’t the direct link between parentification and mental health. It’s what the researchers found sitting in between the two: adult relationship style. Using mediation analysis, the study found that people who were parentified as children were more likely to develop what the researchers call a “toxic” relationship style in adulthood, and it was that relationship style, not the childhood caregiving itself, that did most of the work in predicting depression and anxiety. A toxic relationship style significantly predicted both depression and anxiety on its own in the study’s regression models, accounting for close to a fifth of the variance in each.
That distinction matters for how the effects of parentification actually get carried forward. It isn’t simply that a hard childhood produces a hard adulthood in some direct, unavoidable line. It’s that certain early caregiving roles shape how a person learns to relate to others, and that learned relationship pattern is what ends up predicting whether they struggle with anxiety or depression years later. Change the relationship pattern, and the researchers’ data suggests the mental health risk shifts with it.
Perceived benefit works as a protective factor
The study’s most counterintuitive finding involves what the researchers call “perceived benefits of parentification,” meaning whether someone looks back on their early caregiving role as having taught them something valuable rather than purely having cost them something. That perception was linked to lower depression and lower anxiety, and it was also associated with a more “nourishing” adult relationship style rather than a toxic one. In other words, two people can carry a similar childhood caregiving load and land in very different adult outcomes, depending largely on how they’ve since interpreted that experience.
This lines up with what’s been documented in related research on parentification and adult attachment: caregiving roles taken on too early aren’t automatically destructive, but they carry real risk when a child had no support in processing what they were doing, and no eventual reframe of the experience as anything other than loss. The Gavcar and Gavcar study’s authors point to relational boundaries and emotional support as the levers worth intervening on, not the childhood history itself, since that can’t be changed after the fact.
The distinction between the two forms of parentification carries practical weight too. A child who managed a parent’s emotional crises, listening to adult problems, providing comfort a parent should have been providing, absorbed a different kind of pressure than a child who effectively co-parented younger siblings, handling meals, homework, or discipline a parent wasn’t available for. Both blur the normal boundary between child and adult, but they train different skills and different vulnerabilities. The study’s finding that only the parent-focused form showed a significant link to depression, while both forms linked to anxiety, hints that being emotionally responsible for a parent specifically carries a heavier long-term weight than managing a sibling’s day-to-day needs.
What this research ultimately complicates is the instinct to treat parentification as a fixed diagnosis, a wound that guarantees a particular adult outcome. The data suggests something more workable: the caregiving role a child took on matters less than the relationship habits it left behind, and those habits, unlike the childhood itself, are still something a person can actively reshape.
