Parentification, Ethnic Identity, and Psychological Health in Black and White American College Students: Implications of Family-of-Origin and Cultural Factors

INTRODUCTIONParentification, along with the related psychology of families, is a phenomenon whereby parental roles and responsibilities are abdicated by parents and carried out by children and adolescents. Typically these roles and responsibilities evidenced in the family of origin are considered developmentally inappropriate and excessive. This ubiquitous phenomenon is often seen in mental health patients and nonclinical populations, including college students (Castro, Jones, and Mirsalimi, 2004; East, 2010; Gilford and Reynolds, 2011; Hooper, 2007a; Hooper and Wallace, 2010; Jacobvitz and Bush, 1996; Kuperminc, Jurkovic, and Casey, 2009; McMahon and Luthar, 2007; Thomas et al., 2003). Since the introduction of the terms parentification, parentified child, and adult child into the mental health, developmental, and family psychology nomenclature (see Boszormenyi-Nagy and Spark, 1973; Karpel, 1976; Kerig, 2005; Minuchin, Montalvo, Guerney, Rosman, and Schumer, 1967), American families have changed (Antecol and Bedard, 2005; Gilford and Reynolds, 2011 ; Lowe, 2000). Society has also changed; specifically, most would agree that society has become racially and culturally diverse and racially and culturally pluralistic (Chao and Otsuki-Clutter, 2011 ; U.S. Census Bureau, 2008). Therefore, an updated and expanded view of parentification may be useful.Moreover, a significant distinction of the original, seminal research on parentification was the composition of research participants on which the original conclusions were based. More specifically, until the very recent past (East, 2010; Telzer and Fuligni, 2009), most studies have primarily consisted of White American participants, thereby limiting the generalizability of those findings. The few studies that were conducted with racially diverse study samples may have caused some researchers to misconstrue the outcomes, processes, and behaviors of racial minority patients and research participants (Kane and Erdman, 1998). For example, Kane and Erdman (1998) asserted, "Both Hispanic American and Anglo-American counselors could be tempted to judge the level of intimacy and/or autonomy demonstrated by an African American family as extreme, perhaps dysfunctional, when in fact it could be the norm for the family's culture" (p. 17).Thus, the findings that were originally put forward in the 1960s and 1970s may no longer hold true, or they may no longer be culturally relevant to current family systems and individual family members. For example, in some instances researchers and clinicians could have perpetuated erroneous interpretations related to parentification in racially diverse-primarily Black American-patients and research participants and in the families in which they were embedded (Anderson, 1999; Boyd-Franklin, 1989; Siskowski, 2006). Given the oft-reported problem involving misdiagnosis or underdiagnosis of mental health disorders among Black American patients (Ffooper, 2010; Satcher, 2001 ; Smcdley, Stith, and Nelson, 2002), a similar phenomenon may hold true for understanding the cultural implications of the parentification process in the context of Black American populations (Chao and Otsuki-Clutter, 2011; Harrison, Wilson, Pine, Chan, and Buriel, 1990). The phenomenon of parentification is complex; and unmeasured factors (e.g., poverty, interpersonal violence, lack of resources, educational and academic factors, single-parent households, normative culturally responsive coping methods) rather than race may attenuate or amplify the outcomes associated with parentification (Pinquart and Sorensen, 2005).The original research on which current conceptualizations about parentification are based should not be considered trivial or unimportant. On the contraiy, much of the seminal work and original hypotheses put forward 40 years ago (see Boszormenyi-Nagy and Spark, 1973; Minuchin et al., 1967) continue to hold true in studies consisting of White American research participants and some racial minority research participants. …