Parentification: Measurement, Process, and Outcome Research

Dr. Lisa M. Hooper's
Parentification Research

Parentification is often defined as a type of role reversal, boundary distortion, and inverted hierarchy between parents and other family members in which adolescents assume developmentally inappropriate levels of responsibility in the family that go unrecognized, unsupported, and unrewarded.

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The Empirical Study of Parentification


This website is devoted to the measurement and empirical study of parentification. Due to the numerous family contexts from which the abdication of adult- and parent-like roles to children and adolescents can emerge, the empirical study of parentification is critical.

In over a million U.S. households in 2000, young adults lived in households where parentification took place. Furthermore over 40,000 children between ages 15 and 17 maintained a household completely on their own—that is, without any parental or adult presence. Because of parentification’s ubiquity and the potentially pernicious outcomes, it is important that researchers continue to examine this complex, multi-dimensional, construct so that ecologically valid, culturally-tailored preventions and interventions can be developed and tested.

This website summarizes Dr. Hooper’s work over the past decade. Dr. Hooper, collaborators, and students have contributed to clarifying the family system in which parentification traditionally takes place, with a focus on understanding the cultural factors that may inform differential outcomes of parentification. Additionally, researchers and clinicians can learn about the  Parentification Inventory, an instrument, which captures the extent to which one has been parentified in his or her family-of-origin. Dr. Hooper plans to extend her work on parentification in the Latino and military communities.

We hope you find this site a useful resource and welcome any feedback you may have

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