A few months ago, a friend and colleague brought up the word parentification in our weekly accountability meeting. “What’s that?” I asked.

(Keep scrolling for the video version of this post.)

When he explained what it is and how he experienced it as a child, I said, “That sounds like emotional incest and how my childhood was like, too.”

I’ll talk more about emotional incest later but in this post, I wanted to go into parentification. In a nutshell, it’s having been forced to be an adul...