The Emotional Labour of Being the “Understanding” Daughter or Son

At a family dinner, a father and his older son start arguing about money. Their voices get louder. The mother turns to her daughter and says in a quiet tone, “Go and talk to your father. He listens to you.” The daughter sets down her fork. Follows her father into the next room. No one asks how she feels about being the one sent in. In some families, one child becomes the one who stays calm, who sees both sides, who tries to fix things. It can look like maturity. Psychologists ask a different question: what does it really cost? 

The Unpaid Work Nobody Lists 

The term emotion work was introduced by Hochschild (1979), referring to the effort that people make to align their emotions with societal demands. The expectations in this regard are known as feeling rules. Emotion work in private life is distinct from emotional labour that takes place when someone is working for pay. This concept was further elaborated in The Managed Heart (Hochschild, 1983). Technically, an individual does emotion work within the family setting, even though most individuals refer to it as emotional labor. 

So where does the understanding child fit? Think of a family as having its own feeling rules: stay calm, don’t make it worse, be the one who listens. A child who follows them is working on their own reactions so the family can carry on, and often tries to settle other people’s feelings too. It happens at home, nobody pays for it, and it is rarely thanked. That is the kind of effort Hochschild’s term was meant to name. Applying her idea to children is my interpretation, not something she tested. 

This work is not shared evenly. Research on households suggests that women do a disproportionate share of emotion work and that it often goes unacknowledged (Erickson, 2005). The same may happen between generations. When a child becomes the family’s calming presence, the effort may rarely be counted as effort. 

Read More: The Psychology Behind Why Eldest Children Are Given More Responsibility

When Understanding Becomes a Role

The term ‘parentification’ is often used by those who research children in this situation to describe a child assuming a role which is normally an adult’s. According to Jurkovic (1997), there is a difference between instrumental parentification, for example, when the child is cooking or looking after the siblings, and emotional parentification, in which the child becomes a confidant, mediator, or comforter to their parent. 

Part of the problem is that the role can ask more than a child’s age allows. Gavcar and Gavcar (2026) describe how parents who are dealing with illness, money worries, or other limits may start to lean on a child. The child then takes on a role beyond what they are ready for. The authors note that responsibilities like this, when they last, have been linked to more depression and anxiety in later years, and to more stress and lower self-esteem. It is further stated that if parents give age-appropriate tasks to children and thank them for completing every task appropriately, they can cope with that role more easily. However, it seems that a child who never receives any assignments or gratitude for doing something will be unable to fulfill his duties. 

The two ideas overlap, though not every child becomes parentified. The concern is probably strongest when the role is heavy, never-ending, and not shared with others. A meta-analysis of studies looked at adults who reflected on their childhoods. It found that people who said they were parentified as children were more likely to show psychological problems as adults (Hooper et al., 2011). These results are based on memory, so they show a connection but not proof of cause. 

Emotional parentification often involves family conflict. Peris et al. (2008) studied 83 couples and their adolescent children. They defined it as a child’s sense of being expected to meet a parent’s need for support or companionship. It was linked to marital conflict, to the child feeling threatened, to less warmth in the parent-child relationship, and to the child’s tendency to step into the parents’ arguments. 

How common this is can be seen in a national survey of Polish adolescents. 35.9% adolescents reported high emotional parentification toward their parents, while only 7.2% reported high instrumental parentification, such as completing chores or providing financial support (Borchet et al., 2022). The results showed that girls reported higher levels of emotional parentification while boys reported higher levels of instrumental parentification; however, the majority of the differences were small, and this study could not prove causation. 

Read More: Finding Balance: Managing Responsibilities After Parentification

The Cost of Staying Calm: What the Research Shows 

A child who keeps the peace may often have to keep something else quiet: their own feelings. Gross and John (2003) studied what happens when people habitually hold back their emotional expression, which they called suppression. In five studies, people who relied on suppression experienced and expressed less positive emotion, yet experienced more negative emotion. They also functioned less well in relationships and reported lower well-being. Those studies did not look at family roles, but they suggest what suppressed needs can do. 

A child who keeps the peace also learns, again and again, to check what everyone else needs before their own. Repeated often enough, that can become a habit of tuning in closely to other people’s moods and paying little attention to one’s own. People-pleasing and codependency are two ways such a habit might show up. Neither is a certain result. In Gavcar and Gavcar’s (2026) data, heavy caring for parents was linked to both toxic and nourishing ways of relating, which suggests the path can go more than one way. This is explained further below. 

People-pleasing is not a formal research term, but a related idea has been studied. In a study involving young adults aged 18 to 25 in Türkiye, childhood experiences of parentification have been found to be correlated with codependency, which involves being overly attentive to others’ needs while neglecting one’s own freedom (Ünver et al., 2024). An individual who becomes accustomed to prioritizing others’ emotions might develop this behavior in the contexts of friendships, work relationships, and intimate relationships. 

Gavcar and Gavcar (2026) surveyed 448 university students in Türkiye about their childhood caregiving roles. Students who expressed greater concern for their parents also expressed slightly higher levels of anxiety and depression. The correlations were weak (r =.18 for anxiety and r =.09 for depression). Relationship style seemed to explain part of the link. The scale sorted ways of relating into two kinds: toxic styles, which reflect negative patterns in how people deal with others, and nourishing styles, which reflect positive ones. Toxic styles accounted for part of the connection to both depression and anxiety. Nourishing styles played a smaller, opposite role for depression only. It didn’t direct everybody to the same destination since both ways were linked to heavy parental care. 

Students stated their anxiety and depression at lower levels when they saw benefits in their caregiving roles. Furthermore, they scored higher in nurturing types of interactions. Why might the same role feel so different? Gavcar and Gavcar (2026) suggest that it depends on how the child experiences it in relation to what they can handle. A role that feels meaningful and earns approval from parents may be carried as a strength. One that feels far too heavy for the child’s skills may bring anxious and low feelings. This is the authors’ reading, and their data cannot confirm it. However, because the study is cross-sectional, it cannot show cause. Being the understanding child may not be harmful in every case. The role may help some people and weigh heavily on others. 

When the Role Feels Heavy: Ways to Look After Yourself 

Not everyone who is the understanding one in their family needs to change anything. For some it is a role they value. For others it has become tiring, and the ideas below are for them. These suggestions draw on the research discussed above, but researchers have not yet tested their effectiveness in changing family roles. Gavcar and Gavcar (2026) suggest that work on relational boundaries and emotional support may help people with a heavy caregiving past, though this is also a suggestion, not a proven method. 

• Name the role. Notice when being “understanding” has become a job and not a choice.
• Recognise when it is too much. Feeling drained after every family conflict, dreading being called in, or feeling responsible for everyone’s mood can mean the role has grown too heavy.
• Set a limit you can keep. “I can listen for ten minutes” or “I can’t take this call tonight” is a boundary that does not mean walking away from the family. 
• Separate understanding from agreeing. Seeing someone’s side does not mean meeting every demand. 
• Say one need aloud. A small, specific request is easier than a large conversation, and suppression was linked to worse relationships. 
• Share the mediator role. Ask other relatives to take turns calming conflicts.
• Find outside support. A counsellor or trusted friend can help carry what the family role has placed on one person. 

Conclusion 

Being an understanding child is often praised and rarely examined. The research reviewed here suggests the role is real work. Holding back their own feelings can negatively affect people’s well-being and relationships. A recent study found only weak links between heavy caregiving and psychological distress, with outcomes varying according to how individuals experienced the role. The useful question for a person in this position may not be whether to stop understanding others, but whether anyone is understanding them too.

References +

• Borchet, J., Hooper, L. M., Tomek, S., Schneider, W. S., & Dębski, M. (2022). Parentification in Polish adolescents: A prevalence study. Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40653-021-00411-8 
• Erickson, R. J. (2005). Why emotion work matters: Sex, gender, and the division of household labor. Journal of Marriage and Family, 67(2), 337–351. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-2445.2005.00120.x 
• Gavcar, E. G., & Gavcar, E. (2026). When caring becomes a burden: Childhood parentification and its links to relationship styles, depression, and anxiety in young adults. BMC Psychology, 14, Article 332. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-04136-x 
• Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.348 
• Hochschild, A. R. (1979). Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure. American Journal of Sociology, 85(3), 551–575. https://doi.org/10.1086/227049 
• Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press. 
• Hooper, L. M., DeCoster, J., White, N., & Voltz, M. L. (2011). Characterizing the magnitude of the relation between self-reported childhood parentification and adult psychopathology: A meta-analysis. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 67(10), 1028–1043. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.20807 
• Jurkovic, G. J. (2014). Lost childhoods. In Routledge eBooks. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315825762
• Peris, T. S., Goeke-Morey, M. C., Cummings, E. M., & Emery, R. E. (2008). Marital conflict and support seeking by parents in adolescence: Empirical support for the parentification construct. Journal of Family Psychology, 22(4), 633–642. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0012792
• Ünver, B. (2024). The mediating role of Self-Differentiation in the relationship between parenting and co-dependency. Journal of Cognitive-Behavioral Psychotherapy and Research, 310–323. https://doi.org/10.14744/jcbpr.2024.15029