Growing Up Too Fast

One psychologist calls it "false maturity." Sara Arnaud, PhD studied children caring for parents with multiple sclerosis - not quite the same, but it's also a neurodegenerative disease - and summed up the issues:

• You as a child caregiver face increased responsibilities in caring for yourself, your ill parent, and maybe your younger siblings.
• In doing so, you assume a comparatively independent, seemingly mature role at an age when you might not be able to achieve a genuine flexible maturity (which comes only with age and experience).
• Responding to these demands could be an effective way for you to deal with the realistic challenges of your life situation, gain your parents' approval, and relieve your feelings of anxiety and guilt.
• Another set of ingredients complicates matters. The agitation surrounding your family's situation adds to your need for attention and care. But instead of receiving a significant amount of your family's attention, as you did at one time, your ill parent has become the primary dependent. This requires you to suppress your desires to be taken care of long before you outgrow them.

Compared with other adolescents, those living with someone who has a chronic illness may show higher levels of:

• General anxiety
• Body or image concern
• Dysphoria (fancy word for sadness or depression)
• Hostility
• Relationship problems
• Dependency longings (wanting someone to take care of you)
• Precociousness (acting like an adult before your time). This starts with assuming too much responsibility too early; sometimes it's carried to the point where you lose emotional spontaneity because you're always trying to figure out what people need from you. You can become almost robotic in your maturity.
• In general, boys in these circumstances tend to exhibit more unhappiness and aggressive hostility, while girls gravitate toward obedience.

Arnaud also says feelings of unhappiness arise from several different places:

• Your pity and concern for your ill parent
• Seeing your well parent's occasional despair and depression
• Your own anxieties and guilt, and from the loss of having someone take care of you. This includes an awareness that you don't get many of the family outings and recreational pursuits your friends enjoy.

Why is this a problem? Hostile feelings could arise from your resentment toward your parents because of their increased demands on you - out of necessity - and because they have exposed you to such distressing conditions. These feelings may not be conscious or even logical, because everyone knows the situation is not anybody's fault. However, they can still evolve into negative emotions toward your ill parent, whose behavior is irritable and inconsistent.

Your relationship with your parents, especially the one diagnosed with dementia, tends to be wrapped in conflict. But it doesn't stop there. This trickles into your friendships. Your experience with your loved one's unpredictability, for instance, teaches you to remain extremely cautious with everyone. As a result, all relationships may lack trust and become laced with insecurity.

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