to parentify

[Joel S. Berson]

At 4/15/2011 12:31 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>Not in OED.
>
>A child psychologist on CNN explains that a little boy "was parentified at
>an early age."

At birth?  Or about nine months earlier? :-)
Joel


>About 1,000 GB results.  Not the earliest:
>
>1975  Max Sugar _The Adolescent in Group and Family Therapy_ (N.Y.:
>Brunner-Mazel, 1975) 169 [GB: not verified]: Boszormenyi-Nagy (1972) has
>described how the therapist is often "parentified" by parents who, until
>then, tended to parentify their children.
>
>Sugar's sense seems to be "to regard or act toward as toward a parent."
>Today's exx. seems to mean "to be assigned a care-giving role like that of a
>parent."
>
>JL
>
>--
>"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org