I was part of a verrry large family and wasn’t parentified, though it absolutely does happen.

I mean I didn’t want to play with mom, I wanted to run around in the cornfield with my brothers and play capture the flag or something. And having a chore schedule isn’t parentification.

The closest would be the oldest watching the youngers while mom & dad go on a date, but I mean we just put a movie on and there are pretty clear expectations around everything. No different than hiring a local teenager (who you know through a local family) to do brief childcare.

Parentification in my mind has to cross a line where one kid is kind of forced to always have to be responsible for raising the other kid. Like if your parents are really deadbeat and one kid actually takes responsibility.

A lot of people don't really get big families, which makes sense. You just have a different definition of “normal” for certain things because big families just HAVE to operate differently in a lot of ways, and a lot of norms we expect are products of living a specific way in your formative years. That’s just different, not necessarily bad