"Of the many other disturbed patters of parenting that can be traced, in part at least, to childhood experience, there is one that happens also to be well documented in the studies of abusing mother (e.g. Morris and Gould 1963; Steele and Pollock 1968; Green, Gaines, and Sandgrun 1974; DeLozier 1982). This is their tendency to expect and demand care and attention from their own children, in other words to invert the relationship. During interview they regularly describe how, as children, they too had been made to feel responsible for looking after their parents instead of the parents caring for them.
Most, perhaps all, parents who expect their children to care for them have experienced very inadequate parenting themselves. Unfortunately, all too often, they then create major psychological problems for their children. Elsewhere (Bowlby 1973, 1980) I have argued that an inverted parent-child relationship of this kind lies behind a significant proportion of cases of school refusal (school phobia) and agoraphobia, and also probably of depression."
- John Bowlby, A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory (Routledge, 1988. p. 18)
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