“Parentification” is a new pop-psychology term supposed to convey the trauma parents impose on their older children who are given family responsibilities.

“Parentified” children supposedly carry all sorts of pathologies into adulthood, such as becoming “people-pleasers” and perfectionists.

For decades, psychiatrists have noted that in dysfunctional families — say, an absent father and an alcoholic or withdrawn mother — the oldest child bears some scars from the lack of a real parent and the need to prematurely take on serious duties.

But these days, when professionals chase social contagions introduced by minor TikTok influencers and spread via algorithm, it’s now considered abusive to ask your 10-year-old to change a diaper, your 12-year-old to babysit, or your 14-year-old to fetch mom a cup of coffee.

Of course this discourse gets gendered, and “Eldest Daughter Syndrome” becomes new evidence of the patriarchy’s harm. (See the New York Times piece “Why Your Big Sister Resents You.”)

Some in the media have started to express some skepticism of this notion that looking after other people is bad for personal development. “Do ‘Parentified Children’ Really Have It So Bad?” asked a headline in New York magazine’s “The Cut” website.

Simply asking this question seemed to trigger journalists on X.

“What is going on???” asked one incredulous liberal writer.

She was reacting simultaneously to a headline in the Atlantic asking, “Why Do So Many Parents Think Kids Need Their Own Bedroom?” Her followers were just as angry and shocked.

“Trying to normalize increasingly dystopian living conditions, as they do,” was one typical reply.

“It’s more TradWife nonsense,” another reader commented, mocking the notion that “You can survive on one income if you just bought a smaller house for more kids.”

That each child needs his or her own bedroom is weirdly embedded in America’s thinking.

For instance, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that raising a child costs $250,000 or more, that estimate included “the average cost of an additional bedroom.” A family with two children was assumed to need one more bedroom than a family with one child.

The assumptions here — that older children shouldn’t have to care for younger children and that sharing a bedroom is harmful — have a theme: We shouldn’t require people to take care of or learn to live with others. Any unchosen obligation is oppression.

These are the emerging dogmas of a new secular religion that elevates individual autonomy to the highest level. Is it any wonder people are getting married less and having fewer children if they’ve been led to believe that it’s traumatic if someone expects you to care for another?

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In such a sad, lonely world, the parentified child has it pretty well, actually.

As New York writer Rachel Connolly aptly put it, “if a person reaches adulthood and their biggest issue is that they’re a supportive friend, with a tendency to push themselves to always go above and beyond, I would say, in the grand scheme of things, that this person is doing pretty well.”