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“It is like a child putting on an adult’s coat.”
Part of an occasional series about phrases that this therapist finds himself repeating, often.
As a clinician in private practice, one of the phrases that I frequently hear myself saying is this: “It is like a child putting on an adult’s coat.” This phrase emerges with parents, but also with adults who grew up “parenting their parents”. These words are sometimes used with children or adolescents who have been put into adult roles WAY too early.
Concisely, I’m trying to describe the multitude of feelings that come with a child taking on an adult role.
There are times when the “adult” role feels exciting and an acknowledgment of how we have grown as a child into an emerging adult; but there are also times when the adult role or “coat” that we are trying to put on and wear is WAY too big for us, bulky, poorly fitting, yet we have to function in it anyway. And because we can all be pretty narcissistic as children, we begin to blame ourselves for not being able to “fill the coat” or the adult role that we have been given.
