Measuring Perspective-Taking and Interpersonal Affect in TAT Stories to Assess Parentification.

Parentification is a construct that describes a child or adolescent who has prematurely taken on family tasks and roles that are usually reserved for parents. Family therapists are often concerned about the effects of parentification on children's development, especially when it limits the child's maturation into autonomous functioning. This paper illustrates the use of two scoring systems for thematic apperceptive techniques (TATs) to estimate the degree of concern that assessment psychologists should consider expressing when evaluating cases of possible parentification. Feffer's Interpersonal Decentering measures the maturity of perspective-taking between story characters. If a child character is using more mature perspective-taking with a parent than a parent character is using toward a child, this finding suggests parentification. Thomas' Affective Scale measures the valence of interpersonal affect in story relationships, applied here to parent-child relationships. Stories showing parentification in the context of positive affect might be developmentally appropriate; parentification stories with the strongest negative affect should raise clinical concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]