Ishwari's reaction towards dev and saloni

Making a child the stand in for the spouse you lost, be it through divorce or death, is not unusual. It happens all the time. From a Family Systems perspective, this dynamic makes perfect sense. When one member of the system leaves, another one will step up and take its place. This is nature's way of maintaining a sense of balance. The scientific term for this phenomenon is "homeostasis."Additionally, nature hates a vacuum so when a space as large as a mother or father becomes vacant, something or someone will unconsciously and automatically want to fill it.

Those who are using their children to get their emotional needs met may believe that the new arrangement is a good one because they believe everyone benefits. They get their needs met and, as they see it, their children benefit because they get to feel useful and loved. The adults may not realize that there are many more negative impacts on children who are parentified than positive. 

Asking a child to play the role of an adult and it is a heavy burden for most children. In many cases, the troubles shared with children (who don't have the coping skills or life experience to know how to deal with them) leave the child feeling hopeless and helpless. Rather than augmenting a child's self-esteem, the constant feeling of futility can lead to lower self worth.

It's not only parents imposing this role on their children. Some children see what is needed (or at least what they think is needed) and offer to fill the spot. For every story I hear about a parent leaning too heavily on a child, I hear about a child who wants to be seen as "the man of the house now," or "dad's caretaker."

How the Surrogate Spouse Role Impacts a Child's Adult Relationships

This level of parent-child enmeshment fosters unhealthy codependence. The child who was trained so well to anticipate the needs of its parent will, without awareness or intervention, carry this trait on into his or her adult relationships.A daughter who later becomes a wife may suppress her own needs and not speak her own truth in her marriage. This in turn leads her into toxic rages or might cause her to act out by having an affair. Because she was trained not to ask for what she needed, it never occurred to her to do so. Meanwhile, she merely had to state what she needed and her husband would have responded positively.A son may grow up with a pattern of setting himself up to be a doormat by doting on his partner who is only to happy to have a one-sided relationship.Those with learned helpessness may become chronic underearners and those with an over inflated need to please may unconsciously turn into workaholics.