10 Signs You Have 'Hurried Child Syndrome' And Grew Up Too Fast, According To Psychology
'Hurried child syndrome' is a trauma response when parents treat their children like adults from a very young age.
astarot | Shutterstock Did you ever meet a kid who sounded way older than they were? Chances are that child had something doctors call “Hurried Child Syndrome,” also known casually as growing up too fast. It’s a trait that people get as a trauma response when their parents treat them as adults at a very young age. If you’ve been parentified (forced to act as a primary caretaker for siblings or parents), had hyper-demanding parents or if you’ve had to fend for yourself, you might've been pushed to grow up too fast.
Here are the 10 signs you have Hurried Child Syndrome:
1. You were an overachiever in school
Did your parents send you to every G&T program imaginable? Were you on a myriad of sports teams, academic crews, and student bodies? Did you want a break from all the work, only for your parents to scoff at you?
Parents who push their kids to become hyper achievers don’t often leave enough time for them to just play and exist as kids. As a result, these kids typically get anxiety over schooling, worried that their performance isn’t enough for their picky parents. When they graduate from school (assuming they don’t burn out), they are often high-performing professionals who keep a perfectionistic streak.
2. You’re unusually serious
The child who doesn’t get time to play is usually the child who doesn’t smile much. They may seem “older than they appear” in both their attitude and activities. Some just seem to be stone-faced stoics.
When Hurried Children grow up, they tend to remain fairly serious. When other college students and young professionals go out to parties, they tend to be the ones awkwardly sipping a drink with bored expressions on their faces.
3. You have a hard time with emotional development
Hurried Children are not given the time to learn how to “human” the way others have. They may have short tempers, an inability to deeply connect with others, or the feeling that they always must rush to the next task.
If you were a Hurried Child who had very demanding parents, things like saying “no” become monumental tasks. Hurried Children who were parentified, on the other hand, may deal with feelings of unworthiness or difficulties explaining why they are upset.
4. You have an old soul
I don’t mean this in a “woo woo” way, but rather, the hard-to-explain vibe of a person who has seen too much too soon. If people somehow always expected more of you than others your age, chances are you’ve heard this dubious compliment more than once. If you regularly feel like an 80-year-old in a 20-year-old’s body, you probably were a Hurried Child.
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5. You have anxiety around failure
For many Hurried Children, failure is not an option. This sounds like a good thing until you realize that it may prevent them from ever trying to achieve their goals in the first place. This is because their parents pushed them so hard that they developed anxiety at a young age.
According to American Pediatric Nursing, Hurried Children also experience physical symptoms of anxiety. They may have difficulty sleeping, headaches, muscle spasms, and even ulcers because of their hurried lifestyles.
6. You have trouble relaxing
When people say that you need to relax more, do you just give them a puzzled look? Hurried Children never really got to understand what it means to truly, meaningfully relax. A Hurried Child (or Hurried Adult) might have a hard time sitting still for five minutes simply because they are not used to taking time for themselves. If you don’t understand how to relax healthily, chances are that you’re dealing with echoes of Hurried Child Syndrome.
7. You were forced to act as a parent to other people
Parentified children are children who are always “Hurried.” They never got to be kids. They had to act as the de facto babysitters for their siblings, cousins, or even adults around them. While others could play and be immature, you just didn’t get that liberty.
Rather, you had to make sure everyone around you wasn’t freaking out or putting themselves in danger. If you were the oldest child, this usually meant you had no free time because you were “babysitting” 24/7.
8. You struggle with self-worth and boundaries
Hurried Child Syndrome often comes with a lot of self-esteem issues. Because people often treated you as a babysitting appliance, a burden, or a child only worthy of love if you excelled, you might have internalized a lot of self-loathing.
If you had responsibilities foisted on you regularly, you might also be unaware of what is considered to be “normal” for a person to be expected to do. You might think it’s normal for everyone to dump their kids on you, but it’s not.
Because you grew up with your boundaries being trampled on, you may have a hard time saying no. It’s not just a fear of disappointing or displeasing others. You might be afraid of being punished for it.
9. You give others way too much leeway or none at all
When you are expected to act like you’re 30 when you’re 13 years old, you tend to view yourself as an exception to the rule. You end up knowing that you grew up a little hasty and that you had responsibilities others didn’t.
You just…don’t know how to react to others being immature. Many Hurried Children have zero tolerance for immature or irresponsible behavior, avoiding it at all costs. However, some will swing in the opposite direction, infantilizing everyone around them because it’s become second nature to do so.
10. You’ve contemplated going low-to-no contact with your family members
Shocker: many people who were parentified, over-scheduled, or neglected to the point of raising themselves are resentful. They have every right to feel that way because their parents robbed them of a childhood.
Unsurprisingly, the damage their parents dealt left a major mark. Sometimes, that culminates in the decision to stop talking to their family. Such is, quite unfortunately, life. Recent evidence shows that some parents and adult children dissolve their relationships and become estranged, a concept defined as either no contact at all or limited contact with poor relationship quality. In a web-based retrospective survey of 1,340 Americans, researchers estimated that of 10% of Americans identified themselves as estranged from a parent or child at the time of the survey.
Ossiana Tepfenhart is a writer whose work has been featured in Yahoo, BRIDES, Your Daily Dish, Newtheory Magazine, and others.