Many parents nonchalantly refer to their children, whether babies or adults, as their “best friend”. It can be an offhanded comment about an infant daughter or a declaration to the room at your child’s 30th birthday party.

It’s a phrase that, generally, comes from a good place. But if a parent actually treats their child as a best friend, such as by sharing personal stories or swapping gossip, it can become a problem.

“There is absolutely nothing wrong with you wanting to spend time with your child and [if] you find that you have fun hanging out with them, that is great, but when you are referring to your child as your best friend, that is a blurring of boundaries,” said Holly Humphreys, a licensed professional counsellor with Thriveworks in Roanoke, Virginia.

This can cause the relationship dynamics to move from parent-child to parent-friend or parent-counsellor, she noted.

“So, you’re actually putting your child into a different category when you say that they’re your best friend, and then that can lead into oversharing of personal details that your child should not know about,” Humphreys noted.

It can also cause problems for both the kid and the parent in other realms, too. Here’s what therapists want you to know:

It’s always a no-no for parents to refer to and treat a young child as their best friend, therapists say. And that’s true whether you have kids in elementary school, middle school, high school or college.

The idea that your young child is “your best friend” may come from a loving place, “but even with good intentions, it points to a deeper issue,” said Carrie Howard, a licensed clinical social worker and anxiety coach.

“Kids need their parents to be their parents. They need [their parents] to be the safe, guiding adults in their lives, not their peers. And when those lines get blurred, it makes it harder to set boundaries and actually parent well,” Howard explained.

If you treat your kid like your best friend, they may not want to listen to you when you do set rules. Or, they may feel pressure to care for you, either emotionally, practically or both. This role-reversal is known as parentification, Howard explained.

“A child can’t be their parent’s best friend without feeling some unspoken pressure to meet the needs of the parent that just aren’t theirs to meet,” said Howard.

Kyndal Coote, a psychotherapist, said when she hears a parent refer to their young child as their best friend, her first concern is the emotional burden that’s falling on the child.

“Children aren’t developmentally equipped to be a parent’s primary emotional support system. They don’t have the tools to do that, their brain is not even developed,” Coote said.

If a child is a parent’s primary emotional support system, the child may feel responsible for managing a parent’s feelings, she noted. “And that is a very, very heavy burden for someone who should just be focused on learning how to manage their own development,” added Coote.

As children get older, this kind of emotional burden can cause the child to feel insecure in their decision-making and lead to guilt when prioritising other relationships, such as romantic partnerships, Coote said.

“When we rely too heavily on our children in adolescence or in childhood, that relationship is just going to continue to be enmeshed as the child grows into an adult child,” said Meredith Van Ness, a psychotherapist and the owner of Meredith Van Ness Therapy.

(Enmeshment is a dysfunctional relationship pattern in which someone lacks boundaries and autonomy in a family.)

With adult children, this is a much more nuanced issue and likely depends on the relationship and the family, Van Ness said.

Treating your adult child as your best friend isn’t as damaging as treating a young child that way, because adult children can understand grown-up issues, but it can still be problematic and is not advisable.

“With adult kids, the dynamic is a bit different. Sometimes these relationships can feel very close and even look like a friendship in some ways – you might talk on the phone every day or spend a lot of time together, and that can be really wonderful, but I caution parents not to mistake that closeness for a peer-to-peer best friend relationship,” Howard said.

When your child becomes an adult, they’ll start to have their own relationship woes and other grown-up problems. “And they should still be able to come to you as their parent,” Humphreys said.

More, the parent-child history doesn’t just disappear when a child grows up, which can lead to an imbalance in the so-called “best friendship,” Howard said.

“Think of it this way, in my role as a therapist, ethically, I can’t be friends with my clients when they discharge from treatment, even though we’re both consenting adults, and there’s an important reason for this. It’s really hard to have a truly mutual, healthy, give-and-take relationship when there’s been a significant power differential in the past, like with therapist [and] client or parent and child,“
Howard explained.

Former roles in a relationship leave an imprint, Howard added. “It’s hard to erase that history of who had more power, influence or responsibility in the relationship,” Howard noted.

This can then make the relationship vulnerable to bad boundaries and blurred lines, Howard noted.

Finance adds another power dynamic to this relationship, Van Ness added.

Parents often pay the dinner bill for their grown-up children or give them money for the grandkids. This isn’t so common in friendships.

There can certainly be an aspect of friendship within a parent-child relationship, but you have to understand when that goes too far, Howard said.

“We want to maintain boundaries with our kids … these are long-standing relationships, so we don’t want to infringe on those boundaries by burdening [our kids] with our emotions that we really need to rely on someone else for,” Van Ness said.

If a child, no matter the age, has to become the emotional caretaker of the parent, it’s a red flag that the parent-child friendship has crossed a line, said Van Ness.

“Unfortunately, that happens with young children when parents get divorced,” said Van Ness.

This may look like one divorced parent trying to get a child to “side with them” instead of the other parent, Van Ness said.

Oversharing personal details that your child shouldn’t know is another sign that the relationship isn’t healthy, Humphreys said.

“You should not be going to your child to discuss marital difficulties, problems with other people, that sort of thing,” Humphreys added.

“If you find yourself doing that, then that’s a red flag that you need to have more peer-to-peer relationships,” said Humphreys.

Instead of reaching out to your child about these things, you should aim to talk to your significant other, a friend, another parent, or a sibling, Humphreys noted.

“You should not be relying on your child to help you get through situations. That puts a lot of pressure on a child, and also, if you are going to them when you’re having marital issues or relationship issues, that puts them in the middle a lot of times with the other parent or the other significant person in your life,” Humphreys said.

If you find yourself getting jealous of your child’s friendships or romantic relationships because you feel threatened by the bond, that’s also a bad sign, Coote said. You should want your child to have other happy and healthy relationships.

If you think you’ve been leaning on your parent or child a little too hard and treating them as that “best friend” role, it’s OK. In most cases, it comes from a place of love.

“This is everybody’s first human experience, so the first thing I tell parents is, it’s not your fault that you weren’t taught healthy relationship skills and you didn’t have the tools to develop that — most of us didn’t get an education on managing your emotions and [emotional] intelligence and relational intelligence and that sort of thing — but, even if you didn’t get that education and you didn’t have that healthy example, it’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility to do something about it and develop those skills as adults so you don’t unintentionally harm your kids,” said Coote.

The first step in breaking this pattern is developing your own support system, Coote added.

“Do you have healthy adult friendships? Are you good at managing your own emotions independently? Do you know how to regulate your emotions? Can you sit with difficult emotions?” Coote asked.

“You can have warm, loving relationships while still maintaining that role as their parent. It’s almost like mentorship rather than friendship. You’re not their equal, you’ve been on the planet much longer than them, so you really shouldn’t even developmentally feel like they’re equal,” Coote said.

Whether your child is six, 16 or 36, the parent’s job is to “guide them toward independence, not keep them close to meet your emotional needs,” Coote noted.

“Our goal as a parent is to raise our kids so that they can be independent,” Van Ness said.

“We really need to know that our parents are going to be OK without us and that our kids are going to be OK without being in their lives so fully,” said Van Ness.

Leaning on your child (or your parent) as your best friend only puts unfair pressure on them and takes away from all the great aspects that can exist in a parent-child relationship.