The Psychology of CODA: Parentification and the Difficult Work of Leaving

Parentification and the Child Who Carries the Family

Ruby's role as her family's interpreter is a form of what psychologists call parentification: the assumption by a child of responsibilities that would normally belong to parents or adults. It reverses the normal direction of care, so that the child carries the family rather than being carried by it. Research on parentification documents both its burdens and its complexities. The parentified child carries responsibilities beyond their years, often at the cost of their own childhood and their own needs. But parentification is also complex. It can produce genuine competencies and a genuine sense of being valued and needed, right alongside the cost. Ruby's situation has both. Her role has burdened her and subordinated her own needs, and it has also made her essential, valued, and important to the family she loves.

The Difficulty of Leaving

What the film captures with particular care is the specific difficulty that parentification creates when the parentified child must individuate, must pursue their own life, must leave the family that relies on them. Having carried the family and been essential to its functioning, the child faces a real obstacle in leaving, because their leaving threatens the family that has depended on them. Ruby's dream of pursuing music could remove the bridge her family has relied upon. This is not simply teenage restlessness; it is the genuine bind of individuating from a family that genuinely needs you, where stepping toward your own life feels like stepping away from people you love.

The Pull of Loyalty

Ruby's struggle is intensified by the pull of loyalty, the powerful sense that to pursue her own dream would be to abandon the family that needs her. This loyalty is genuine and admirable, a real devotion and a real sense of responsibility. But it pulls against her own emerging life. What makes Ruby's case so honest is that her family genuinely relies on her. This is not a story in which the loyalty is misplaced or the family's need is illusory. Her leaving really would create difficulty. The loyalty is therefore grounded in reality, which is exactly what makes it so hard. The pull is not a feeling to be brushed aside; it is a response to a true situation, the real reliance of a family her leaving would really affect.

Leaving Without Abandoning

The film's resolution does not ask Ruby to abandon her loyalty. It asks the family to grow. The Rossis begin to learn to navigate the hearing world without total reliance on Ruby, to develop other resources and capacities, to release her toward her own life while finding ways to function in her absence. This captures a substantive truth about the parentified child's dilemma. The resolution usually involves not the abandonment of loyalty but the family's development of capacities that reduce the total reliance that made the child's leaving so threatening in the first place. When the family becomes more able, the choice stops being all or nothing. Loyalty and individuation, which had been set against each other, can finally be reconciled.

The Music the Family Cannot Hear

The specific poignancy of Ruby's dream is that her deaf family cannot fully share it. Her music is a realm they cannot hear, a passion they cannot fully enter. The film's most powerful sequence places the hearing audience in the family's position: during Ruby's concert the sound cuts out, and we watch the performance in silence, as they do. We see Ruby singing and the audience responding, but the music itself stays beyond reach. It is a substantive evocation of how the family loves and supports a passion they cannot fully share. The father's gesture of placing his hands on Ruby's throat to feel the vibrations of her singing captures this love across difference, a way to participate in and connect with something his deafness forecloses. This is a model of a love that reaches across a gap, that supports and honors a passion it cannot fully enter.

Deaf Culture and the Film's Representation

The film's representation of the deaf family, played by deaf actors, is a substantive part of its achievement. It presents the family not as objects of pity or as defined by deficit, but as a family with its own rich life, culture, and full humanity. Deafness here is not a tragedy but a different way of being in the world, with its own richness. The casting of deaf actors and the film's authentic engagement with deaf experience allow it to depict that experience from within rather than as imagined by the hearing. The film also engages Ruby's particular position between worlds: belonging fully to neither the deaf world of her family nor the hearing world she bridges, navigating a gap she also inhabits. That position between worlds is a substantive feature of the CODA experience, the specific place the hearing child of deaf adults occupies.

Reflections for the Viewer

CODA works as a warm, crowd-pleasing drama and as a meditation on the burden carried by a child who serves as their family's bridge to the world. For viewers who have occupied the position of the parentified child, who carried responsibilities beyond their years, who served as their family's bridge or support, who subordinated their own needs to the family's reliance on them, the film offers recognition of a specific burden, and of the genuine value the role can also hold. The work of individuating from a family that relies on you, of pursuing your own life while honoring your loyalty, of finding a way to leave without abandoning, is real and difficult, and it is often supported by therapy that engages parentification and family dynamics. The film suggests that the way through is rarely the abandonment of loyalty. More often it is the family's growth, the development of capacities that reduce the reliance that had set loyalty and individuation in opposition. Many of the capacities that help a child grow toward their own life begin early, through teaching emotional regulation and building confidence in children. And for anyone who loves a person whose passion or path leads into a world they cannot fully share, the Rossis offer a model: a love that reaches across the gap, that supports and honors the dream it cannot fully enter.

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