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"After a tough first year at an Ivy League university, 20-year-old Sarah was looking forward to relaxing over the summer. Unfortunately, her parents made that impossible.\n\n\"My dad's an alcoholic, and my mom's addicted to dating alcoholics,\" the Stanford, California, native says. \"They're divorced, and my dad is broke, so I had to help him get government assistance. Meanwhile, I needed to deal with my mom's drama about the terrible guys she chooses.\" Between running her mom's dating life and managing her dad's finances, Sarah was exhausted by summer's end\u2014and relieved to return to college thousands of miles away. \"I can't do much from here, so I can't feel guilty,\" she says.\n\nThese days countless teens like Sarah, who are coping with irresponsible parents, are forced to step in as the mature party. \"When parents refuse to act like adults, it creates a power vacuum. Someone has to fill that space, and most often it's the teen son or daughter,\" explains Karol Ward, a licensed psychotherapist and author of Worried Sick (Berkley).\n\nWhile Sarah had to take care of her mom and dad, nineteen-year-old Nicole, in Buffalo, found herself playing guardian to her younger sister when their mother was MIA. \"When I was sixteen, my fourteen-year-old sister Jen and I wouldn't see my mom for three or four days at a time,\" she says. \"I had to drive Jen to school and feed her because Mom wasn't around.\" The stress of the situation led to heated arguments that eventually destroyed Nicole's relationship with her mother: Now they are completely cut off from each other. \"I'd complain about taking care of my sister, and my mom would say it was my responsibility because she was gone all the time working,\" Nicole says. \"But her business wasn't open all hours of the night\u2014she was with her boyfriend!\"\n\nSome of today's adults want to be young and free more than they want to be parents, explains Susan Shapiro Barash, author of You're Grounded Forever . . . But First Let's Go Shopping (St. Martin's Press). \"It's like this group enters a second adolescence, and their kids have to hang on for the ride,\" she says. The cultural shift is clearly evidenced in current popular media. While many TV series once portrayed mostly rock-solid mothers and fathers, today's shows\u2014like Gossip Girl, The Real Housewives franchises, and Desperate Housewives\u2014are more likely to reflect immature parents.\n\nThe loss of a parental authority figure robs teens of the lightness of adolescence. Vanessa, 20, of Spokane, says that her dad\u2014who has been divorced from her mom since Vanessa was in elementary school\u2014was comfortable being her buddy but couldn't be depended on when the chips were down. \"Three years ago I was in the hospital having a tumor removed,\" the Washington native says. \"It was expensive, and when we asked my dad for financial support, he told my mom he was done with me.\"\n\nTeens like Vanessa are compelled to give up the traditional luxury of dependency on their parents and may need to grow up fast emotionally, says Nina Brown, Ed.D., author of Children of the Self-Absorbed (New Harbinger). However, \"to a certain extent, teens cannot be fully independent,\" she says. And because limiting parental contact is not feasible, children of self-centered parents often try to take responsibility for their parents' problems and feelings. But teens have to recognize that they're not to blame for the actions of their guardian, Brown adds. Though Vanessa's dad has refused to have any contact with her for more than two years now, she's learned not to take his behavior personally. \"Compared with what he dealt with, growing up in an abusive home, I guess he's father of the year,\" she says.\n\nIt's hard to say why adults don't always act like grown-ups. \"Sometimes good parents simply make mistakes,\" Ward says. For these moms and dads, a conversation or a carefully worded letter might be enough to do the trick. But others never got the parenting they needed and, Brown explains, \"failed to make strides past adolescence\" toward a healthy, mature level of empathy. For them, she adds, \"everything centers around what they want,\" and selfish conduct is an inherent part of their pattern of behaviors and attitudes. In these cases, no amount of talking will change them, so instead of trying to improve communication, Brown suggests self-protection. \"If your parent is hurting you with his or her behavior and won't change, you have no choice but to set up emotional barriers to protect yourself.\"\n\nWard also advises seeking support from a responsible adult, like a counselor, teacher, minister, or a friend's parent. That's what Sarah did. \"I started attending a teen Bible study, and Kelly, the lady who led it, became like a mother to me,\" she says. \"My mom was jealous, but I think Kelly saved my life.\"\n\n\"Teens who are forced to act like adults often have a hard time reaching out for help because they are so adult,\" Ward says. \"But they need someone who can remind them that it's OK to set boundaries.\" Elle,* nineteen, from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, struggled with defining healthy roles within her family, especially during her parents' nasty divorce. But she says that by reaching out honestly to her mother, she was able to change the situation\u2014while also accepting that her dad may never become the type of father figure she needs him to be. \"My dad's always been more concerned about what he wants, so I don't think he understands what he's done to us,\" she says soberly. \"I doubt anything I could say would even faze him.\"\n\n\"Sometimes my mom will slip up too,\" she continues. \"But now that she knows how I feel, she'll usually catch herself, or she'll see the look on my face . . . and just stop.\" \u2014GINGER RUE\n\n*Name has been changed."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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