Hey, Desirving listeners. Today we have a special guest with us, Maggie Nick, licensed clinical social worker who has written a book called Good Kids, and it is about parentified children, as far as I can tell. And I'm going to get into it with Maggie to find out if that's correct. I will often talk about these sorts of kids as children and as adults. You might hear me on

reaction videos or something, seeing a 10-year-old kid that seemingly has some red flags of being

parentified. So words that will be thrown around is like, oh, they're an old soul, or they're so

mature for their age, or they're such a good kid, these kinds of things. Now, you know, sometimes

kids are old souls. Sometimes sometimes kids are just a little bit more mature. Sometimes they are good

kids. You know, there are good kids in the world. But it's a red flag, particularly if around them

is not the authority and the safety to be a kid that we would hope that children would have.

So a really common scenario is you have a single parent who is struggling and is turning to their child for support emotionally and sometimes for practical help even, like with the younger kids or with even earning money to pay the bills.

Not that that isn't okay, so to speak, but part of the profile.

And so the child learns that they can't be a kid and they have to sacrifice

their childhood for the betterment of the system so that the family system can survive.

They become a companion to their parent. They become like a parent to their parents sometimes

or a parent to their younger

siblings. And it can really, really damage children, but they sneak under the radar because

they don't have behavioral problems. They do well in school. They are often really anxious. They're

very conscientious, maybe too conscientious. So Maggie has written a book about how this happens and also how to recover as

adults. So welcome to the podcast, Maggie. Thank you. What a beautiful intro. Thanks for getting it.

So your book is called Good Kids, Why You Suffered in Silence and How to Break the Cycle by Maggie, Nick,

Likes his Clinical Social Worker. So what led you to write about this

topic? Oh boy. This is my story. First of all, I grew up as a raging good kid and really wore it

like a gold star, right? I was an old soul, you know? I was a delight to having class. I would go

over to my friend's houses and their parents would be like,

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