I started my work in the counseling field way back in 1985 after I’d gotten clean from my heroin addiction. As was usual in those days, my first jobs were in drug and alcohol rehabs where the family roles I’m going to talk about today were discussed a lot. I’ve seen a ton of change in the psychology field since then, but what I’ve understood about the roles we create (or are created for us?) in our families has truly stood the test of time. There are four roles I’ll talk about today: the Hero, the Scapegoat, the Lost Child, and the Mascot. This isn’t about pigeon-holing you into some type. It’s about having another lens of understanding for why you do what you do (and why others do what they do). Today, I’ll teach you what each role is, the research (yes, we have some now), what it means for you in your relationships today, and what to do about it if you recognize yourself in one of them.
19-minute read
My book Stop Reacting, Start Connecting will be out in late September! Today’s topic was a request from my Substack community, The One Love Collective. I went back and forth about doing this topic because there’s not a lot of hard research, but…
The Four Roles
The four roles most people mean when they talk about these family roles are the Hero, the Scapegoat, the Lost Child, and the Mascot. Now, I’m going to give you some very broad strokes here, which are all based on my own experiences working in the field for so long, with some actual research thrown in. You will likely see yourself in more than one category or be firmly in a category but not fit every example. That’s all fine. I’ll come back to that later.
Since my own siblings and I fit very neatly in these categories in a lot of ways, I’ll also be doing some personal sharing for examples. So, let’s break them down.
The Hero is often called the golden child. This is the kid who does well in school, excels at a sport or with an instrument (or all of that). Maybe they learn another language, and they go on to become “successful” by the metrics of that society. Here in the US, that person would likely be a professional of some kind, a doctor or a lawyer. Maybe they’re a successful entrepreneur, own their own business, or have advanced something in their chosen field. You see them as CEOs and leaders in different areas. No matter what they choose, they’re the best at it. So, they could be a blue-collar bus driver, but they’re the best damn bus driver in that town. They often get married or have long-term partners and make money. Again, even if they don’t make a lot by society standards (that bus driver again), they’re “good” with money, save, and create stability for themselves.
They might seem arrogant, but that’s not always true. Often, they’re acting a certain way, trying to cover up this terrible feeling they have that someone is going to discover that they really don’t know what they’re doing. Imposter syndrome rides heavy here.
Their job is to give the family validation. Sure, I’m a screw-up, but you should see my brother, Robert. He’s amazing. (He’s the resident Hero in my own family of origin story).
The Scapegoat is the family black sheep. This is the sibling who’s been screwing up since day one. They got in trouble at school, and they’re always underachieving. If the principal of your middle school knew your name, you were likely a scapegoat. You hear things with a sigh, “Oh, she had so much potential.” Their job is to be the family Jesus Christ, because all the sins hang on them.
I’m going to tell you the story of my first swear word. I don’t remember it, but legend in my family has it that I’d asked for more cooked carrots at dinner when I was about five years old and, when I was told there were none left, I apparently said, “Oh shit.” Everyone at the table looked straight at my brother, Michael, our resident Scapegoat. I didn’t get in trouble, but he did. To be fair, it was him who taught it to me, but still. I learned a lot that day about how to get away with things.
Scapegoats often have different jobs over the years. Their holy grail (I say with love) is some union-type job where they can keep getting in trouble but can’t get fired. They’re often behind with money and dealing with debt or bad credit. But mostly, they just seem to have bad luck. If something negative happens, it always seems to happen to them. I’m not saying they’re not lovable, but they’ll often get on your last nerve.
The Lost Child is the one nobody’s looking at. They learn early not to make waves. They don’t ask for much, and the family often couldn’t tell you what this kid is into or who their friends are, because everybody else is too busy doing their own job to notice there’s another kid in the room. They’re emotionally sensitive and incredibly loyal, and they’re more comfortable in their own heads, or with one or two close people, then they’ll ever be in a crowd.
Their job is to need nothing. One less kid to worry about, one less thing on the pile, and everybody else gets to feel like at least somebody in this house is fine.
My parents would take three days off from all of us children every July Fourth. They’d drive up to the Catskills in upstate New York (yes, exactly like in that Dirty Dancing movie) and they’d leave my oldest sister (our resident lost child) in charge. She made sure I was fed, that I got a bath, that I went to bed nearly on time, and that we didn’t blow all the money my parents left on junk food. Then my parents would come home and my hero brother, Robert, was the one who got the credit.
And that’s the role, right there. Lost children often grow up into teachers, counselors, and nurses, which makes a certain amount of sense when you think about it, because they’ve had years of practice paying close attention to people and being the behind-the-scenes support or second in command.
Finally, there’s the Mascot who’s often referred to as the family comedian or the family cheerleader. The Mascot isn’t always great at finishing tasks (they never had to and would get by with a wink and a nod). They’re often charismatic and manipulative in ways you don’t always see right away. If you’ve ever been sold something and later walked out of the store thinking, “I didn’t need a large screen TV!” your salesperson was probably a Mascot. Obviously, they’re often seen in the arts and entertainment field. The limelight is no problem for this group.
Their job is to break the tension. When the room gets bad, the Mascot does something funny, everybody exhales, and nobody has to deal with whatever was about to happen. What gets missed about the Mascot is that everybody likes them and almost nobody takes them seriously, so the family will keep things from this kid to protect them, when in fact the Mascot usually knows far more about what’s going wrong at home than anyone gives them credit for. They just don’t have anywhere to put it, so they make a joke instead.
As you might have guessed if you’ve been following me for a while, I’m definitely the Mascot in my family of origin. However, there are a lot of years between me and the youngest of my older siblings, so I think that’s why I’ve taken on a lot of Hero qualities also. As I said earlier, you might fit neatly somewhere here, or you might not. This isn’t about typecasting. It’s about trying to understand your beliefs about yourself and why others might treat you in particular ways.
Where Do These Roles Come From?
These roles came out of the addiction world, which is when I first learned about them. Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse published a book in 1981 called Another Chance about families organized around a parent’s drinking, and she described the family as having a set of jobs that get handed out to whoever’s available. She named five, but one of them, the enabler, is usually the sober spouse of the person with the alcohol or drug problem, rather than one of the kids, which is how you get to these four. A year later, the now-famous Claudia Black published her own version and gave you the same four kids under different names, calling them the responsible child, the adjuster, the placater, and the acting-out child. Different vocabulary, identical jobs, so depending on what you’re reading, you might notice that the names change but the roles really don’t.
In 1991, Potter and Williams built the first solid instrument for measuring these roles, called the Children’s Roles Inventory, and they dropped the enabler on purpose because they were screening for what you did as a kid; the enabler is a grown-up’s job. When they went back and tested the structure again a few years later, the same four held up across three separate samples. So when I tell you there are four, the research is backing me up.
One more thing before we get into what the research says, because you might be thinking, “I don’t come from an alcoholic family so none of this applies to me.” Yes, these roles came out of studying families with a drinking problem, but when researchers compared families where a parent was alcohol dependent to families where nobody was, they found no real difference in how strongly people identified with the roles. What predicted the roles was dysfunction itself, whatever flavor your family happened to run. So, you didn’t need an addict in the house to have been handed one of these roles (which means being handed one of these jobs). You needed a family under enough strain that it needed somebody to do something.
What Does the Research Say About Each Role?
For a long time, most of this was really just clinical observation, which is a polite way of saying a very smart woman watched a lot of families and wrote down what she saw. That’s not nothing, but you know, mama likes her research. So, here’s what we’ve got, role by role.
Heroes do well, at least on paper. When you look at the research, they score higher on self-esteem than the scapegoats and the lost children, and they’re more satisfied with the people they can lean on when they need help. They also don’t show the higher rates of depression in adulthood that the other two do. The catch is that the Hero’s drive tends to get pointed at whatever their parents valued rather than at anything they picked for themselves.
Scapegoats have it hardest, and I want you to hear that clearly if this is you. They score lower on self-esteem, and they’re less satisfied with the people they can lean on. They also report more depression as adults. When you look at the research, it shows it’s a kid who kept getting blamed for things that were already wrong in that house, who figured out early that nothing they did well was going to count anyway, so why try? That kid ended up angry and pointing it outward with difficult (for others) behaviors while everybody else was busy looking fine.
Lost children look a lot like the scapegoats on the numbers, with lower self-esteem and less satisfaction with the people around them. They report more depression in adulthood too. Where they differ is what it looks like from the outside, because from the outside nothing is wrong, and that’s the whole problem. The research talks about loneliness and sadness that nobody noticed, trouble making close friends that follows them out of the house, and adults who end up with very little contact with the family they grew up in.
Mascots look like the heroes on the numbers, with higher self-esteem and more satisfaction with their people. They don’t show raised depression as adults either. The cost lands somewhere else. Because nobody ever took the Mascot seriously, they tend to have a hard time with emotional intimacy later on, and getting down to their own deeper feelings isn’t something they’ve had much practice at, so true closeness is where it shows up.
One more thing worth saying is that the Scapegoat and the Lost Child are the two roles most strongly tied to how dysfunctional the family was in the first place! In other words, you often don’t see these roles at all in healthy, functional families, while the Hero and the Mascot roles will show up in families that are doing fine, too.
A couple of things to know about all of this. The majority of the research is based on people looking back and remembering their own childhoods, which isn’t the most reliable thing in the world, and it can’t tell you whether the role caused the depression or whether being depressed changed how somebody remembers being a kid. The effects are also on the smaller side, in my humble opinion. So, take it as useful information, not as a verdict on your life.
Does Birth Order Matter?
Believe it or not, this whole model was built on birth order! The Hero is supposed to be the oldest because they can carry responsibility first, the Scapegoat is supposed to be the next one down because their accomplishments always get compared to the Hero’s, and the Mascot is supposed to be the baby because the family protects the baby.
But when somebody finally tested it, surveying adults who’d grown up around alcohol dependence, birth order showed no significant differences on any of the role scales. What did show up was gender, with the women scoring higher on Lost Child and the men scoring higher on Mascot. There’s also work here in the US suggesting that in African American families, the oldest daughter is more likely to land in the Hero role, which is tied to the caretaking older girls in those families are already expected to do.
My own house is a good example. My oldest sister was the Lost Child even though she was the oldest, and my oldest brother got the Hero job even though he came after her, because in my family in that decade, the boy was the one you bragged about. So, the role doesn’t get handed out by your birth order; it gets handed out by what your family needed and who was available to do it, which is why the age gaps matter, the number of kids matters, whether you were a girl mattered, and whether the job was already taken mattered most of all.
Does This Apply Outside the US?
I get listeners all over the world, so let me be straight with you about this one. These roles were developed in the United States, and most of the research on them was done here, including that work on African American families I just mentioned. One of the better recent studies about depression which I’ve been referring to all along, came out of a university in the UK. It found the same pattern, with the Scapegoat and the Lost Child being the roles tied to family dysfunction and to depression later on. Past that, there isn’t much. The people who’ve gone through this whole body of work say plainly that very little of it has looked at other cultures, and that families vary enough across cultures and across the ways families get put together that the model needs updating.
So, if you see yourself or your kids in any of these roles, use the information as informative, not as a prescription.
How Your Role Shows Up Now
You might have stopped being a kid (well, mostly), but that role followed you. It came with you into your romantic relationships, your friendships, your job, and the way you talk to yourself. Again, these are some very broad brush strokes, but I’m hoping some information will be helpful to you if you see yourself (again, or one of your kids) in any of these roles.
If you were the Hero, you likely take on more than you should and then resent it. At work, you’re the one everybody leans on, and you don’t say no. At home, you’re managing everybody’s feelings and calling it love. You’re also probably terrible at receiving, so when somebody tries to take care of you, you get weird about it and immediately want to do something for them. You’re keeping score in your relationships all the time.
If you were the Scapegoat, you walk into rooms braced for trouble. Somebody’s tone shifts and you’re already sure it’s about you. When there’s a problem, you assume you’re the reason before you’ve heard any of the details. Or maybe you went the other way and got loud about it, so you fight first and ask questions later, and then you get treated the same way you were treated at home. That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy you’ve maybe been running for years. Either way, you have a hard time believing anybody is on your side, including the people who are.
If you were the Lost Child, you probably don’t ask…anything. You’ve likely built your personality around being low-maintenance, having opinions you don’t say out loud, and you likely end up in relationships where you know everything about them and they know almost nothing about you. At work you do good, careful, invisible work and then watch somebody louder get the credit, and you tell yourself it’s fine. It isn’t fine, and the resentment is in there somewhere, usually pointed at yourself.
If you were the Mascot, you’re funny about serious things. Your partner tries to start a real conversation, you make a joke, everybody laughs, and the conversation is over, which was the point, because emotional intimacy isn’t comfortable for you and getting in touch with your own feelings has never been your thing.
At work, mascots usually do fine and often do well, because everybody likes having you in the room. You’re good with clients and good in a crisis where somebody has to keep things light. Where it costs you is that people don’t always read you as serious, so you can get passed over for the heavier work. Finishing things and handling conflict head-on are the two places you’ll struggle.
What to Do About It
You know my shtick is to give you action steps, so let’s make all this information useful.
The free download this week is a quick quiz I’m calling Which Role Are You Still Playing? It’s a self-assessment about your life right now (not about your childhood), so it helps you work out which role you’re in today. Take two minutes to do it, then come back and find your role below.
If You’re the Hero
- Watch for the automatic yes. Practice saying, “Let me get back to you on that,” which buys you the pause you need. Then go back to them and say no to the ones you should be saying no to, because ghosting people isn’t the answer here, of course, and doing too much and being resentful isn’t the answer either.
- Once this week, let somebody do something for you without evening the score. Make eye contact, put a hand on your chest, say thank you, sincerely. Let yourself truly receive something without giving anything back.
- Write down your top three values, then ask yourself whether they’re yours or whether they came from your parents, a coach, or somebody else who mattered to you growing up. If they’re the same, that doesn’t make them wrong it’s information to think about.
If You’re the Scapegoat
- When something goes wrong, before you respond, name the specific thing you did. Not what you added to the mood, and not how you could have handled it better. If you can’t name an action, it isn’t yours.
- If your family still puts you in this role, you need a boundary. Decide ahead of time what you’ll say, something as short as, “There are so many things I’m excited to talk about with you, and that’s not one of them,” then change the subject or leave. You don’t have to win the argument; you just have to stop showing up for it.
- When you decide somebody’s annoyed with you, stop and ask whether you have any actual evidence or whether you’re running on a memory. Most of the time it’s the memory.
If You’re the Lost Child
- Once a day, say what you want before you ask anybody else what they want. Where you’re eating, what’s for dinner, which movie. Don’t wait to hear their answer first.
- In your next meeting at work, give your idea first instead of waiting for everybody else to go. Don’t be the silent one in the room.
- Tell one person one true thing about yourself that they didn’t already know, and let it be uncomfortable. Being known is a skill, and you’re out of practice, not incapable.
If You’re the Mascot
- Set a timer three times a day. When it goes off, stop and name what you’re feeling right then. You’re not fixing anything, you’re just building the habit of identifying feelings past fine and great. In today’s Therapy-to-Go Bundle I have a full Feelings List to help you broaden your feelings vocabulary.
- Watch for the joke that turns up right when something real is starting. Let three seconds pass before you say the funny thing and see whether you still want to say it.
- When somebody asks how you’re doing and you feel the deflection coming, answer the question instead. One sentence, straight, no bit.
Wrap Up
So, should you pick one of these and call it your type? Yes, maybe and no. I’ll tell you what I’d like you to do with it. Claudia Black pointed out that in a family that’s working, everybody plays a bunch of roles and moves between them depending on what the day calls for. Somebody’s the responsible one on Tuesday, somebody else is the funny one at dinner, and next month they trade. It’s when a family comes under strain that the roles stop moving, and everyone gets stuck with one job.
So, the point isn’t figuring out which one you are; it’s noticing which one you’re still doing when nobody has asked you to. You got handed that job when you were a kid, and you got good at it because you had to. The family that needed it isn’t here today (even if it feels like they are), and you can be different if you choose. It’s all about creating a new self-image, a new way of talking to yourself (that internal dialogue again), and creating healthy boundaries with your family, friends, and everyone important in your life.
Therapy-to-Go Bundle
- Which Role Are You Still Playing?
- For the Hero: The Saying No Script Sheet
- For the Scapegoat: Sorting out the Blame
- For the Lost Child: Seven Days of Going First
- For the Mascot: The Three Times a Day Check-In
- Journaling Prompts
- The Feelings List
References
- Vernig, P. M. (2011). Family roles in homes with alcohol-dependent parents: An evidence-based review. Substance Use & Misuse, 46, 535-542.
- Wegscheider, S. (1981). Another Chance: Hope and Health for the Alcoholic Family. Science and Behavior Books. (Later editions published under Wegscheider-Cruse, S., 1989.)
- Black, C. (1982). It Will Never Happen to Me: Children of Alcoholics as Youngsters, Adolescents, Adults. M.A.C.
- Potter, A. E., & Williams, D. E. (1991). Development of a measure examining children’s roles in alcoholic families. Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 52, 70-77.
- Williams, D. E., & Potter, A. E. (1994). Factor structure and factorial replication of the Children’s Roles Inventory. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 54, 417-427.
- Alford, K. (1998). Family roles, alcoholism, and family dysfunction. Journal of Mental Health Counseling, 20, 250-260.
- Zagefka, H., Jones, J., Caglar, A., Girish, R., & Matos, C. (2021). Family roles, family dysfunction, and depressive symptoms. The Family Journal, 29(3), 346-353.
- Veronie, L., & Fruehstorfer, D. B. (2001). Gender, birth order and family role identification among adult children of alcoholics. Current Psychology, 20, 53-67.
- Brisbane, F. L. (1989). The family hero in Black alcoholism families. Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education, 34, 29-37.
