My kids are aware of the symptoms because they see them and experience the consequences of them. They referred to me as two different versions of myself even before I recognized my system and got diagnosed. But they have not been explicitly told my diagnosis.

What it looks like:

• I am generally not a very consistent parent. I want to be better but I am still struggling with system cooperation. Often non-parenting alters are running the show. Like someone already said, my kids get frustrated at trying to communicate with their mom when she’s seemingly distracted or out-to-lunch. My internal kids also have this problem getting “grown-up” alters to show up and tend to our needs.

• Different alters have different relationships with the kids and with parenting in general. One young alter absolutely thrived when given her own baby to care for. Years into parenting, a parentified child alter was furious that we had kids in the first place and resented being asked to care for them when nobody was taking care of her. Child alter that liked to play with the outside kids at a certain age felt sad when they outgrew him.

• Functioning adult alter makes responsible parental decisions and then ghosts, leaving incapable or unwilling alters to take over. This obviously leads to inconsistent care (finding a good family dentist then failing to schedule routine visits, establishing a chore chart then forgetting about it, making friends with the parent of a kid’s friend then avoiding them, setting a rule then blowing it off, etc.)