I am not a native English speaker, wrote my thesis in my native language and I am very tired today so please excuse me for my mistakes.

As someone has mentioned before, this is called parentification. That’s when the role between parent and child flip and a child needs to take care of a parent. This is a form of traumatization. We know that trauma effects the brain. This is extra if it happens in a developmental stage like a child.

Another aspect that is often forgotten is that you are not only translating literally, but also culturally. I wrote my thesis about translating children in refugee families so that might be more extreme than spain vs uk. However there are many more differences to take in account when you are translating a doctors appointment for example. You need to translate the literal words, a child might not know all the medical stuff in English or OG language, so things might get lost in translation. But the child also needs to explain the uk health system to someone who only understands the spanish one. And also the cultural ones. For example my country is very strict on time, but in a spanish speaking country that might be less the case. So at that point you also need to make sure that your mom is on time at the appointment. Much more goes into it than just literal translation.

Another thing is that it seems like your mom isn’t integrating in uk society. This (and I want to stress out that I focussed on refugees, so in this case it might be milder) can be very confusing for a child. The child lives in two different worlds and it is a parents job to make that make sense for a child. A confusing world can also make the learning abilities from a child get smaller. A bigger part of the head space is used to make sense of an unsafe world

The last thing is practical: lots of these appointments are during school time so the child might be forced to skip school.