Investigating individuals' motivations to become counselling psychologists: The influence of early caretaking roles within the family.

This study examines the early family experiences of a sample of trainee counselling psychologists in order to gain insight into their career motivations. Specifically, it was hypothesized that counselling students would be more likely to report early occupation of caring roles within the family and less experience of appropriate bonding with their parents compared with students training to enter a non-counselling psychology profession. Participants completed scales to assess Parentification, Parental Bonding and Self-efficacy toward Caring. The responses of 64 students were analysed, 32 in each respective group. Results indicated that counselling psychology trainees reported significantly lower levels of care from their mothers but reported higher levels of self-efficacy toward caring. An investigation of the predictors of parentification indicated that a lack of care from fathers was associated with higher parentification scores for all participants. Care from mothers was shown to relate differently to parentification, depending on the gender of the participant, such that a lack of care from mothers was related to parentification for female participants, whereas greater care from mothers was related to parentification for male participants. Implications for counselling psychology training and practice are discussed in addition to future directions for parentification research.