This Is How You Became The Family Scapegoat

You were not chosen because something was wrong with you.

I know that can be hard to believe if you were always seen as “the problem.” When an entire family agrees on a story about you for twenty or thirty years, you stop believing that there’s any possibility they are wrong. Many people in our Calling Home groups report that they have spent most of their adult lives trying to figure out what is wrong with them. They’re too sensitive. Too loud. Too much. Not enough.

Not every family has a scapegoat. Plenty of families have friction, favorites, and hard holidays without anyone being made into the problem. The scapegoat role shows up most in families with a lot of dysfunction, where the adults do not have a better way to handle their own stress. But there is some research and clinical evidence on why one person gets put in this role in these types of families. This article will help you understand what the scapegoat is, why dysfunctional families need one, and why you were chosen for that role.

What is a Family Scapegoat?

Scapegoating happens when the family places an outsized share of the blame for something on one person. Social psychologists define it as "attributing inordinate blame for a negative outcome to a target individual or group." In families, the pattern was first described in 1960 by two researchers, Vogel and Bell, who studied families with a child who had been labeled the problem. They found that when the parents had serious conflict with each other, neither one could safely engage with the other parent or get them to carry the stress. So the tension was placed on a child, and the child's problems became the center of the family. Everyone organized around what the child was doing wrong, how it was impacting the family, and potentially how to “fix” the child.

In families with a scapegoat, the family's condition matters more than the child.

The most consistent finding in this area is that the role represents what is happening in the family, not who the child is.

In two studies of adults describing the roles they held growing up, the more dysfunctional someone's family of origin was, the more likely they were to say they had been the scapegoat. A large study of Canadian families found that parents treated their children more unequally when money was tight or when the marriage was unhappy. Unequal treatment goes up when a family is stretched.

Another study followed 218 young children and their families over the course of a year, from kindergarten into first grade. The researchers were looking at something family therapists call “detouring,” which is when parents deal with the tension between them by uniting against a child. Detouring predicted increases in the child's behavior problems, including hostility, and rejection by other kids a year later. It did not work the other way. The child's problems did not predict the parents ganging up on them later. The blaming came first and the problems followed.

If you’re the family scapegoat, you were probably told that you were difficult, so you got treated that way. The research suggests that, in many families, being treated that way is part of what makes a child look difficult.

Parents Need Someone Else to Blame

Children are an easy place to put a family's pain. A child is available, dependent, and has no way out. They cannot leave, they cannot get a second opinion, and the people telling them who they are are the same people they rely on for everything else.

There are two typical motives behind scapegoating:

1. Guilt: When something has gone wrong and you are partly responsible, blaming someone else lets you keep seeing yourself as a good person. A parent who cannot look at their own part in how the family is going has a strong reason to find the problem in a child.
2. Control: When life feels chaotic, having one clear cause makes it feel manageable again. A house where someone is drinking, or the money is unstable, or the marriage is falling apart is a house full of uncertainty. One person to point at turns that into a simple story. These experiments were not done with families, but the two motives fit what many people describe about their childhoods very closely.

The Bowen Center (you’ll remember Bowen from our differentiation topic last month) also describes a process where a parent's anxiety settles on one child in three steps:

1. the parent focuses on a child out of fear that something is wrong with the child
2. the parent interprets the child's behavior as confirming the fear
3. the parent treats the child as if something is really wrong with the child.

For many parents, focusing on a child is also a way to avoid focusing on each other. It is easier for two people in a struggling marriage to be worried about the same kid, or angry at the same kid, than to look at what is happening between them. The child gives the parents something to agree on or to divert their energy towards. This is also common when they feel that they cannot fix the other problem they’re dealing with and they are looking for something easier to control.

Why You Were Chosen

No study has followed families and tracked the moment one child gets picked as the scapegoat. However, there is research on which children parents tend to treat less favorably, and what patterns clinicians who work with scapegoated adults see over and over. These are some of the patterns that researchers and clinicians see in families with a scapegoat:

Personality and Temperament Fit: A 2025 analysis pooling data from 19,469 people found that parents slightly favored children who were more conscientious and more agreeable. The effects were small, but this showed that a child whose temperament is harder for a particular parent to manage is more likely to end up having issues with that parent. Harder for this parent is a description of the fit between two people. It is not a flaw in the child. The parent has to be really emotionally aware and attuned to make sure they do not get stuck in this negative relational pattern with their child. Some parents cannot do this and so they assume their frustration with the child is the child’s fault and that they should carry the blame. Many scapegoats are also sensitive, reactive, or both. In a family looking for a problem or for something else to focus on, that person’s reaction becomes the evidence that the child is the issue. This typically follows a pattern: you get provoked, you respond, and your response is what gets talked about for the next six months, not what was said to you.

Values and Preferences: In a study of older mothers and their adult children, children who shared their mother's values were about half as likely to be the one she was most disappointed in. The child who thinks differently, believes differently, or wants a different kind of life is more likely to be the one a parent feels let down by.

Family Design: Birth order is a weak predictor of which child gets favored. But, the makeup of the family and when you arrive in comparison to your siblings matters. Researchers who study siblings have found that brothers and sisters often define themselves by being different from each other. If the responsible, high-achieving spot was already filled when you showed up, then you might differentiate yourself from the “responsible” sibling in a different way. Family therapists who worked with families affected by addiction described the scapegoat as often the child who came after the family hero. You may have also been born into a year when the marriage was at its worst, or into a family that was really struggling at the time.

Disability, Illness, and Identity: A child who is sick, disabled, neurodivergent, struggling with their mental health, or gay or trans is also an easy target in a family looking for someone to blame. Sometimes that child really does make family life harder. There are appointments, costs, and strain. In a dysfunctional family, a situation nobody chose then gets turned into that child's fault. The stress of being blamed often makes the original struggle worse, and the family interprets that as more evidence that you are the problem.

Why You Played The Role

In adulthood, many scapegoats are unsure why they played this role for so long when it felt so unfair. Why did you accept all the unfair blame? Why did you apologize first? Why did you try to keep everyone calm? Why did you accept that you were the problem?

You did it because it helped keep your world together.

Children tend to blame themselves for their parents' conflict. Researchers who study kids in high-conflict homes have found that self-blame is one of the ways children internalize parental conflict. In one study, children's self-blame was part of the link between their parents' fighting and their own anxiety and sadness. Children in these homes also try to manage the conflict. They step in, change the subject, make a joke, get in trouble at the right moment, or become very good at reading the room. This is often the child’s attempt to protect their own sense of safety. For a kid, it is easier to believe "I am bad" than to believe "the people I depend on are not safe." If you are the problem, the adults can still be good, the world still makes sense, and there is something you can do about it. If the problem is them, there is nothing a child can do.

Because of this, blame is very useful for both the child and the parents. When you were the problem, the family had a focus. The parents had something to agree on and this made the conflict more predictable. You got something from that stability too, and taking the blame was a reasonable thing for a child to do with the options available. That does not mean you chose the role or that you are responsible for it. You were just doing what a kid does with this set of options.

Many adults who grew up this way keep doing this as adults. You apologize before you know what you are apologizing for. You take responsibility for the mood in the room. You assume that when something goes wrong at work or in your relationship, it was probably you. If you spent your childhood as the target, you learned to scan for blame, including blame that isn’t really there.

This Isn’t About Your Worth

The dysfunctional family picks a scapegoat because of stress, a parent's guilt or fear, the fit between a particular child and a particular parent, where that child landed in the family, and what they were already dealing with. None of those reasons are about what you were worth, how much you deserved to be loved, or how you should have been treated. Every child deserves to be treated fairly, including the sensitive one, the sick one, the loud one, and the one who is different.

This does not mean you never did anything wrong as a kid. Every kid does. It means your ordinary mistakes and you just being a child were seen through a particularly negative lens that you could never escape.

The Scapegoat and Your Family Today

Not every scapegoat goes no contact, and not every scapegoat wants to. Many people in our Calling Home groups are trying to stay connected to their families without stepping back into this role. If that is you, the goal is not to get your family to agree on a new story about you. Your family is often not confused about you or missing information. You are not one well-constructed explanation away from being understood. The story about you is doing a job for the family, and as long as the job needs doing, more evidence usually does not change it.

What you can change is whether you keep doing the job. Last month at Calling Home was about differentiation, which is the ability to stay connected to your family and still be your own person around them. Murray Bowen described this as having a solid self, the part of you that can say "This is who I am, what I believe, what I stand for, and what I will do or will not do." For a scapegoat, that is a long, deliberate process. Confidence here does not come from your family finally seeing you correctly. It comes from knowing what is true about you when they don't. You can expect some pushback when you stop playing the part. A family that has relied on one person to carry the blame usually notices when that person stops carrying that blame (we’ll cover this more in Week 4).

If You Stepped Away

Understanding why you were chosen still matters even if you cannot have a relationship with your family members right now. The role tends to follow people into their adult relationships and into the voice in their own head (more on this in week 3). Knowing that the role came from your family's needs and not from something wrong with you helps you stop carrying it into so many areas of your life.