Yeah, despite the pop factor, it was kind of helpful to me in the early days of therapy.
One of my issues is that I can be hyper-responsible and excruciatingly hard on myself. My therapist asked me to look at how hard I worked to parent my own children in a balanced and loving fashion (rather than just being scathingly critical), then asked me why I treated myself so much more unfairly and severely than I treated them.
We spent a few sessions actively having me imagine my child-self and then "parenting her" as I would parent my own kids. While it was something I had dabbled with informally, it was odd that someone giving me permission to do that seemed to really allow me to engage that vision; and then being able to step outside of myself and really look at my child-self objectively and apply all the life knowledge I had accumulated into parenting my younger self, well, it really really helped.
And it worked well, because it used resources and skills I had already accumulated, but that I had just not allowed myself to apply to me.
The validity of this experience comes in the reality that I was judging myself even as an adult by the standards that I felt like the authorities over me were judging me against when I was a child... and as a child would, I was either trying to meet those standards as an adult or rebel against them in child-like ways, rather than embracing my current status as an adult... which meant I had autonomy and power to set my own standards based on my own concepts of fairness and well-being. So, in a way, I was taking over the mantle of "authority" and redefining it for that child self, so that I could work through those insecurities under the supervision of a "parent who cared" (i.e., me). It's almost a nice little time-travel loop, but it can help break that slavery to old negative parenting and help one establish new standards for oneself that foster self-respect and acceptance.