The Eldest Daughter & the People Pleaser

Today we will be focusing on, as we said, the eldest daughter syndrome because it is the documented clinical pattern most closely tied to people-pleasing.

Having said that, we acknowledge that every birthplace has its own set of perceived stereotypical patterns and that this may also change within family systems, cultures, etc.

An example of this would be the middle child often being referred to as the lost child.

So we just wanted to make it well aware that Corey and I are mostly doing this because it attaches to people pleasing.

We're also both eldest daughters, so it was very fitting for this episode.

I'm going to start off just with a definition of the eldest daughter syndrome by Annie Wright, and she states that eldest daughter syndrome is a documented clinical pattern in which the oldest daughter in a family is assigned adult-level emotional caretaking or managerial responsibility before she has the developed mental capacity to hold it.

It is not a formal diagnosis, and it sits at the intersection of parentification research, attachment theory, and family systems theory.

And it names a real cost to identity, autonomy, and childhood.

It's what happens when you grow up being everyone's emotional manager before you were old enough to manage your own feelings, and then carry that job description into every relationship and workplace you've had since.

Important factor is that it's not dependent on how much responsibility the daughter had to carry, but on what the cost was to her developmental needs.

And I also just want to say that you don't actually have to be the oldest child in a family to have the eldest child syndrome.

It really is dependent on the role you were assigned.

It typically is the eldest daughter, but in odd circumstances, it can be another child that's been given that role.

Yeah, so we're really talking about the intersection of eldest and daughter, the eldest daughter.

Yeah, and for those of you that aren't familiar

with the term parentification, that's really just when a child assumes that parent role, and it's sort of expected of them to rise up to a caregiving role as a child with parents.

whether those parents are active or not, it's really just that expectation that is put on kids to rise up and probably have far more responsibility than expected for their age and development.

I think also when you look at eldest daughter syndrome, it's generally driven by deeply ingrained gender expectation that disproportionately pushes the first born girl into caregiving and emotional labor roles.

So it's very closely tied to gender as well.

I would say that it's largely coming from our mothers because we're assuming mothering roles.

So an overwhelmed mother or there's no mother.

That could be the other situation, right? You step into the maternal role.

But in a family where both parents are physically present...

It's generally considered the maternal or mother jobs that are being handed off.

So caretaking for the children, cooking, cleaning, managing the social, emotional load of the family.