It’s Time We Acknowledge That Older Sisters Are The Backbone Of Society

Younger children everywhere, you’ve been put on notice: Your oldest sister is tired of doing it all.

On Reductress, a jokey headline declared, “‘Eldest Daughter’ Finally Added as Official Diagnosis in DSM-V” because of all the mental duress oldest sisters are under. (Though not an actual psychological diagnosis, the pop psychology phrase “oldest daughter syndrome” has hit a nerve with many oldest daughters.)

On TikTok, youngest brothers ― those diametrically opposed to oldest daughters in responsibilities ― jokingly apologize for doing the bare minimum in life and skirting the emotional labor that’s second nature to women.

Elsewhere on social media, big sisters joke about how it’s time we acknowledge that older sisters are the backbone of society. (It’s true: Big sisters tend to be overrepresented in powerful women lists. What do Eleanor Roosevelt, Taylor Swift, Hillary Clinton and Beyoncé all have in common? They’re all high-performing older sisters.)

Eldest daughters see what needs to be done and do it ― but it comes at a cost, said Lisette Schuitemaker, the author of “The Eldest Daughter Effect: How Firstborn Women Harness Their Strengths.”

“Our particular life path makes us into responsible, dutiful, hands-on, thoughtful and caring women,” she said. “You will often find us in positions of leadership because we have been trained to take the lead from a young age.”

The flip side of that “is we can get bogged down by the many tasks on our to-do lists because e feel responsible for all and need to save the planet,” she said.

Just a pitch, but we could fix pretty much every problem in two weeks if we put a committee of oldest daughters in charge

— Lauren Ashley Smith (@msLAS) March 22, 2021

Oldest brothers deal with a lot, no doubt, but it’s different for girls; a 2016 UNICEF study found that girls between ages 5 and 14 spend 40% more time on domestic work than boys.

“There are usually different gender expectations placed on boys vs. girls,” said Leeor Gal, a marriage and family therapist in Pennsylvania. “Girls are oftentimes raised to be ‘caring,’ and boys are raised to be ‘tough.’”

“Caring” entails a lot: “What you sometimes see is oldest daughters developing people-pleasing tendencies or feeling responsible for other’s well-being,” Gal said. “A younger girl might learn to put her needs last for the sake of someone else.”

‘It’s an eldest daughter revolution:’ Oldest daughters share their experience.

Y.L. Wolfe is the oldest of everything: oldest daughter, oldest child out of four siblings, oldest grandchild and oldest niece.

“I always saw myself as my mother’s assistant throughout my life ― even when I was very young,” she told HuffPost. “I have memories going back to the age of 3 in which I was worrying about my younger sister’s welfare when she was 1.”

Parentification, where a child feels compelled to take on responsibility for their family’s emotional, physical and/or mental well-being, was a huge part of Wolfe’s childhood. Psychologists say emotional parentification can lead to difficulty in self-regulating, setting boundaries and building relationships.

Being the eldest daughter really feels like being an unpaid intern version of young mother sometimes you know

— Bolu Babalola is genuinely on leave 🍯&🌶 (@BeeBabs) June 27, 2017

Growing up, Wolfe would watch her baby brother before school when she was 11 (he even started calling her “second mom”), go grocery shopping for the family and handle any emergencies that cropped up.

“When I was in high school, and my mother had a health crisis, my father called me from the hospital, crying, telling me they didn’t know if my mother was going to make it and that he needed me to take care of the kids until the doctors could figure out what was wrong,” Wolfe said.

She did what she always did and stepped up, taking care of everything until her mother could come home. She recalls her dad insisting she didn’t tell the other kids how bad it was.

“He wanted to protect them, but that same thought wasn’t extended to me,” she said. “I am sometimes haunted by that memory because no one thought about how young I still was and how much I needed protection, too.”

In adulthood, she became the peacemaker of the family, the go-between when family members were in conflict.

When her sisters had kids, she often felt like an executive assistant to them.

“I’ve been there through so much, helped with doctor’s appointments, moving into new houses, helping take care of the kids when they were sick,” she said.

Wolfe admits she sometimes wonders if her family would continue to ask for favors if she’d had a family of her own.

“If you’re single and don’t have children, the expectation is that we don’t have any obligations or stressors in life and so we owe our families extra labor,” she said.

Wolfe said it took her until her 40s to recognize how much of her identity was tied up in big sister-ness and how much it took out of her. Now, she’s heartened to see younger generations put their feet down.

“To suddenly see women collectively stepping into an ‘eldest daughter revolution,’ as I call it, has brought me to my knees in gratitude,” she said. “I felt like I was always trying to extract myself from this dynamic in a vacuum. It’s about time we are talking about this!”

As the oldest of four in an immigrant family, Parween Mander, a financial coach from Vancouver, Canada, also felt like a makeshift third parent growing up.

“I was always keenly aware of specific financial challenges my parents were going through ― translating bank statements and tax papers for them and talking with bank representatives,” she said.

The biggest hurdle happened when she was 16 years old, and the family almost lost their home. Mander recalls sitting in on meetings with mortgage representatives and trying her best to help her parents secure a new mortgage.

“That taught me that not having money means a lack of power, safety and control,” she said. “It defined my relationship with money.”

New financial challenges crop up with aging parents: retirement planning and medical bills. As an older daughter, Mander said she still picks up the slack. She notices the same tendencies among her clients who are older siblings: They’ll overextend themselves with younger siblings, too ― lending money they may not have, grabbing the bill when out for dinners and overspending on gifts.

“As the oldest, typically we don’t want our siblings to witness or go through financial hardship and money scarcity like we did, so I find that a lot of those clients spend money each month to buy their siblings things,” she said.

Mander has started to use the phrase “good daughter trauma” to describe the innate desire to use money as a tool to people please and ensure others around you are taken care of financially.

After a while, your family comes to expect that. When older siblings act differently, saying no or prioritizing their own needs, it shocks the family system.

“If we spend money on ourselves or prioritize ourselves first, we are labeled selfish or ‘cheap,’” she said.

Vidhusha Thirugnanam is another exhausted big sister from a first-generation immigrant family. Growing up in Toronto, Canada, she helped her parents understand documents and Canadian life while setting an example for her two younger sisters. The burden of being perfect was heavy.

“I sought validation from my parents and did whatever it took to maintain peace in the household,” Thirugnanam told HuffPost. “That was always too much pressure for a child.”

As she got older, she realized it wasn’t her responsibility to fix her family. There are jokes online about how cataclysmic it would be if the oldest daughters went on strike, and to some extent, that’s exactly what Thirugnanam did. Her family is faring fine, and her life has been a lot calmer since.

“I decided to take a step back in family duties and focus more on myself. I established boundaries and no longer seek validation,” she said. “I found peace of mind doing this. I recommend it to all oldest daughters who feel they are being emotionally and physically drained by their family’s expectations of them.”

Learning to establish healthy boundaries and recognizing when your mental health is at stake are huge milestones, said Thirugnanam, who’s made a number of TikToks about the oldest daughter experience.

Today, she leans into the saying, “You cannot pour into the cups of others if you yourself are empty. Learn to fill your own cup first.”

“A lot of oldest daughters will run themselves dry, putting their family’s needs ahead of their own,” she said. “I am here to normalize oldest daughters taking a step back for the sake of their own well-being.”

How to deal with oldest daughter stress as an adult.

Want to take on less as the oldest? Below are some tips on taking a step back while still being an integral, important part of your family.

Delegate responsibilities when you can.

The goal is to feel responsible but not take responsibility all the time, Schuitemaker said. Practice letting others take the lead, even if it would be easier to address yourself rather than wait for them to do it. At 69, Schuitemaker said she still has to remind herself that her siblings and younger family members can care for themselves.

“Let others organize the family outing, or don’t automatically take all the care of your elderly parents on your shoulders,” she said. “It’s not easy, but you will also be pleasantly surprised by what others are able to handle.”

Set boundaries with yourself before you voice them to your family.

Setting boundaries is a great place to start, but it’s not just boundaries with others that we need to work on, Gal said; it’s boundaries with ourselves, too.

“It’s not easy to change years of habits and actions, so we must first start with getting comfortable with saying no to ourselves before we do so with others,” she said.

Try to identify your needs within the family: Do you care whether or not you’re hosting the holidays or cooking a three-course dinner for someone’s birthday? If you don’t want to, practice identifying that within yourself first.

“Once that has been set, you are ready to suggest someone else’s house for this year’s gathering,” Gal said. “You don’t have to make huge leaps; simply start with something small and make your way towards the bigger boundaries.”

If you feel financially responsible for your family, know it’s OK to pull back some.

If you’ve shouldered financial responsibilities in the past, recognize that it’s OK to ask for help and be vulnerable yourself, Mander said.

“You don’t have to do this alone,” she said. “Depending on your situation and how old your siblings are, find a way to split and even out the financial responsibilities you carry with them.”

Always make sure to put money aside into your own savings account(s) first or debt repayment before lending or spending money on others, she added.

“What I find is with my clients because they don’t have financial clarity, they spend and give money away because they ‘go with the flow’ and don’t know if they can truly afford to support others,” she said.

“Once we get them on a budget and system, they’re able to make better decisions and stick up for themselves because now they can see the impact of helping someone else before themselves,” she said.

Remember: Your identity is so much more than “big sister.”

It wasn’t until her 40s that Wolfe started to look at her family dynamic with clear eyes and realize the support she received from her family pale in comparison to what she’d given them through the years.

“These days, I’m not interested in allowing people to burden me with non-reciprocal expectations, and frankly, despite how much I love them, I’m tired of being my family’s concierge,” she said.

Hoping to turn a new page, she started doing boundary work with her therapist.

“I won’t lie: It’s hard work,” she admitted. “It’s hard to break free from this dynamic because many of us are proud of what we do and have done for our families. We know this makes us valuable to them.”

But as Wolfe has learned, that belief can derail your life path and make you forget who you are separate from your loved ones.

“I often feel that part of the reason I never had kids was because I knew it would shift my attention away from my family, and I was terrified to let them down,” she said. “Today, though I still wrestle with that fear, I’m more terrified of letting myself down than them.”