Overachieving in Eldest Daughters

In recent years, the colloquial term ‘Eldest Daughter Syndrome’ has been floating around. For those of us in the clinical field, we’ve talked about birth order and the clinical efficacy of whether or not your place in the “line up” matters in terms of psychological behavior and development.

But there’s something to be said about being the eldest child, particularly a daughter, and what that means for you as an adult.

Eldest children are often relied on to help with duties within the family and girls in particular are more socialized to take on caregiving roles within a family unit.

As a millennial eldest daughter, I saw how a lot of my experiences growing up and the responsibility I felt impact how I behaved as an adult.

Anxiety, perfectionism, an almost hyper independence, and deep empathy.

It was why I became a therapist.

Many eldest daughters grow up taking on a large amount of emotional responsibility. There are expectations around being the one who takes care of everyone else and often not learning how to take care of yourself.

This could have been being placed in a position of caring for younger siblings, helping them with homework or meals, or it could have been taking on emotional needs of parents, like listening to a parent complain or vent, or it was a combination of both.

Eldest daughters often go on to be quite successful. There are a lot of positives with knowing how to “get things done” and “take care of everything.”

We’re organized, prompt, reliable, caring, empathetic.

We have it all together.

But usually, things fall apart internally.

We start to spin our wheels, overthinking things, worrying about making sure that everything is “correct”, we don’t want to disappoint anyone so we make sure that we keep on top of all of the schedules, that we never say no, that we don’t rock the boat.

Things are presented to us at work or in our relationships and we take it on, even if we don’t actually want to. It can feel compulsive. I must to this, I should do this.

We keep going and going, taking on more and more responsibility. Perhaps believing that no one else can do it the way that we can or feeling that because we were asked, we must take on that burden, because that was what was expected of us.

But the cost of high achievement is often more stress, more burn out, more exhaustion.

We self-sacrifice and self-betray because we’ve learned to put everyone else first.

One of my favorite sayings to use in therapy is “you can’t pour from an empty cup.”

Most of us never learned how to stop and attend to our own needs, to even learn what those needs were, because we didn’t have anyone who paid attention enough to teach us or show us that our wants and needs mattered.

As adults, we now have the capacity to turn some of that energy inward, to take the time to care for ourselves.

By taking care of yourself, making sure that your needs are met, it means that you can take better care of others around you.

The cliché saying is to put your oxygen mask on first, but that’s exactly it.

How can we keep giving if there’s nothing left to give?

By pushing ourselves beyond our limits, we suffer, and then those around us suffer, too.

It’s a gift to our relationships to take care of ourselves, to ask for help, and recognizing that we are deserving of rest and care is the first step.  

My challenge for you, fellow eldest daughter, is to think about those ‘shoulds.’ Be curious about where you learned them. Who told you that you should? See where the answer leads.

If you’re interested in exploring more, schedule a free consultation here!