I knew the whole oldest daughter syndrome thing had gone way too far when someone I know started trying to diagnose my daughter with it. She’s two and doesn’t even have any siblings yet.
I'm the eldest girl within a large extended family, and feel like I was held to stricter standards and criticism by my family at large, but also just think it's because I had my more conservative grandma for longer (which I appreciate), and secondly, my aunts and uncles just hadn't had kids, especially daughters, at my age yet. It's normal for people to be overly idealistic about how they'd raise kids prior to having them. All that to say, I'm not really negatively affected by all that.
I read too many newsletters to remember who wrote what, but someone was calling herself the eldest daughter, even though she had an older brother... because she was the first girl child. Like, that's not what 'eldest daughter' means. You weren't parentified, which is a real thing, and much of what I take eldest daughter discourse to be about: putting yourself aside for other family members, either because you were told to, or because you felt it was the right thing to do.
I'm an eldest daughter who was a rule follower and studied hard and tried to always to do the right thing. I may have regrets/a teeny bit of anger over various childhood issues, but I'm an adult and know that I wasn't truly harmed. I wasn't forced to care for my younger brother, and any high standards I felt I needed to hit were mostly self imposed and because it didn't occur to me to be otherwise.
Taylor Swift has a younger brother, but since she has been a professional musician/singer/celebrity since she was a young teen, I'm not sure how she is an eldest daughter as we define it. Rule follower and hard worker, sure. But parentified? They moved states to give her a career, uprooting her brother from his own life. If anything, it's Taylor's brother who probably has the more interesting story to tell.
I do buy that (especially in larger families) the male children, even if older in principle, can be a bit flaky on all the organising-mom's-birthday-present and more major forms of admin that emerge as the parents get older. If the women are Taylor Swift fan age or even Taylor Swift age they probably haven't yet hit this anyway though?
This is just "emotional labour" discourse for families instead of marriages anyway.
To be fair to Taylor, much of her work is probably not directly autobiographical/confessional unless she says so. She has plenty of songs expressing vulnerabilities that make little to no sense given her life. And this particular song's relationship to the "eldest daughter syndrome" people talk about is loose at best anyway.
I am the older sister of one brother. At the risk of sounding like one of those old folks who had to walk to school uphill through the snow five miles both ways, let me share how the eldest-daughter thing went down in my family when my brother and I were in high school:
1. I had to come straight home from school and do chores like cleaning the bathrooms and vacuuming the whole house. My brother had chores in theory, but he never did them because, in his words, “they can’t make me.” And he was right—my parents never did anything about it.
2. I was not allowed to go to parties where there was any alcohol. My brother got brought home by the cops for underage drinking on more than one occasion, without being punished.
3. I had a curfew that was tightly scheduled by my dad to minimize any opportunity for hanky-panky. My dad would find out what time the movie my date and I were seeing ended and estimate the time it would take to drive me home afterwards, and that would be my curfew. And I definitely was not allowed to have a boy in my room, even if it was a friend and we were working on a school project. My brother brought his girlfriends home and took them to the guest bedroom in the basement with no supervision or protest from my parents.
4. I was required to go to church every Sunday morning and most Wednesday evenings. My brother quit going to church at some point and our parents never made him go back.
I’m not actually as resentful as I sound. My brother and I had a terrific relationship as kids and still do. But eldest daughter syndrome is totally a real thing, and just because some women gripe about it to an irritating extent online doesn’t change that.
Do you think the “eldest” matters as much there as the “daughter”? If your sibling was a sister, do you think she’d have had similar rules?
One thing I definitely saw in some families is that there would be a “prodigy” and a “screw up” and the former would always be held to a higher standard. Often the prodigy was an older sibling but not always. And the screw up was often a middle child but sometimes the baby.
I’m an older brother and feel like I was held to a higher standard, but a lot of it was self inflicted. My younger sister was more of a boundary pusher.
Oh, these are two really interesting points! I totally agree that in the past (and maybe still) parents were much stricter with daughters than with sons.
You may also be right that families’ energy and hopes tend to coalesce around “the prodigy”—or the kid who seems to be the highest achieving. And then the strict discipline is to keep the high-achiever on the straight and narrow.
The irony is that in our family, I was a super high-achiever in school but have been a SAHM and housewife for 25 years. And my brother, who was a middling student in high school and college, is far and away the most successful person I know.
1. Those picture of England in Autumn are a lie. Mostly it’s hanging around a pedestrian precinct with a Boots, a Morrisons, and a Weatherspoons while the rain half pisses on you. Not a full piss, mind, nothing so committed, a half piss.
2. The expression on dog woman’s face: “I wanted none of this. This is so wrong.”
I’m an eldest son with three younger brothers. A lot of those descriptions sound pretty accurate, but tbh, I think it just makes me significantly more competent (my brothers don’t know how to clean ANYTHING)
A lot of the discourse online seems bad at differentiating between 1) specific ways sexism manifests for elder daughters, especially for conservative cultures and 2) the fact that the oldest child usually has some expectation of competence.
We do have some evidence that firstborns and only childs are more likely to experience depression and anxiety diagnoses compared to children born second and beyond.
Doesn't speak to why or how this manifests, but it does show up.
Separately, I know data is a big source of content for this blog and it might be useful to see if other studies performed by Epic Research can help inform more of your writing. This is my employer, but all hospital organizations that contribute anonymized patient data get access to the full pool of anonymous patient data. This means there's decades of encounters, for hundreds of millions of patients, across the U.S.
A. We have a ton of gooner games and not much evidence that they outsell other games. There’s a gooner game called NIKKE which releases regular content and does pretty well. But I imagine it’s dwarfed by other forever games like Fortnite or Stardew Valley, which are pretty tame.
B. I don’t think anyone actually believes this anyway. Social media is primordial ooze for memes. Successful ones flourish and others die. “Yassify a game woman to make her ‘better’” is a successful meme. People addicted to notifications and red badges will mindlessly help it propagate.
Yeah they know how to take gooner money it's just not by wasting time with stuff like atmosphere. You make cellphone gambling games with premises like 'what if WW2 warships but hot anime girls' or 'what if guns but hot anime girls '
I have two daughters, who are three and a half years apart, and the older one has always taken a lot of responsibility for the younger one. My husband and I were afraid that a couple decades from now, she’d feel like we “made her be responsible” or “parentified” her, so we kept telling her she didn’t have to do so much for her sister. Then finally she yelled at us, “I LIKE packing her lunch! I LIKE cooking dinner for her! Stop telling me I don’t have to!”
Funny enough eldest siblings supposedly have better life outcomes overall. Haven’t checked if it holds for daughters as well as sons but I’d be surprised if didn’t. As a middle child who made it I wish eldest siblings would check their privilege when talking about their struggles.
Sylvester Stallone's daughters are also surprisingly attractive. And Wayne Gretzky's daughter. Also, "Eve Jobs" sounds very much like a porn-star name to me, no slight or anything at all at her intended as I know nothing about her. She is pretty though.
Given that you highlight a Tweet related to this (and allowing that this might be too ‘internet culture’), but would you consider writing about Hasan electrocuting his dog when live-streaming on Twitch? Here’s the rationale:
So right about the daughters. Eldest of 7 here. With only two kids, you can’t even grammatically say eldest. And with only a brother, you could also view it as “only” daughter. Which has a different connotation. So yeah, no. Don’t steal my valor Taylor! 😉😜
I knew the whole oldest daughter syndrome thing had gone way too far when someone I know started trying to diagnose my daughter with it. She’s two and doesn’t even have any siblings yet.
I'm the eldest girl within a large extended family, and feel like I was held to stricter standards and criticism by my family at large, but also just think it's because I had my more conservative grandma for longer (which I appreciate), and secondly, my aunts and uncles just hadn't had kids, especially daughters, at my age yet. It's normal for people to be overly idealistic about how they'd raise kids prior to having them. All that to say, I'm not really negatively affected by all that.
I read too many newsletters to remember who wrote what, but someone was calling herself the eldest daughter, even though she had an older brother... because she was the first girl child. Like, that's not what 'eldest daughter' means. You weren't parentified, which is a real thing, and much of what I take eldest daughter discourse to be about: putting yourself aside for other family members, either because you were told to, or because you felt it was the right thing to do.
I'm an eldest daughter who was a rule follower and studied hard and tried to always to do the right thing. I may have regrets/a teeny bit of anger over various childhood issues, but I'm an adult and know that I wasn't truly harmed. I wasn't forced to care for my younger brother, and any high standards I felt I needed to hit were mostly self imposed and because it didn't occur to me to be otherwise.
Taylor Swift has a younger brother, but since she has been a professional musician/singer/celebrity since she was a young teen, I'm not sure how she is an eldest daughter as we define it. Rule follower and hard worker, sure. But parentified? They moved states to give her a career, uprooting her brother from his own life. If anything, it's Taylor's brother who probably has the more interesting story to tell.
I do buy that (especially in larger families) the male children, even if older in principle, can be a bit flaky on all the organising-mom's-birthday-present and more major forms of admin that emerge as the parents get older. If the women are Taylor Swift fan age or even Taylor Swift age they probably haven't yet hit this anyway though?
This is just "emotional labour" discourse for families instead of marriages anyway.
To be fair to Taylor, much of her work is probably not directly autobiographical/confessional unless she says so. She has plenty of songs expressing vulnerabilities that make little to no sense given her life. And this particular song's relationship to the "eldest daughter syndrome" people talk about is loose at best anyway.
I am the older sister of one brother. At the risk of sounding like one of those old folks who had to walk to school uphill through the snow five miles both ways, let me share how the eldest-daughter thing went down in my family when my brother and I were in high school:
1. I had to come straight home from school and do chores like cleaning the bathrooms and vacuuming the whole house. My brother had chores in theory, but he never did them because, in his words, “they can’t make me.” And he was right—my parents never did anything about it.
2. I was not allowed to go to parties where there was any alcohol. My brother got brought home by the cops for underage drinking on more than one occasion, without being punished.
3. I had a curfew that was tightly scheduled by my dad to minimize any opportunity for hanky-panky. My dad would find out what time the movie my date and I were seeing ended and estimate the time it would take to drive me home afterwards, and that would be my curfew. And I definitely was not allowed to have a boy in my room, even if it was a friend and we were working on a school project. My brother brought his girlfriends home and took them to the guest bedroom in the basement with no supervision or protest from my parents.
4. I was required to go to church every Sunday morning and most Wednesday evenings. My brother quit going to church at some point and our parents never made him go back.
I’m not actually as resentful as I sound. My brother and I had a terrific relationship as kids and still do. But eldest daughter syndrome is totally a real thing, and just because some women gripe about it to an irritating extent online doesn’t change that.
Do you think the “eldest” matters as much there as the “daughter”? If your sibling was a sister, do you think she’d have had similar rules?
One thing I definitely saw in some families is that there would be a “prodigy” and a “screw up” and the former would always be held to a higher standard. Often the prodigy was an older sibling but not always. And the screw up was often a middle child but sometimes the baby.
I’m an older brother and feel like I was held to a higher standard, but a lot of it was self inflicted. My younger sister was more of a boundary pusher.
Oh, these are two really interesting points! I totally agree that in the past (and maybe still) parents were much stricter with daughters than with sons.
You may also be right that families’ energy and hopes tend to coalesce around “the prodigy”—or the kid who seems to be the highest achieving. And then the strict discipline is to keep the high-achiever on the straight and narrow.
The irony is that in our family, I was a super high-achiever in school but have been a SAHM and housewife for 25 years. And my brother, who was a middling student in high school and college, is far and away the most successful person I know.
If you are the older of two, you are the elder daughter.
If you are the oldest of three or more, you are the eldest daughter.
Quite simple, really. I still remember which schoolteacher taught me this at the age of approximately 11.
1. Those picture of England in Autumn are a lie. Mostly it’s hanging around a pedestrian precinct with a Boots, a Morrisons, and a Weatherspoons while the rain half pisses on you. Not a full piss, mind, nothing so committed, a half piss.
2. The expression on dog woman’s face: “I wanted none of this. This is so wrong.”
I’m an eldest son with three younger brothers. A lot of those descriptions sound pretty accurate, but tbh, I think it just makes me significantly more competent (my brothers don’t know how to clean ANYTHING)
A lot of the discourse online seems bad at differentiating between 1) specific ways sexism manifests for elder daughters, especially for conservative cultures and 2) the fact that the oldest child usually has some expectation of competence.
We do have some evidence that firstborns and only childs are more likely to experience depression and anxiety diagnoses compared to children born second and beyond.
Doesn't speak to why or how this manifests, but it does show up.
https://www.epicresearch.org/articles/firstborn-children-and-only-children-more-likely-to-have-anxiety-and-depression-than-later-born-children
Separately, I know data is a big source of content for this blog and it might be useful to see if other studies performed by Epic Research can help inform more of your writing. This is my employer, but all hospital organizations that contribute anonymized patient data get access to the full pool of anonymous patient data. This means there's decades of encounters, for hundreds of millions of patients, across the U.S.
The genesis of this was the Flint Water crisis (https://www.epic.com/epic/post/using-epic-uncover-flint-water-crisis/) and Cosmos (the pool of data) helped uncover the use of oxygen instead of ventilators during Covid and that GLP-1s actually do contribute to sustained weight loss even if you stop taking it (https://www.epicresearch.org/articles/two-years-after-stopping-glp-1s-most-patients-sustain-at-least-some-weight-loss).
The video games thing is so dumb because
A. We have a ton of gooner games and not much evidence that they outsell other games. There’s a gooner game called NIKKE which releases regular content and does pretty well. But I imagine it’s dwarfed by other forever games like Fortnite or Stardew Valley, which are pretty tame.
B. I don’t think anyone actually believes this anyway. Social media is primordial ooze for memes. Successful ones flourish and others die. “Yassify a game woman to make her ‘better’” is a successful meme. People addicted to notifications and red badges will mindlessly help it propagate.
Yeah they know how to take gooner money it's just not by wasting time with stuff like atmosphere. You make cellphone gambling games with premises like 'what if WW2 warships but hot anime girls' or 'what if guns but hot anime girls '
I have two daughters, who are three and a half years apart, and the older one has always taken a lot of responsibility for the younger one. My husband and I were afraid that a couple decades from now, she’d feel like we “made her be responsible” or “parentified” her, so we kept telling her she didn’t have to do so much for her sister. Then finally she yelled at us, “I LIKE packing her lunch! I LIKE cooking dinner for her! Stop telling me I don’t have to!”
Funny enough eldest siblings supposedly have better life outcomes overall. Haven’t checked if it holds for daughters as well as sons but I’d be surprised if didn’t. As a middle child who made it I wish eldest siblings would check their privilege when talking about their struggles.
Lmao this reminds me of whole japanese controversy about “should big boob anime girls be on posters” lmao
And they fought literally tooth and nails between red pill incels and radical feminists lolll
Sylvester Stallone's daughters are also surprisingly attractive. And Wayne Gretzky's daughter. Also, "Eve Jobs" sounds very much like a porn-star name to me, no slight or anything at all at her intended as I know nothing about her. She is pretty though.
"Eve Jobs" sounds like someone was bullshitting at a party about knowing Steve Jobs's daughter and had to make up a name right away.
Given that you highlight a Tweet related to this (and allowing that this might be too ‘internet culture’), but would you consider writing about Hasan electrocuting his dog when live-streaming on Twitch? Here’s the rationale:
- you said you like Ezra Klein
- Ezra writes for the NYT
- Hasan was interviewed recently in the NYT
- ???
- Profit.
So right about the daughters. Eldest of 7 here. With only two kids, you can’t even grammatically say eldest. And with only a brother, you could also view it as “only” daughter. Which has a different connotation. So yeah, no. Don’t steal my valor Taylor! 😉😜
Thank you for doing this! I was on twitter confused like why is everyone mad at this Bier guy because of something to do with Steve Jobs?