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This year, for the first time, she didn’t make the family calendar. And she could already see what was coming. In a few months, her mom would text and ask who’s hosting the Easter holiday or what’s the plan for a Memorial Day weekend get-together. And she’d smile and text back, “I’m not sure—I haven’t checked with anyone.” How would it go? She wasn’t sure yet, but it feels like a good start. The world was not going to collapse if she failed to coordinate every holiday. Plans will be made somehow, by someone, probably. But it won’t be her, the eldest daughter. She’s taking an intentional step back. It felt strange at first, but it also felt like taking a big, deep breath. It felt like a gift to herself. She was choosing to believe that being a good daughter doesn’t have to mean being the family’s default CEO.
Many daughters can relate to this feeling, though it may be the firstborn who knows it all too well. It’s the preparedness of thinking about family before anyone else; it’s a quiet vigilance of holding together the things that nobody else will. It’s the unpaid labor of doing daughtering. Daughtering is the effort that women put into making and sustaining family connection, and its labor and resource requirements are often invisible to everyone who benefits from it (Alford, 2019). The muscle memory of being an eldest daughter and managing everyone and everything is a well-worn role with a script.
Daughtering itself is a form of labor related to the deceptively gentle-sounding forms of family work called kinship and kin keeping. My own research and interviews with adult daughters in the trenches of real work in families reveal that the role of a daughter is tough, complex, and beautiful. The role of daughters is so much more interesting and complex than we’ve ever imagined it to be. It’s mental labor, cognitive labor, task labor, and identity labor that women are enacting all the time, whether we know it or not, for the good of the family. And we’re all doing it whether we get any credit or not.
The eldest daughter doesn’t just carry her share of the family labor; she is the family’s story keeper, legacy builder, and Chief Executive Officer. And she does it all without getting the credit she deserves.
But this year, that can change. You can decide to have different rhythms, responsibilities, and roles within your family. It starts with a change-maker like you deciding to do things differently and sticking to it.
Families are in a constant state of change, but we rarely pause to notice it or think about what it means for us. Daughters and parents are both in a process of change all the time, over an entire lifetime. I call this the Kinship Shift (Alford, 2026), where our daughtering expands in magnitude and complexity throughout our lives, until we end up feeling like we are in charge of everyone and everything in our family sphere. That’s exhausting, and yet we can’t always see how to get out from under the burdens of that continuous giving. Part of recognizing this shift is allowing the family dynamics to change, replacing old traditions with new, and seeing people for who they are now.
There’s no single way to daughter. There’s the daughter who overperforms. The daughter who withdraws. The daughter who resists. The daughter who tries to rewrite the script. Each of those forms is valid. But some will cost you more than others. Being a daughter isn’t about self-erasure, nor about rebellion for rebellion’s sake. It’s about finding the line between love and labor—and deciding where you want to stand. Daughtering, as my research shows, is not just about care; it’s about identity. It’s where women learn what love costs, and what it shouldn’t.
In her powerful book, Maternal Thinking, Sara Ruddick argued that care requires three disciplines: preservation, nurturance, and training. Eldest daughters have been preserving and nurturing their families for years. Now it’s time for the third discipline: retraining themselves—and their families—into new patterns of connection.
Of course, families aren’t one-size-fits-all, and the person who plays the most essential part isn’t always or exclusively the eldest daughter. It might be the youngest daughter, the middle, an only-child, a niece, or even a son who is doing the hard work of keeping the family in check. The dynamics within your family structure may differ from others, but feelings of invisibility are universal. And it deserves our attention.
When you decide to stop managing everyone, you can start truly connecting with them. When you rest, your empathy becomes clearer. When you stop trying to prove your value through service, you may discover it was never in question. This is the paradox at the heart of eldest daughterhood: when you finally let go of control, you gain genuine closeness. When you start being the best version of yourself, you may realize your own family members like you for who you are and not just what you can do for them. And what a gift that is. Happy New-You in the New-Year!
