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This new year, eldest daughters deserve an intentional change in their lives and can find it using the three Cs approach: call it, calibrate it, change it.
Call it what it is: Control
One of the hardest truths for eldest daughters to accept is that what they believe looks like generosity is often masking the need for control. When you’re the one who organizes the family vacation, calls the plumber for your parents, and coordinates every Mother’s Day gift, it’s easy to feel resentful that nobody else is stepping up to help. Often, the eldest daughter is the one who notices—and in noticing, begins to believe she’s responsible. Family researchers have long described this as intergenerational vigilance (Miller-Ott et al., 2017), a sense of watchfulness passed down through gendered expectations.
Daughters, especially firstborns, may learn to anticipate the emotional needs of others. The daughter who could once soothe her mother’s bad mood at age 10 grows up to be the woman who can’t rest until every group text is resolved. And while that can make her the family’s emotional backbone, it can also leave her brittle.
You know what I love about Taylor Swift’s song “Eldest Daughter” from The Life of a Showgirl album? She calls out the armor a daughter wears. She acknowledges that the eldests grow tough exteriors, may be gruff or seem cold. It’s an outcome that happens because you’re trying not to get hurt. You believe you need that shell. It can be hard for the eldest to tell (or show) others that they need love, want love, and believe their family will show up and give it to them. It’s a harsh reality of how the eldest daughter has come to view her role and perform family scripts.
The sociologist Marianne Walters once called this dynamic “the invisible web”: the pattern in which women’s care keeps families stable but also keeps women stuck. The eldest daughter often feels this more sharply than anyone else, especially as she becomes an adult.
When she was little, being helpful earned praise. As an adult, being helpful earns her exhaustion. But that can change. You can see your family in a new way. You can share your story with vulnerability and see what good things might happen.
The first step toward changing the “eldest-daughter-in-charge” mentality is to identify the daughtering patterns we’ve been enacting in our families; this is a process family communication scholars describe as daughtering, the often invisible labor adult daughters perform to keep families functioning (Alford, 2024). Then, you can see what’s old and what needs to be made new. Care and control have been fused into women’s lives and can often be ineffectively substituted for each other in our communication habits.
But what if the other family members can’t run things because you’ve already taken over? Maybe you tell yourself that masterminding every possible family experience is a way to show love. But it’s also micromanaging. Remind yourself that control is not helping; it’s dominating. And it squashes all the others around you from trying.
Calibrate your daughtering: Envision a different way forward
Once you see the unhealthy patterns and old scripts you’ve been carrying around, you can decide to do things differently. The next step in this process is to do the thinking work of calibrating what you’d like your life to be like.
Start by lowering the bar for expectations on yourself and others. Now, lower it again. If things are going to be different in your family system, then you have to change your expectations for what they can be. The family group chat or the next big birthday gathering may look a little different, and that’s a good thing. Since you’ve been doing everything for everyone, nobody else is trained. But remind yourself that martyrdom isn’t a love language, and you are excited to take a big step back to let others in.
In order to level-set your daughtering, think of a few things you can take off your to-do list this year. Spend some time considering which daughtering behaviors you enjoy the most. Keep those. Now notice the things you do not enjoy doing: I won’t get in the middle with my mom and brother. I won’t plan and pay for those anniversary flowers from the group. I won’t rescue my dad from his sister. Decide who you want to be and live out that vision.
Change it: Create something new in your life
The final step in making a difference in your life this new year is to enact change that makes a meaningful difference. If you want to make your invisible work visible and get credit for the work you’re doing, start by narrating your life as an eldest daughter. Start talking and describe how you used your time, energy, and resources to achieve things for the family, almost as if they needed a training manual (because they actually do).
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And now’s the time to set some boundaries. Be clear and direct about what you will and won’t be doing. Tell others what you’ve crossed off your list for the year. If they’re reasonable, they may pause and reflect on what you’ve said. The less reasonable family members may not like it. And that’s okay because you’re not here to please everybody.
If this is the case, try applying the workplace trend of “quiet quitting” to your personal life. Quit doing stuff without announcing it to anyone. Just don’t plan the event, don’t call people about the gift, don’t answer the texts with the drama. If someone asks you to plan an event or put out a personal-family-drama fire, quietly don’t respond.
If you need some help and you’ve already decided to drop a task from your list, try the “Oops” technique. Respond with “Oops, I forgot about that—maybe someone else can do it because I’ve run out of bandwidth.” See what happens in a family when your availability dries up.
If this sounds bitter or cold to you, let’s remember the true goal. It takes practice to unlearn the behavior of overextending ourselves. We have to learn to feel discomfort without fixing it. We have to watch someone else do the thing “wrong” and stay silent so they can learn.
Let others try. Let them show you their diverse, interesting, new ways of being a family. Let them fail. Let some things drop.
We must choose to rest our minds and bodies instead of engaging in personal martyrdom. Dropping a task for just one year or one time doesn’t mean it will be gone forever. Anyone in the family can evaluate whether or not it’s a meaningful event or just a repeat placeholder. That’s not apathy toward our family, it’s maturity about how to love and allow love for yourself, too.
Try these three Cs tips and find yourself sorting out healthy from destructive behaviors. You can start noticing what you enjoy most about being in a family and doing those aspects as a matter of priority. Allow other people a chance to step up and reveal what’s important to them and what’s not. As a result of these healthy communication changes, you can see your family evolving. You are both allowing and encouraging a new rhythm.
