The Curse of the First-Born Child.

[Mike from back east]

New information has arrived, so it's time to update this thread.

Today's edition of The Atlantic has this article: "The Plight of the Eldest Daughter" which fits this thread since about half of the first-borns are female.

I don't have a gift link to get you past the paywall and into The Atlantic. This MSN link seems to have the article in full.

Here are some key excerpts:

Women are expected to be nurturers. Firstborns are expected to be exemplars. Being both is exhausting.
By Sarah Sloat

Being an eldest daughter means frequently feeling like you’re not doing enough, like you’re struggling to maintain a veneer of control, like the entire household relies on your diligence.

At least, that’s what a contingent of oldest sisters has been saying online. Across social-media platforms, they’ve described the stress of feeling accountable for their family’s happiness, the pressure to succeed, and the impression that they aren’t being cared for in the way they care for others. Some are still teens; others have grown up and left home but still feel over-involved and overextended. As one viral tweet put it, “are u happy or are u the oldest sibling and also a girl”? People have even coined a term for this: “eldest-daughter syndrome.”

Research suggests some striking differences in the experiences of first- and secondborns. Susan McHale, a family-studies professor emeritus at Penn State University, told me that parents tend to be “focused on getting it right with the first one,” leading them to fixate on their firstborn’s development growing up—their grades, their health, the friends they choose. With their subsequent children, they might be less anxious and feel less need to micromanage, and that can lead to less tension in the parent-child dynamic.

Eldest kids, for example, aren’t necessarily more responsible than their siblings; instead, they tend to be given more responsibilities because they are older. That role can affect how you understand yourself.

Women are usually “kin keepers,” meaning they perform the often invisible labor of “making sure everybody is happy, conflicts are resolved, and everybody feels paid attention to,” McHale told me. On top of that emotional aid, her research shows, young daughters spend more time, on average, than sons doing chores;...

Daughtering is the term that Allison Alford, a Baylor University communication professor who researches adult daughters, uses to describe the family work that girls and women tend to take on. That can look like picking up prescriptions, planning a retirement party, or setting aside money for a parent’s future; it can also involve subtler actions, like holding one’s tongue to avoid an argument or listening to a parent's worries. Daughtering can be satisfying, even joyful. But it can also mean caring for siblings and sometimes for parents in a way that goes above and beyond what children, especially young ones, should need to do,...

There's a lot more in the article, if you can get in. The info in this article is a perfect match for what my oldest sister, the first-born, experienced; I think I elaborated on earlier in this thread. Of importance is there is now some valid research to support the thread.

Here's a link to a similar article.

[gentlearts]

Very interesting. I was the eldest daughter, and my daughter is the eldest daughter. She carries the torch in the family. If it weren’t for her, her 3 brothers would hardly get together with anyone.

[Sonic_Spork]

I am an eldest daughter.

My first brother wasn't born until I was 9 and my parents were on the brink of divorce when my Mom conceived. Dad was out drinking and cheating, Mom was depressed and not getting out of bed, so I had to care for my baby brother quite a bit. I already knew how to cook for myself and do laundry. I remember being up in the middle of the night, ten years old, holding a crying baby who would not stop crying or take a bottle and crying myself because I was so tired and had to get up and go to school in a few hours.

Then when my parents split, for a couple of years both my brother and I lived with my father and his much younger new wife, who had no idea what she was doing. I still had to change my brother's diapers. We were in daycare together where I had to protect him from abuse at the hands of the in home daycare providers. Every babysitter I ever had was horribly abusive in one way or another. The best situation we ever saw in that regard was one where the older girls were merely expected to do a lot of the childcare work while the adult getting paid slacked off.

Then my Mom got pregnant from her hot young foreign lover who never intended to stay with her. She "wanted a piece of him to keep forever" in the person of my second little brother, born when I was 13. I left my Dad's home and went to live with Mom and once again had an infant to care for. I don't feel as though I was ever really a child. Hell, before all of this, my main caregiver until I was 5 was my wheelchair bound great grandma, until she died. She had already taught me how to read her the newspaper and cook for both of us by the time she passed. When I was FIVE. Was I ever a child? I don't think so.

I ended up having two sons. Their father, my ex, placed all of his expectations on the older one and was abusive and contemptuous to the younger one. I overcompensated by being too loving and permissive to the younger one. The older one grew up wanting to make himself invisible, not liking attention at all. The younger one, forever trying to prove himself to his father, would alternately try to bid for his Dad's attention, and start fights and drama to show his strength and try to earn respect, but that only triggered abuse. My older son has modest intelligence but very low self esteem, he isn't a troublemaker but he's struggling to get employment and pull his weight. Lives with his fiancee now, but unsure if that will last. My younger one is highly intelligent but was always a bit strange...could master anything, reading, writing, musical instruments, coding, animation...all sorts of stuff. But would burn through interests and cast them aside. In high school, he had the onset of schizo affective disorder and dropped out, getting his GED. He is now homeless living in a car with his girlfriend.

This morning alone...I have been on the phone all day handling one existential crisis after another. Each of my sons, my ex, my youngest son's girlfriend's mom, and my mother, and an old friend on the other side of the country, have all been barkin' up my tree and seem to want me to solve their problems, send them money, hear their drama, and talk them off their ledges. I would give anything to shake all of the dysfunctional people in my life off my back, but I just can't seem to do it. And I fully expect to die alone with no one to care for me at all. I have a wonderful and very loving second husband who often wants to help, but I also feel like he just doesn't know how. Thing is...I have no idea how to ask for help, I see everything as my responsibility. Everyone's everything all the time. People keep telling me that I should pursue leadership roles at a club I was part of and management roles at work because I'm just such a great leader and it makes me want to throw a furious tantrum every time I hear it, because all that sounds like to me is, "You are so good at managing other people's problems, you should really take on more." I only see the work and responsibility in "leadership"...not power or privilege of any kind.

I am exhausted, overextended, and sometimes I just want to cut all ties and disappear, and avoid human connections for the rest of my life. An open road and no destination. But then sometimes I want to get a big piece of property that can house all of my messy loved ones and just...provide solutions for all of their pain and struggles. I have had difficulty with boundaries, and I don't know how to make choices that don't center around what other people need of me.

So that whole "Eldest Daughter Syndrome" thing does feel true to me, but I've got to believe that there are families out there that don't raise their daughters in service to their own dysfunctions and in care of dependents from the time they can walk, nor turn them loose in the world at 18 with no guidance and no resources.

[Kathy884]

Originally Posted by Mike from back east

The Curse of the First-Born Child is what I call the family dynamic where the first-born has all of the parents hopes and dreams heaped onto him or her. Often the parents live vicariously through this child, who really gets all sorts of attention, pressure and push to succeed, as if the parents get a merit badge for having high achieving kids.

I've seen many first-borns who are either big successes or big failures, rarely an average so-so outcome; usually either heroes or neurotics.

By the time there are 4 kids in the family the last one gets away with murder as the parents are exhausted and burned out on the first three. In my own family I've seen this repeated for two generations, and in related families.

It certainly doesn't happen in all families, but I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed this sort of family dynamic, or if it's recognized as such by family counseling professionals.

In looking at three generations of first born kids in my family, I do see people who have done well, people who take responsibility for things who are super dependable, and who are there to help other family members. In our family I think of the first born kids being the most dependable and responsible. Other aren't bad with this either, but the first borns are the ones you can really depend on.

I don't in my family see so much pressure to succeed for any of the kids, but I think a big part of that is that those in the older generation were successful in their own right. What they really wanted for their kids was for them to have a vocation that they were passionate about and enjoyed and for their kids to be kind.

For the younger ones I didn't see them getting away with murder, but what is striking to me that I do see with the second born is learning the very important skill of begging for forgiveness rather than asking permission at an early age. I'm a first born who used to follow all the rules to the T. I learned the begging for forgiveness instead of asking permission within reason from my younger brother, but I was a slow learner and really didn't start doing this till I was in my 30s. It's a blessing to be able to do this effectively at work -- do my best work and what's best for the company and know what BS I can bypass.

[Lodestar]

In order to understand family psychology there is no individual. There are individual(s) affecting and being affected by the others. Families present for help with an identified patient, or problem person, but it is truly the family itself which needs adjustment. Repeatedly family members are unable to see how they have played their part in the family disfunction.
(Don't tell them or they'll bail. Heh.) A grim joke but maybe the key to growth, both within and outside of the family, is discovering how each individual fits and what part they play in family wellness or imbalance.

I think every birth order child has a "curse" or a blessing depending on how you want to frame it. And no two siblings share the same experience being raised. Every child, as has been mentioned, changes the equilibrium of the family mobile.

It's a matter of balance with each family member seeking its own weight in the mobile in order for it to hang perfectly.
If one member is affecting the balance more than others each person will add or lose "weight" (influence) in an attempt to stay balanced.

That "weight" may be positive behavior or it may be negative behavior. Increased attention or escape are two of the results of those choices.

Serendipity that this subject is here. I had lunch yesterday with a friend who worked with at-risk youth. We discussed the problems of the young members of families, what is sometimes called the mascot roll - always quick with a witty quip to ease the tension.

We noted how many of them go on to become entertainers and comedians and how particularly prone to self-destruction they can be. Who'd have thought someone so fun and so funny would be carrying such a heavy weight?

Originally Posted by gentlearts

Very interesting. I was the eldest daughter, and my daughter is the eldest daughter. She carries the torch in the family. If it weren’t for her, her 3 brothers would hardly get together with anyone.

As I put on my old lady Thanksgiving sweatshirt the other day I thought, "I am the Keeper of the Holidays."