Have you heard of “eldest daughter syndrome”? It’s the emotional burden eldest daughters are inclined to tackle (and are inspired to tackle) in lots of households from a younger age.
From caring for youthful siblings, serving to out with on a regular basis chores, taking care of sick mother and father to sorting procuring orders or on-line deliveries, eldest daughters usually shoulder a heavy however invisible burden of home duty from a younger age.
What’s fallacious with that? You may ask, should not the eldest kids, who’re alleged to be extra grown-up, assist out and take care of their youthful siblings? Aren’t women “naturally” higher at caring? These well-liked assumptions are so entrenched that they’ll make it tough for us to see the issue.
But #EldestDaughterSyndrome is now trending on TikTookay, with adolescent women talking out concerning the unfair quantity of unpaid (and unappreciated) labour they do of their households, in addition to discussing its hostile results on their lives, well being and wellbeing.
Of course, the “syndrome” has existed for hundreds of years throughout many components of the world. So why is it now being spoken about as such a problem?
This article is a part of Quarter Life, a sequence about points affecting these of us in our twenties and thirties. From the challenges of starting a profession and caring for our psychological well being, to the joy of beginning a household, adopting a pet or simply making pals as an grownup. The articles on this sequence discover the questions and convey solutions as we navigate this turbulent interval of life.
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Despite girls’s rise in training and employment, they nonetheless shoulder the lion’s share of housekeeping. Indeed, progress in direction of gender equality within the office has not translated into gender equality at dwelling. And eldest daughter syndrome can go some strategy to clarify why that is the case.
Research reveals that kids make a notable however usually missed contribution to home labour. Mirroring the gender divide amongst adults, women between 5 and 14 years previous spend 40% extra time on home work than boys.
Following a patriarchal pecking order, the eldest daughter usually bears the brunt of the burden amongst her siblings.
As voiced by many on TikTookay, the syndrome can impair eldest daughters’ wellbeing and “steal” their childhood as they’re rushed into assuming a disproportionate quantity of grownup duties – also called parentification. In doing so, it reproduces gender inequality in home labour from one technology to a different.
Why it occurs
At least three behavioural theories underlie eldest daughter syndrome and they’re usually concurrently at play, reinforcing each other.
First, the position modelling principle, which means that eldest daughters usually comply with their mom as a task mannequin in studying to “do” gender. Second, the sex-typing principle proposes that oldsters usually assign completely different, gendered duties to ladies and boys.
Sex-typing usually builds on mother and father’ gendered understanding of home work as one thing related to femininity. For mother and father who consciously attempt to instil gender equality of their kids, sex-typing can nonetheless happen as eldest daughters unconsciously be a part of their moms in gendered actions equivalent to cooking, home cleansing and procuring.
And third, the labour substitution principle means that when working moms have restricted time obtainable for home work, eldest daughters usually act as “substitutes”. As a consequence, they find yourself spending extra time on care provision and housekeeping.
Consequently, moms’ progress in direction of gender equality at work can come at the price of their eldest daughters selecting up the home slack at a younger age.
As we glance additional afield, the difficulty of eldest daughter syndrome has far-reaching implications for world gender inequality and an ongoing world care disaster.
In the Philippines, for instance, many moms migrate to the US, the Middle East and Europe to work as home employees.
Their work helps free their purchasers from home gender inequality to some extent by home outsourcing. But again within the Philippines, the ladies’s eldest daughters usually must step up as “surrogate” moms and run the family.
In this course of, eldest daughter syndrome reproduces home gender inequality throughout generations and offloads such inequality from one a part of the world to a different.
What can we do?
The “cure” may appear easy – we want households to recognise the unfair burden which will have been positioned on the eldest daughter and to redistribute family duties extra equally.
Yet, doing so is way from easy. It requires male members of the family particularly to step up their contribution to home work. In flip, it requires us to “undo” centuries of interested by housekeeping and care as one thing gendered and “feminine”.
To obtain that, we have to first recognise the issue that home labour, significantly labour carried out by kids and eldest daughters, which fits largely unseen, unpaid and under-valued.
In the 2023 UK Budget, the Pound 4 billion funding in extending childcare protection sheds some mild on the sheer financial worth of childcare, which, though large, represents solely a tiny fraction of the intensive vary of home duties disproportionately shouldered by girls and sometimes eldest daughters.
But we won’t change one thing we won’t see. This is why being extra conscious of eldest daughter syndrome, not solely as a person battle but additionally as a problem of gender inequality, is an effective begin.
Author: Yang Hu – Professor, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University