More recently, The Hunger Games series saw 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen taking her 12-year-old sister’s place in a tournament where she has only a 4 per cent chance of survival.
Who has a Type-A personality, is an anxious overachiever, unable to set boundaries and constantly engaging in people-pleasing behaviour? According to a recent viral video on social media, it’s the eldest daughter of a family. In a clip that has been watched over six million times, licensed marriage and family therapist Katie Morton says that the term eldest daughter syndrome (EDS) “[was] coined to describe the unique pressures and responsibilities placed on the oldest daughter of the family”.
It may not be an officially recognised “syndrome” according to the DSM-5, but going by the responses to the video, as well as a tweet on the same subject — “Are u happy or are u the oldest sibling and also a girl” — the “parentification” of the oldest female child has a wide resonance.
This characterisation has been mined for stories for long. Louisa May Alcott’s classic coming-of-age novel Little Women exemplifies the responsible and people-pleasing eldest daughter traits in the 17-year-old Meg March. Or consider the “sensible” Elinor in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and the near-maternal attitude of Margaret towards the younger Schlegel siblings in E M Forster’s Howards End.
More recently, The Hunger Games series saw 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen taking her 12-year-old sister’s place in a tournament where she has only a 4 per cent chance of survival.
Families are, however, not so simple. If there are older daughters burdened by caregiving, there are plenty of examples for the reverse. In the realm of fiction, the most famous one is the novel-turned-film My Sister’s Keeper where the youngest daughter is only born to ensure the older daughter lives. If social media has validated the #eldestdaughtersyndrome and helped many “feel seen”, it has also overlooked the experience of millions of others whose lives cannot be flattened into a single role.
