'Eldest Daughter Syndrome': Can Birth Order and Gender Really Affect Your Personality?
Fact checked by Nick Blackmer
Online, “eldest daughter syndrome” has launched a discussion about how gender and birth order might be able to affect a person’s personality.
It’s not an official mental health diagnosis, but people say eldest daughter syndrome can lead to traits such as worrying or feeling anxious, people-pleasing, and more.
Firstborn girls may be expected to take on more physical or emotional labor in their families, but there’s no research to suggest that birth order determines personality.
Can your birth order affect your personality or even predispose you to certain mental health struggles? Online, people think so—the term “eldest daughter syndrome” is making waves on social media, with many women saying they relate to these buzzy “symptoms.”
Eldest daughter syndrome is not an official mental health diagnosis but rather a way to describe some of the pressures and responsibilities placed on the firstborn daughter in a family, said Kati Morton, LMFT, a licensed marriage and family therapist, YouTube Creator, and author.
Firstborn daughters might experience “being responsible for more domestic labor and being held to a higher standard than their siblings,” Morton told Health. “Eldest daughters also share that they felt like the third parent, and are often responsible for the emotional caretaking of their entire family.”
The idea is that, because of this added pressure, firstborn daughters are more prone to personality traits such as people-pleasing, anxiety, and others.
And this definition has clearly resonated—Morton’s TikTok video on eldest daughter syndrome has received over 6.7 million views since it was posted in late February.
Beth Filippo, 42, a mother of three kids from New Lenox, Illinois, has found the discussion relatable—growing up with a younger brother, she has always felt a weighing sense of responsibility for her family.
“It’s far more than wanting to do something because you care about your family,” she told Health. “It’s guilt, obligation, and knowing that any reliability will only come from me.”
The term seems to be consistent with some women’s lived experience, but is there any evidence beyond the anecdotal that being a firstborn daughter can really influence your personality?
Here’s what experts had to say about eldest daughter syndrome and how personality traits, gender, and birth order are connected.
What is Eldest Daughter Syndrome?
In Morton’s TikTok video, she ascribes the following eight traits to eldest daughter syndrome:
An intense feeling of responsibility
Being an overachiever, type A, and very driven
Worrying a lot and having anxiety
Struggling with people-pleasing behaviors
Having a hard time setting boundaries
Resenting siblings and family
Struggling with feelings of guilt
Having a difficult time in your adult relationships
As the name might suggest, the traits associated with eldest daughter syndrome connect both to gender expectations and birth order.
For one, older siblings will often take on additional responsibilities simply because of their age, said Julia Rohrer, Dr. rer. nat, a personality psychologist at the Wilhelm Wundt Institute for Psychology at Leipzig University in Germany.
“They can be assigned certain tasks earlier, help out [and] watch their siblings, and so on,” she told Health.
But girls and women, in particular, often face extra pressures and work, as the division of labor is still oftentimes gendered, Rohrer explained.
“In many families, women end up doing more chores and more care work,” she said. “If you combine these two things, there is a good chance that in at least some families, the eldest daughter will end up with more responsibilities than all of the other kids.”
For Meghan Klasic, 42, a mother of three living in Lake Elmo, Minnesota, this was her experience growing up. She is the only girl in a family of seven.
“My brothers ‘affectionately’ referred to me as mom junior, mainly when I was nagging them or repeating what my mom had said if I didn’t feel they were doing it correctly,” she told Health. “Especially with my younger brothers, I acted motherly, assisted in changing diapers and being helpful or playing with them.”
Related: Perfectionism and Anxiety: The Problem With Trying to Be Perfect
Evidence to Support Eldest Daughter Syndrome is Mixed
Despite eldest daughter syndrome's resonance online, researchers are skeptical.
One 2024 study is commonly referenced online in connection to birth order, and it found that mothers’ prenatal distress can accelerate certain pubertal development in daughters, especially those who are firstborn. Essentially, these girls have faster social—but not sexual—development, which could be an evolutionary advantage for mothers who need help assistance in raising other kids.
However, Rohrer said the study is only very loosely connected to the idea of the eldest daughter syndrome.
“The data have been sliced many ways, so I wouldn’t put too much trust in that one birth order interaction effect that they found, among girls only,” she said.
Researchers have found that firstborn children tend to score higher on intelligence tests than their younger siblings, but these are small, not deterministic differences, she explained.
Other research Rohrer has published found birth order does not seem to have major effects on personality traits such as emotional stability, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and openness to experiences.
Because of these findings, Rohrer said she is “quite skeptical about the eldest daughter syndrome as an explanation for why people turn out the way they do, with the specific struggles that they do have.”
Though birth order doesn’t determine a person’s personality, social expectations could, in part, explain some of the “symptoms” of eldest daughter syndrome, Rohrer explained.
Some firstborn daughters may “have a disposition to readily take on responsibilities and to worry a lot, so they will naturally be more easily squeezed into the role of the uber-eldest daughter who takes care of everything and everyone,” she said. “This, of course, can lead to resentment later in life, even if it does not actually affect their personality.”
Another explanation for eldest daughter is simply that these problems ascribed to the “condition” are just most people’s experiences, Rohrer said. For instance, it’s common to struggle with relationships because they’re often difficult. And many people feel pressure to achieve, and think they have more stress than they should.
Related: These Personality Traits Can Lower Your Risk of Dementia
For Some, the Term May Be Helpful
With what the research says for now, it’s unlikely that eldest daughter syndrome is a “mono-casual explanation” for these eight different traits, Rohrer explained.
While it can be reassuring to think that current problems can be explained through one specific factor in childhood, “these stories that we tell about our lives are often just that—stories that appeal to us for one reason or another," she said.
Morton agreed that there are too many variables aside from birth order that could impact a person’s personality, but maintained the topic is still significant. The fact that so many people connect with the idea of eldest daughter syndrome means it’s important and worth looking into, she added.
“We all like to have words to describe what we are feeling, and I think for [many] eldest daughters, they just thought something was wrong with them or that they were going crazy,” said Morton. “Being able to identify their emotional experience is validating and reminds them that they aren’t alone in it.”
Related: All About the Different Personality Types
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