At 37, being the eldest daughter is emotionally draining – and costs me thousands

Instagram pop psychology normally earns nothing more than an eye roll from me, but the first time I saw someone talking about eldest daughter syndrome, it stopped me in my tracks. How was this person reading my life so accurately to me, and why were so many things suddenly slotting into place? Of course, having lingered for more than a few seconds on this one piece of content meant that my algorithm suddenly became incredibly eldest daughter-centric, and it wasn’t long before I started to think about this set of behaviours, so-called because they are common in first-born women and girls, applied to my rocky history with money. As you might suspect from the slightly whimsical moniker, Eldest Daughter Syndrome is not a formal clinical diagnosis, but rather a set of recognisable traits and behaviours that a certain group of people can gather around and recognise within themselves. It includes things like feeling responsible for everyone else’s wellbeing, easily falling into a parental role in all of your relationships, perfectionism and over-achieving, people-pleasing and struggling with boundaries. As I ticked each of these off my internal checklist, I realised how many of them I had already associated with some of my more problematic money habits, quickly calculating that the culmination of all of them must be some sort of final boss for keeping otherwise capable, intelligent women broke and confused. I am not only an eldest daughter, but an eldest daughter by quite some distance – my two younger sisters, technically half-siblings, are seven and eight years younger than me. I’m also the oldest in my friendship group, with an early September birthday. My husband is the eldest of six. In short, a perfect storm.Reflecting on the times that I fell foul of the circumstances of my birth was painful at first – seeing clearly for the first time that, in always being the one to pick up the bill or pay the tip, I was just disadvantaging myself financially at every tiny opportunity. Then, there were the bigger things. Being hyper-independent and terrified to admit to having made mistakes, I never felt able to ask for help or support as I tumbled into five figures of credit card debt, all the while working furiously to keep up the illusion of a responsible woman who had it all together. Even once I’d paid it all off, I couldn’t take advantage of my improved financial situation for myself and my family, instead choosing to subsidise holidays for friends – a few hundred pounds at a time – and offer paid work to a family member to the tune of up to £1,000 per month even though I hadn’t shored up my own income. It’s not all altruism and people-pleasing, though – some of it is competitiveness and a need to be first at everything. After paying off my debt and massively increasing my income, I pushed myself to buy a house as quickly as possible. It’s uncomfortable to admit, but it was at least in part because I found the fact that some of my friends had “overtaken” me on that front unbearable. The result of all of this is that I found myself once again in a financially precarious position, overcommitted in every single direction and burnt out in every way possible. Still, my obsessive “generosity” persisted, and I could not break these habits of a lifetime. I was so afraid that someone might see how close to the edge I was. Then, I had a baby and the bottom fell out of my income. I was forced to dismantle my whole illusion of control and superiority. I let one family member down, badly, and was forced to ask another for help. The anxiety I’d lived with for years while I was in debt reared its ugly head and almost dragged me under. “Eldest Daughter Syndrome” did not feel like a cute Instagram trend in those moments. And yet, I think this demolition of my role in all of my relationships, and more broadly how I fit into the world, will serve me well in the long run. The whole realisation acted not only as a prompt to go easier on myself, but also as a push to call myself out for not trusting other people to handle themselves without my intervention. Now, over a year later, I am reaping the rewards of letting go a little. I was able to draw on some of the more helpful traits of being the eldest – resilience, resourcefulness and drive – in order to cling on and push through, but I emerged more certain than ever that it isn’t fair on myself or on others to ever put myself in that situation again. That I cannot spend my life in a cycle excavating all my resources in services to the wants, needs and expectations of others and then frantically filling them in when it all gets too much. That actually, my financial generosity was often at best enabling and at worst stifling for the people I forced it on. It was hard to break the patterns at first – to leave the bill on the table, or to offer empathy but not solutions when someone lamented a large unexpected bill – but I have found other, more rewarding ways to be generous and supportive. There have been uncomfortable silences where people might have expected me to jump in, but there have also been more honest conversations. There has been a levelling effect in my relationships, and I have realised just how much resentment I was carrying from my own determination to always swoop in to the rescue. I still have responsibilities, of course, but I finally understand that my main financial obligation is to myself, my husband and my children, not every single person in my life.