Eldest daughters have a reputation for being Type A and bossy. But they can also do emotional heavy lifting in families. What does science say about how birth order influences our personalities?

Guests

Allison Alford, associate professor in the Department of Information Systems and Business Analytics at Baylor University. Author of “Good Daughtering: The Work You’ve Always Done, the Credit You’ve Never Gotten, and How to Finally Feel Like Enough.”

Rodica Damian, associate professor of social and personality psychology at the University of Houston.

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: If you’ve been on social media lately, maybe you’ve seen the jokes about eldest daughters, like the eldest daughter on vacation.

(TIKTOK MONTAGE)

Oh, you guys are up. Are you ready to go? I’ve been up for three hours.

I’m telling you, we have to put this umbrella up. We have skin cancer in our family.

You want a carrot? I feel like I haven’t seen you eat a vegetable in three days.

I am relaxed. What are you talking about? I’m so relaxed.

CHAKRABARTI: Or the eldest daughter in therapy.

No, I’m actually so good. I just feel personally responsible for the emotional stability of everyone I’ve ever met. No, I really don’t need help. I just need everyone to stop needing things from me. I just want someone to tell me what to do for once.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, maybe you’re like, “Oh my God, that is just like my bossy and annoying older sister,” or, “That is so not me. Not at all.” Or maybe, like some On Point listeners, you are feeling very seen.

(MONTAGE)

ANNA: Not only am I the eldest daughter, but I’m the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter.

NANCY: I am the eldest of four and the original boss girl. Actually, Barbie and I share the same birthday.

JENA: It has made me pretty bossy.

ANNA: We’re perfectionists. As my mom would say, the anxiety is just baked in. You wanna set that really high bar and really high standard for yourself, and you’re not necessarily waiting for someone else to do it for you.

MOLLY: Having to do firsts. I was the first one to leave to go to college. I was the first one to move out of state for my career. I was the first one in a pretty conservative evangelical Christian family to drink alcohol and turn away from the faith that I had been raised in and do all of these things that were seen as pretty taboo.

NANCY: I consider myself to be very independent. I’ve never, ever wanted to be dependent on anybody.

KAREN: I was quite the overachiever. During the time in the ’70s when I went to law school, I often found myself being the only female lawyer. The first female lawyer in this job or this position, only female lawyer in this area, blah, blah, blah.

NANCY: I naturally became a leader and an organizer and a compassionate caregiver.

ANNA: I would always cook dinner for my family when I was younger. I still always plan the family vacations.

NANCY: My career was as a project manager, so that was just a real natural role for me. People would ask me, “What’s your number in the family?” And I’d say, “You guess.” And they’d say, “You’re number one, aren’t you?” And I said, “Of course I am.” (LAUGHS)

CHAKRABARTI: This is On Point. I’m Meghna Chakrabarti.

And those were On Point listeners Anna in Delanson, New York; Nancy in Grey Cloud Island, Minnesota; Jena in Florence, South Carolina; Molly in Seattle, Washington; and Karen in San Marcos, Texas.

And yes, today we are talking about eldest daughters, and I’m gonna look across the glass here to my crew in the control room.

Do I give you eldest daughter vibes, guys? Yes, no? Yes. I got some thumbs up and a lot of vigorously nodding heads in ascent. This is a term that’s now been bouncing around, eldest daughter syndrome, but is the syndrome real, or is it actually more about the expectations society places on women in general?

And is there actually any science at all to back up how our place in the family can affect our personalities? Let’s turn to Allison Alford. She’s author of the book Good Daughtering: The Work You’ve Always Done, the Credit You’ve Never Gotten, and How to Finally Feel Like Enough. She’s also an associate professor in the Department of Information Systems and Business Analytics at Baylor University, and she joins us from Texas, from Waco, Texas.

Professor Alford, welcome to On Point.

ALLISON ALFORD: Thank you. Glad to be here. Please call me Allison.

CHAKRABARTI: Allison, okay. Is that an eldest daughter thing, or is that a woman thing already? Just like wanting to be more likable and familiar right off the bat.

ALFORD: Who knows, right? But I’m most used to Allison, and the other sounds like one of my students coming to get me and asking me for a grade change or something.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS) Okay, fair enough, Allison. I did my act of full disclosure. Yes, I am an eldest daughter. What about you?

ALFORD: My full disclosure, I’m the younger daughter, but I really like to think of myself and my sister as partner daughters now.

CHAKRABARTI: Ooh, okay, that’s a new term. Let’s put a little pin in that and come back to it.

So did your experience as a partner or younger daughter lead to your interest in this topic, or how did you get around to the studying of what you call daughtering?

ALFORD: Yeah. I was raised by a family full of really strong women, capable, thoughtful, smart women, so I was always aware of how much effort women put into making family happen.

And then when I was in graduate school, I was studying family communication at the University of Texas at Austin, and I was reading a lot of things about marriage, and I was reading things about friendship, and I was reading a lot of things about mothering. But as I read these items, I thought, we’re missing a little piece here.

We’re missing what it is that women do in adulthood for decades that’s part of being a big part, an important part of being a family member, and it’s not showing up in the literature. So I decided I had to go find out.

CHAKRABARTI: What women do in adulthood, so are you talking as adult daughters or what?

ALFORD: Yeah, absolutely. So my research explores how adult women act as daughters in families, and so that role is, how do I exist in a family in relation to my parent or parents? Most of my research over the past decade has been asking women, “What is daughtering? What does it mean to be a daughter? What do daughters do or not do?”

And what was really interesting is at the beginning of this research, women were practically unable to talk about themselves from that daughtering role. They kept saying things like my mother does this,” or “When my mother does this, we’re doing this thing together, then this happens.”

And I noticed that there just wasn’t a language of agency in daughtering and it was really lacking that perspective.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so how, then how would you define daughtering? Because Allison, to be perfectly frank, I hear that phrase and I’m like, oh, this is the gerundizing of just what is simply, in my mind, it’s just the state of being the female child in a family. But do you have a specific definition of it?

ALFORD: Yeah. I consider daughtering to be the often invisible emotional, mental, logistical, and identity labors that daughters do to keep families connected. And often they’re unaware of just how much of that they’re doing until they’re burnt out.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. Okay. So we’re gonna come back to that daughtering in general. But it’s this social media spread of this phrase eldest daughter syndrome, that has really caught our attention. Let’s actually turn back to TikTok, and here is family therapist Kati Morton explaining what she calls the eight signs of eldest daughter syndrome.

KATI MORTON: Number one, you have an intense feeling of responsibility. Two, you are an overachiever, type A, and very driven. Three, you worry a lot and probably have anxiety. Four, you struggle with people-pleasing behaviors. Five, you have a hard time placing and upholding boundaries. Six, you resent your siblings and family.

Seven, you struggle with feelings of guilt. And eight, you have a difficult time in your adult relationships.

CHAKRABARTI: This seems highly negative. I would actually offer several positive aspects of being the eldest daughter, but Allison, how do you reflect on, this is social media therapy, okay? So big asterisk I should say there. But go ahead. What are your thoughts?

ALFORD: Yeah, I think that social media’s a great place for women to share their experiences and say, “This is what’s happening to me.” But we can also recognize it’s not scientifically derived to get to that phenomenon or this name.

But it does reveal an important part of women’s experience. And so what she’s calling eldest daughter syndrome, I hear these certain aspects of daughtering, the labor of daughtering, which really is part of daughtering, but not the whole story. As you say there’s the challenges, there’s what we have to give, there’s the work but there’s also benefits and wonderful aspects to being a daughter or being in, as you say, the eldest daughter.

So I think that when we talk about daughtering, we want to think about the whole role performance. And what we know is that if we talk about mothers and mothering, we can do that. We can say we love it, it’s hard, it’s beautiful, it’s painful, it’s gross sometimes. But we can appreciate every aspect of it, and I think that’s what we need to do for daughtering, and we just need a little bit more language and discussion around it.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so take us a little deeper because for your book and in your research, you’ve interviewed now, what, hundreds and hundreds of daughters? Yes. And so what are some of the common themes that have emerged from these interviews with them?

ALFORD: Yes. So I’ve interviewed hundreds of women over the past decade and asked them, what is daughtering and what do you do?

And what I learned is that there’s four different types of labor women expressed to me, and so the ways that we show up in relationship. And when I say labor, these things cost us. They cost us some of our resources, our time, our energy, or our money. So the different ways that we show up are acting.

We might do something for our family member, go over to their house, make them a meal, help them clean up a room or the garage or something. The second type of labor is the mental or cognitive labor. It’s the thinking, anticipating, preparing, remembering. The third kind of labor is emotional, so it’s soothing and smoothing and being a sounding board and doing conflict resolution.

And the last kind of labor is identity based. How do I act like a daughter even if no one’s around, even if I’m not face-to-face with my parent? And so the women who told me their stories said that much of what they do for doing daughtering is invisible. It’s maybe I could put it on Instagram or do a TikTok about it if I made a beautiful holiday meal and invited everyone over, and I was like, “What a great daughter,” and I’m taking care of this family stuff.

But the other kinds of labor, the emotional, the cognitive, the identity, you can’t see those because they’re happening inside people’s heads. So we often miss giving women credit for how exhausting those efforts can be.

CHAKRABARTI: Did some, any common theme emerge that was less invisible or less depleting?

The positive stuff essentially?

ALFORD: Absolutely. There’s a ton of positive stuff. Yeah. And the first part is recognize the labor. The second part is say, “Do I wanna do this in this way or not?” And then the third part is to say, “How do I wanna stick with my family so that I can really enjoy these people?”

Because that’s the goal, and many daughters do really love and enjoy their families.

Part II

CHAKRABRATI: Here’s Pam. She’s in Minnesota. She says her daughter has eldest daughter syndrome.

PAM: I have an eldest daughter, and since she was a little girl, she would call family meetings. We were all to meet on the stairs. She would have an agenda, and we would talk about how to make our family function better. We’ve always joked that she raised us, and she is now the powerhouse in her career too at age 27.

CHAKRABARTI: Let’s go over to Spokane, Washington. Chris is there, and Chris told us she was basically her mom’s right-hand person growing up as one of nine kids.

CHRIS: My mother would send me to the store sometimes with just $2 or $3 and tell me to get as much food as I could for us for supper for the 11 of us. I can remember feeling anxious about that, that I would not be able to make good decisions, and I was maybe 11.

My mother also asked me to call businesses that we owed money to and ask them to give us a break for a while. Perhaps she thought that them talking to me would make them go easier on us or just save her the embarrassment, because God knows she had enough to do.

CHAKRABARTI: That’s Chris in Spokane, Washington.

Allison, in the previous segment, we talked a lot about adult daughtering, but I’m wondering if you could reflect with me on what you heard here in terms of the experience that eldest daughters are self-reporting. I do wanna say that clearly. These are people who are willing to talk about it and we didn’t have any control over the stories that they left with us.

But the experiences that eldest daughters seem to say or share that they have while they’re actually children in the family.

ALFORD: Yeah. I think these stories are so powerful, and these eldest daughters are sharing, “Hey, I was asked to carry a lot of responsibility,” and many of those traits began in childhood, and then they carried on into adulthood, framing who we became even as professionals that we heard in that first story.

I think this is a great point for us to look at what are female children asked to do, especially the oldest female child, maybe even in large families or low-income families or immigrant families or spaces where there’s less privilege for the parent to have the ability to do all the things.

So they ask the child to do some of these things. And it’s not just necessarily being the oldest. A lot of it’s about being the female child, and we’re asked to carry a lot of responsibility. I think what’s important here is to note so far in research, we don’t have anything that predicts, that says because you’re the oldest female child, you will have eldest daughter syndrome.

But on the other hand, we’re hearing from a lot of women who are the eldest daughter, and they’re saying, “This is my experience.” And I believe them, and I think it’s a great moment in culture for them to share that story, and we’re just putting language to something that feels really important, which is the invisible labor and responsibility that women are asked to carry in families.

CHAKRABARTI: In the interest of being as rigorous in this conversation as possible, Allison, I wonder, I hope you’ll forgive me if, in advance, if I ask some questions that come at this from a different angle, okay?

ALFORD: Go for it.

CHAKRABARTI: Because I’m always thinking even in the course of thinking how we put together these shows, that the way we frame the show, the questions I ask, they’re like a little spotlight, and the spotlight’s only going to highlight the patch of ground that it hits.

But there may be lots of things going around, going on around that spotlight that are actually equally important or interesting. So I guess what I’m trying to say is, do we know whether sons feel the same way? I feel like I’m concerned that this conversation could come off as seeming dismissive of men, but I am just gonna presume that men growing up in families as sons feel a similar set, if not kind, of expectations put on them of emotional burdens, et cetera.

Just your thoughts.

ALFORD: Yeah. Most of my research has been on women and daughters, but I have also explored what do sons think, what do they, what are they doing in families? And what we know is that sons do grow up with expectations, and sons do show up in their families and do relational things.

But the gap is what is expected of men, young men and men in adulthood. And I think that’s changing generationally over time. But typically, men are not as expected to do the remembering of a birthday or an event. They’re not expected to do the anticipating, tracking, coordinating, worrying, and managing.

But I think that doesn’t mean that men don’t do it. It’s just that they’re not the default responsible party most of the time. But I want to give sons their flowers. I’m married to an adult son who is doing a fantastic job for the last decade with doing a lot of caregiving for his aging mom.

But I think that doesn’t mean that men don’t do it. Allison Alford

And I have a adult 18-year-old son who does a lot of great sonning. But it’s not just about the small individual things that sons do. It’s a cultural conversation about what are men expected to do, what is considered manly within a family, or normal or reasonable for men showing up to create connection and flourishing.

CHAKRABARTI: I totally agree, and I hope someone out there is doing that research, because I would love to hear that story. Guys, by the way, if you’re listening and you’re like yeah, you gotta be more fair to men,” just yesterday, I asked all of On Point listeners, and I specifically said including sons to send us your stories.

And we got, gentlemen, come on, we got one. We got one story from one man. So if you feel unheard, guys, when you’re given an opportunity to speak, please take it. Okay. Now, Allison, let’s go back to the women here. You talked about some other things that I think are actually very critical in this conversation.

First of all are cultural norms, right? Because there are very different cultural expectations of women and daughters around the world, right? And then also socioeconomic status, because I actually think that socioeconomic status at least in the United States, is one of the biggest drivers of all kinds of dynamics and behaviors that we see.

So can you talk a little bit more about that and women and daughters?

ALFORD: Yeah, I’m with you. Now, many times when I talk about daughtering, people’s minds default to caregiving, the elder, when your parent is elderly or ill, or let’s say they need a surgery, or when they become much older and they can’t live alone or they just have more needs.

And the thing is that daughters really do a lot of that, the majority of that type of care. Now, in my perspective, daughtering doesn’t start at that point. It starts decades earlier. But what we do know about women who do caregiving for the elderly and the ill is that it’s typically those who live geographically closest to the parent, and not necessarily the eldest or even the daughter.

It’s who lives close geographically. And then the second thing is who has the socioeconomic privilege to do it, meaning who can take off work, or who is not working, or who is retired? And those are financial privileges. And so we also see that across the lifespan. Who has the financial privilege to fly across the country to see their parents more often, or pay for a family vacation so everybody can go on a cruise together?

And so these financial limitations or privileges often impact how daughters are able to show up, or who in the family shows up to carry the responsibility and do the work.

CHAKRABARTI: Let’s go back and listen to more of our On Point daughters. This is Lillian. She’s in Quincy, Massachusetts. She’s actually a youngest daughter, but Lillian often feels like the eldest, oh, interesting, because she’s actually the more reliable one.

LILLIAN: From a really young age, I took a parentified role in supporting my parents.

I am quite often the first phone call that my parents make when they need support with something. When it comes to important paperwork, other things of that nature, I am the default go-to person.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so that was Lillian in Quincy, Massachusetts. Here’s Nancy in Grey Cloud Island, Minnesota, and she says it could be a burden to feel responsible for keeping her siblings from fighting.

NANCY: I would joke to my mother, not so much joking, I’d be angry at the time, and I would say, “They could be stabbing me with knives, and it would be my fault,” because I was supposed to be taking care of the situation.

CHAKRABARTI: And here’s Christie in Standish, Maine, who told us she basically raised her nine siblings, eight brothers and one sister.

CHRISTIE: My parents had issues. My dad worked three jobs. My mom had babies, and I was the one that was the oldest and the responsible one to be sure that all duties were done every single day, all chores were done. The boys went to football. The boys went to school. I pretty much did it all.

CHAKRABARTI: That’s Christie in Standish, Maine.

I’d like to bring Rodica Damian into the conversation now. She’s an associate professor of social and personality psychology at the University of Houston and joins us from Houston, Texas. Professor Damian, welcome to On Point.

RODICA DAMIAN: Hi, everyone, happy to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: And by the way, Texas is representing today.

I’m really delighted about it. Same first question to you. Are you an eldest daughter?

DAMIAN: Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: Does any of what you’ve been hearing from our listeners resonate?

DAMIAN: I think it’s interesting because to some extent, yes, but I did, my parents lived in Romania, so I did move away when I was 19 for college and then grad school, and my brother, who’s younger, is still there.

So I think we will probably in the future share caregiving in terms of combining my resources with his closeness, so I think yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Okay, that’s really interesting. We’ve been saying, we’ve been talking with Allison about daughtering writ large. But of course, what brought our attention to this is the internet calling something eldest daughter syndrome.

Now, look, I have to be frank, I’m quite skeptical about birth order theory. But is there any evidence that place in family in terms of birth order can have some, let’s see, correlative effect on our personalities?

DAMIAN: So there’s been extensive research for the past 100 years on birth order effects on personality, and original studies started off as very small, without proper statistical controls like socioeconomic status that was mentioned here, and how many siblings are in a family.

These are all aspects that influence the different pressures put on firstborns, for example. The strongest evidence to date suggests that there are no reliable differences in personality based on birth order once you account for all the other statistical confounding factors. So once you, let’s say, hold constant gender, socioeconomic status family structure, all of those things, to try to get at the pure effect of birth order on personality, and looking across all different kinds of essential personality traits, we find no differences.

However, that doesn’t mean that there are no differences in gender, for example. So we do know from a lot of research that women are higher in what we call agreeableness, which is a personality trait that has to do with the tendency to give more, to give more caregiving, to be more empathetic and all that.

So there’s evidence that women might do more of that work. So I think that what Alison’s talking about, which she’s referring to as the daughtering burden, I think that’s much more consistent with scientific evidence than the eldest daughter syndrome.

CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. Okay it is few and far between, the times where I feel utterly vindicated in my skepticism.

So thank you for telling me that science does not back up the popular belief in birth order theory. Actually, that’s interesting. Can I just do a quick follow-up on that? What are some of the problematic studies that came out in decades past that you’re pointing to as not being rigorous?

DAMIAN: The first time this debate occurred in psychology was the fight between Freud and Adler. As part of psychoanalysis, Freud, as a firstborn, thought firstborns had the best personalities, and Adler, who was a middle born thought first and last borns were all neurotic.

And yeah, so that’s the first time it occurred. And then later, there’s the evolutionary based theory, the family niche theory, the idea that siblings compete for parental investment and attention, and that the firstborn takes the path of being the most responsible but also neurotic because they’re trying to please their parents versus the laterborns are more, have to fill a different niche to get attention, so they’ll be more fun-loving and risk-taking and sociable.

It’s just that the now research on, my study had 257,000 representative U.S. sample, and there are other studies of tens of thousands of people from the UK, Germany and other ones from the U.S., from Indonesia, and none of these studies with representative samples and proper statistical controls find any reliable personality differences.

The only thing we find is a one IQ point difference, where firstborns have slightly higher verbal IQ, but you wouldn’t be able to notice it between talking to different people, right? But one IQ point, it’s probably because parents have more time to read to firstborns because they don’t have as much stuff to do.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. That’s interesting, so that would also be highly socioeconomically correlated I think. And also very much of our time, right?  Because this is so cultural, so economic, and so modern, I think, that kind of parenting that you were just describing. So fascinating.

Okay. So Allison, just jump in here. I don’t know if you wanna give us some thoughts about the fact that we just booted birth order theory out the door. But Rodica’s also basically reinforcing from her research what you were talking about, what we’re talking about today, that there are —

And I’m gonna stick to the fact that there are not more expectations put on daughters, but there’s a very specific set of expectations of daughters that also … Rodica talked about it in terms of these personality traits, in fact.

ALFORD: Yeah. What Rodica said, I just fist pumped in the air.

I think that we want to have logical explanations for who ends up doing what, but when we’re talking about eldest daughter syndrome and some people are thinking, “Okay, this must determine or guarantee or force us into a specific personality type,” what I hear instead is a question of responsibility.

Who ends up holding the care? Who ends up doing the work? And I think that underlying that is a question of the invisible labor. So women are trying to, in these posts, in these conversations, in this trending topic, they’re trying to express, “I’m overloaded. I’m doing a lot of invisible labor in my family.”

And we’ve heard today from women in many positions, the only child the younger, youngest child, and the eldest daughter, and I think that we should listen to those stories and say, What is the labor that women are doing, and how can we support women in expressing what they’re trying to say about needing to share this burden with someone else so that they can then enjoy their family? They can like being part of a family.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Let’s go back to our On Point listeners. This is Maddie in Ventura, California. She says she’s the eldest of four, but her siblings all have stronger personalities.

MADDIE: I think I would have been completely bullied if I’d been younger, but because I was the oldest, I got the respect of being the older sister.

We’re all in our 70s now, but I’m still the big sister, even though I am shorter than all of them.

CHAKRABARTI: And this is Christina in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She told us it can be tricky being the younger sibling to her big sister.

CHRISTINA: My sister is the boss, always just railroaded everything. I’m 62, my sister is 63, and to this day she makes me feel like I’m eight years old and I don’t know what I’m doing.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so that was Christina in Milwaukee, and let’s go over to Seattle, Washington, where Molly says we heard, actually, we heard from Molly a little earlier saying that as the eldest daughter, she was the first to break with her family’s conservative evangelical Christian faith.

MOLLY: At the time, it felt really risky and scary and often fraught with emotions between me and my parents.

Now, as I’m reaching almost my 40s, I’m finally settling into that role of I did these things for myself, but I also did them for my younger cousins and my younger brother. Yes, it was hard, but it was necessary, and I’m proud to have been the one to pave a new path, pave a new way.

CHAKRABARTI: So Allison and Rodica.

Actually, Rodica, I never asked you, can I call you by your first name or would you prefer Professor Damian?

DAMIAN: It’s fine either way.

CHAKRABARTI: Rodica’s okay? … Yeah. Oh, okay. So I wanna actually see this from a different perspective now because while we have definitely been talking about this shared experience of expectations of, as Allison, as you described, this extra cognitive labor, the emotional labor the acting to be the facilitator in the social bonds of a family, that these can be unrecognized burdens.

I also hear something coming out of those experiences from our listeners that’s quite different, and that is independence, leadership, and agency. And I feel like especially for modern American women, these are things that also come from the same expectations or the same acts of daughtering. And Allison, I was wondering what you thought about that.

ALFORD: Yeah, I love hearing about what’s the beautiful part that comes out of the experiences that women have in families. I think what we’re saying here is eldest daughter positioning may not be predictive of what you will become, but there are women saying, “Hey, here’s what I have become, and this is my real, true lived experience,” and I believe them.

And so taking on the responsibility, whether it was given to you because of your birth order or not, then produces a result, an important result in women, the ability to lead, the ability to be a boss, the ability to think and plan and organize and tell others what to do and be effective at that.

And so I think that what we’re finding in this is social media gave women a language for an experience they were having, and we found a label before we found an explanation. And I think we’re saying the explanation isn’t being the eldest, but it is something about doing daughtering and being responsible in families.

CHAKRABARTI: Rodica, you had talked about agreeableness being one of the big five personality traits. And again, like popularly, I think in the media, that’s often discussed as a negative expectation of women. But again, like I just see, you could see agreeableness as something completely different, that for our society to function, for human beings to live and work together in groups, we can’t all be at each other’s throats all the time.

DAMIAN: Oh, yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: If we have a group of people who’s especially, whose emotional, so whose EQ is high, that’s essential for a society to function.

DAMIAN: Yes, agreeableness has an unfortunate name as a personality trait because it sounds like you’re just agreeing with people and being a doormat.

But it’s actually not that. As a personality trait, it is about emotional intelligence, empathy, caregiving, and getting along. So actually, it is adaptive. The only thing it’s not adaptive for is negotiating for higher pay. So people who are higher in agreeableness do end up with lower retirement funds and that sort of stuff.

But overall, it is a getting along trait, and actually people, all people, men and women, as they mature, they become, they increase in agreeableness because it is an adaptive trait because you, it helps you get along. But it is also a separate trait from you mentioned leadership.

That’s actually a facet of extroversion, which is a different personality trait. And I also wanted to mention related to what you were saying about being given a role and then that shaping you, we do know that personal, you’re not stuck with your personality. So there’s about maybe 30 to 40% of the variation between people’s personality traits is due to genetic factors, but the rest is non-shared experiences, which means the experiences you have, social roles.

So one personality development principle is called the social investment principle, and this is the idea that when you’re given a certain role, you’re basically gonna change your personality to live up to that role. So we know that when people start their first job, they start increasing in conscientiousness, which is how responsible they are, how reliable and all that.

So being given a leadership position can in fact pressure you to become better at leading, right? So I think it is about those social pressures and the positions we put people in. The only thing I’d add is because we don’t see systematic personality trait differences between first and laterborns, whether they’re men or women.

I tested it, both even for men and women separately or together. It’s, there’s just no, specifically when you hold everything constant, there’s no systematic signal for birth order impacting this. It means that, so this, what this also means is that at least in the samples it’s been tested on, there’s no cultural practice that consistently applies to all firstborns.

So it’s not the case that every family put, forces their firstborn to be the leader, right?

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So I’m glad you brought back cultural practices because we did receive a story from Keyvan who listens to On Point in Claremont, California. She’s the eldest of seven but she told us it wasn’t just because she’s the eldest that she became who she is today.

She says her father was instrumental in helping her understand her powers as a girl in Iran.

KEYVAN: I don’t think this happened in a vacuum just because I was an elder daughter. I owe it to my father believing that men and women are two wings of a bird, and especially girls in this age, according to the Baha’i teachings, should claim their place in society.

CHAKRABARTI: Allison, I was wondering if I could go back to you because I don’t know if your research or your interviews actually looked at how the daughtering takes place in other cultures. Did it?

ALFORD: I primarily interviewed women in the United States. But I have a whole chapter in my book on intersectional daughtering, and that’s how culture, geography, and cultural practices shape how we end up as daughters.

CHAKRABARTI: So tell me a little bit more about that.

ALFORD: So I think it’s important to recognize that what country you’re from, what language you speak, what religious practices you participate in and the expectations of women around the world, and even differently here in the United States are gonna shape how you become as a daughter and what’s expected of you.

So I think it’s really important to notice those differences and appreciate those differences without saying that they create some sort of system or order, as Rodica’s saying.

CHAKRABARTI: Rodica, did you wanna add to that? Because the cultural part is really fascinating to me, actually. Because we’re talking, this conversation is happening in the context of 2026 America, which is only one slice of the giant pie of humanity.

DAMIAN: I can, I think that I completely agree that the cultural practice, if the cultural practice is consistently applied to a social category based on a specific characteristic, then that’ll have consequences. So for example, the one thing we do find for birth order, beside the one IQ point, like I said, is that in the U.S., first-borns have slightly higher levels of education by the end of their lives.

It’s not much. It’s about two and a half months extra, but still that’s a systematic difference. Versus in Indonesia, they actually have lower levels of education. So what’s interesting is that in the U.S. it could be something like, you invest, maybe your college fund runs out for the later born, or it has something to do with investments, so first-borns end up with slightly more.

Versus in Indonesia, the older child actually has to help their family with their farm. So there’s more money for the younger child to go to school. And then if you think of Victorian England, where you have primogeniture practices, where the first-born boy always gets the family land.

That’s gonna have a huge impact in shaping your socioeconomic status and who you are. So if the culture you’re in systematically decides what to do with you based on your birth order, for example, then you will have differences in outcomes based on that. It’s just that, yeah, there’s no current systematic way, besides the education thing and the verbal IQ, tiny differences where personality types differ by birth order.

But that doesn’t invalidate the lived experience of somebody who has a daughtering burden, which is a completely different issue, as I said earlier, from birth order. Or even an eldest daughter who feels the same way. It’s just that it’s probably not because of their birth order having shaped their personality, but because of the specific expectations within their family.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I feel again, that men, sons carry a burden, too. It’s just that it’s hard for us at least in the course of this conversation and the research that we were doing, it was, like, hard for us to get men to talk about it, which is actually quite interesting. So I wonder what they, their felt burdens might be like holding up the honor of the family, not disappointing their parents, which daughters also, of course, also feel, et cetera, et cetera.

Guys, really, I wish you had actually called us when I told you to. I wanna give you a platform here. But let’s go back to our listeners, these these eldest daughters who really did understand the assignment, as my producer Claire so brilliantly said. This is Shannon, who’s in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and she told us she always felt like she had to set a good example.

SHANNON: My younger brother was born five years after me, so there was a very big gap in which I was the only child, the only grandchild, and the only girl. The expectations were high and constant.

CHAKRABARTI: And here is Jan, who listens in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

JAN: I got all the responsibility genes, all the logic genes, all the stick-to-it-iveness genes in the whole family. I have an older brother and a younger sister. The younger sister was the baby, so she didn’t have to do anything. The older brother, because he was the firstborn male, he was special, and nothing was expected of him.

Whereas the oldest daughter, everything was expected.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Allison, I want to go back to you because I’m still thinking about that list of invisible labor that you’ve said that daughtering encompasses. In the conversations with the hundreds of women that you had. But I don’t think I heard you say that any of the women said they wanted to be relieved of those burdens, but rather they wanted them, the work to be acknowledged.

ALFORD: I think it could be a combination. First, I asked women, “Hey what do you do as a daughter?” And they revealed these different ways that they show up, and many of those are invisible. And I think that the first fascinating part of that is they didn’t even notice their own invisible labors because sometimes it’s hard to see how cognitive work or emotional work is depleting our resources or finances.

So women are often only counting the action, the visible action labors as doing enough. So many women are locked in this feeling of, “I’m not good enough. I’m not doing enough. I don’t feel like I’m a good enough daughter,” because they and others are not giving them credit for those invisible parts.

But once you do that, once you recognize all that daughtering encompasses and the responsibilities and the efforts you’re putting in, that’s when you get to start deciding, how do I share this with my siblings or get my partner or my parents on board to change this dynamic? Or what do I decide if I do wanna give something up or I wanna put some boundaries in place?

I think that’s important to tell daughters. You can stop doing certain things in your family if those things are becoming difficult for you. The overall goal, though, that I heard from women is not that they want to stop caring. It’s that they want to stop carrying it alone.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. Okay. Rodica, I wonder if because when any time we have a sociological discussion, I’m always just very aware of the fact that we’re having this discussion at this time and in this place, meaning the United States in 2026. And I just wonder if maybe what we’re doing now is research like yours and Allison is finally giving voice to a set of feelings that’s been, or experiences that’s been with us since time immemorial for humanity.

And sons have their experiences also. It’s just that modernity allows us to give voice to that and expect some kind of recognition in return. I wonder if it’s a fairly recent phenomenon versus for most of humanity, these acts of service were simply expected of all, and recognition wasn’t necessarily part of the deal.

DAMIAN: That’s a really good question. I think maybe an anthropologist would have a better answer to this. But I can say that from the birth order study perspective, my original study with the 257,000 people, that was actually collected in 1960s by the American Institutes of Research. So at least we know, there’s still no, there are no birth order personality differences back then.

And then the other studies I mentioned by other researchers from the UK and Germany were newer, like maybe from 10 years ago. So the data sets, because it takes a long time to collect these representative population data sets. And the Indonesian one is even newer but I can’t say, what was the case 200 years ago.

For sure, from a personality, from a psychology perspective, we didn’t have personality psychology.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.