Running a business as an eldest daughter

I keep saying the word "eldest daughter syndrome" and "eldest daughter core" everywhere on my socials, and I want to set the record straight as an eldest daughter speaking about this trend.

I wish I could say it did resonate with me, but I can't deny the fact that there are similar qualities in a lot of these descriptions that I also inherently have. These qualities make up the composition of who I am, not only to myself but to the people around me.

I never had a conscious way of defining my personality traits. I just automatically assumed that that's just how I was and who I was. Growing up in a cultural household, there are certain unspoken expectations that permeate your subconscious mind and don't allow you to shake them up once you come into adulthood.

I've had to consistently rewire my brain and deal with some of the insecurities and limitations that being an eldest daughter also has on my personality and the way that I behave.

So what is an eldest daughter even mean? For a long time, I just thought it's something I was.

Responsible, over-performative, vicious, organized. The one who remembered everything, solved the problems, paved the way for your younger siblings, was the first one to get into the fight with the parents. I was somehow always the glue that would have to piece things together when everything went wrong.

I was supposed to be respectful, yet independent. I was supposed to be kind, yet outspoken. I was constantly diving between who I truly was and conforming to who I thought I was supposed to be.

At first I thought it was a Pisces in me thinking that I was the one that noticed the mood shift in the group before anyone else could say a word. I'm always the one that remembers the birthdays. I go for the super thoughtful gift. I give a gift of quality time. I say I love you and I'm sorry. If no one else even makes a move to realize something's wrong.

Once again, I thought that's just who I was and how I was born to be. I had no idea that there was an entire generation of eldest daughters dealing with the same generational patterns that I was dealing with.

Now I'm in my 30s, and I'm a founder and leader in multiple companies. I realized that I am a multi-hyphenate. Yet when I sit down and ask myself why I'm doing all of these things, I can't always say for certain that they're just for me.

There's a part of me that still wants to show up, be a people pleaser, not disappoint or let anyone down. There's a part of me that can't fathom a world in which I struggle financially the way I watch my parents struggle my whole life. Yet at the end of the day, I still find myself being the one that always is the first to reach out. The one to say sorry. The one to be a minimal. When ultimately I can't be liked by everyone in my company. Learning to be unspoken, learning to be audacious, learning to be comfortable with my own skin in a world where I was always told that I was too much is really hard for me sometimes.

I'm really proud of the world and the generation that I live in. It wasn't too long ago that my grandmother couldn't even look at her bank account. Yet here I sit with numbers in my bank account I could have never found as a younger version of myself. We, as women, are building something bigger than we could have ever imagined and the way I see it, elder's daughters are the ones taking the charge.

At a leadership conference in Australia, Ruth Limkin, CEO of The Banyans Healthcare, asked a room full of senior female executives one simple question: "How many of you are the eldest child?" About 85% of the room raised their hands.

Whoa. Look at that for a second. Eighty-five percent of the room of leaders were eldest daughters. It's not a coincidence, if you ask me. Nor is it a coincidence that the generation of boss babes is also the generation that's now begging to be solved, begging to not work so much, begging for boundaries that we didn't even know we could ask for.

Do you know this daughter? Were the signs always there? My cousin would joke that she and my sister were my first employees. I've always been the leader in the group project. I've always been the straight-A student, the one with the most volunteer hours and a tutoring record. The one that you can trust, leaving your kids alone while you would go away for a weekend. It's funny how who you are as a kid also shapes out who you're going to be for the rest of your life. Yet I'm not quite sure if I'm cool with all the traits I ended up embodying.

There's a reason the internet has become obsessed with the concept of "eldest daughter syndrome." It's not a clinical diagnosis, but it describes a dynamic many women recognize instantly. Eldest daughters are expected to be mature earlier. We're praised for being responsible. We're trusted with more. We're asked to help. We're the ones parenting our parents most of the time.

According to psychologist Ayushi Thakkar, eldest daughters often develop heightened responsibility, emotional awareness, and caregiving tendencies because of the roles they're assigned within their families from a young age. When you spend years learning how to manage situations, support people, and think ahead, leadership can feel like the most natural thing in the world.

Many of the skills that make great founders and executives are the same skills eldest daughters have been building since childhood. We know how to take ownership. We know how to problem-solve. We know how to step in when things need to get done. We know how to hold everything together.

There's a quiet pride in that. Being the one people count on feels good. It feels like love, like proof that you matter, like evidence that you're doing something right. For a long time, I wore my reliability like a badge. The trouble is that nobody warns you what happens when that badge becomes the whole uniform.

There is a fine line between leadership and over functionality in the relationships in your life. They can look remarkably similar until you look closer.

One line from Ruth Limkin's interview hit me harder than the rest: "Sometimes our identity can get woven into our responsibility." Many women know exactly what she means. When you've spent your whole life being the dependable one, it's easy to start believing your value comes from how much you can carry. Not from who you are, but from what you do, from how much you can handle, from how many people can rely on you.

As founders, this gets dangerous fast. The business needs something, we step in. The team needs support, we step in. The family needs help, we step in. A friend is struggling, we step in. Eventually being needed becomes part of who we are, and that's where burnout quietly begins. The scary part is how invisible it stays, because from the outside it just looks like you're handling things beautifully. No one sees the cost until you're the one quietly running on empty while everyone else assumes you've got it covered.

I don't know about you, but lately I've been tired of hearing you sing. No, I don't gotta cover. No, I can't be there. Sorry, I have plans.

Saying no is the hardest word in my vocabulary. I hope one day it gets easier for myself, and if you're reading this, I hope this is your day too.

A year ago, leadership strategist Kiran Kaur wrote about why eldest daughters often become exceptional leaders. She highlights traits many of us know well: accountability, reliability, emotional intelligence, adaptability, strong decision-making, and natural caregiving instincts. These are real strengths. They're also traits that become liabilities when boundaries disappear.

Somewhere along the way, many women learned that being strong meant never needing help. That being capable meant doing it all yourself. That resting meant falling behind. That saying no meant letting people down. None of those things are true, yet so many of us operate as if they are. The same instinct that makes us reach for the hard thing first is the one that keeps us from ever setting it down.

One of the most interesting observations from Ruth Limkin's work with women experiencing burnout is how hard it is for many of them to prioritize themselves. This isn't because they don't understand self-care, but because they feel guilty. There is always someone else who needs them. Children, partners, parents, clients, employees, friends. The list never ends. How dare they prioritize themselves above everyone else they're responsible for in their lives?

SELF recently explored the phenomenon of eldest daughter syndrome and how many eldest daughters grow up feeling responsible for everyone around them, often at their own expense. For women in leadership, this pattern becomes deeply ingrained. We're excellent at extending compassion outward. We're often terrible at extending it inward. We'll tell a friend to slow down, take the day, give herself grace, and then turn around and demand the exact opposite from ourselves without a second thought.

Entrepreneurship amplifies all of these traits. Founders are already wired to take ownership. We're problem-solvers by nature. We see opportunities, we identify gaps, we want to build solutions. Add eldest daughter tendencies to that mix and suddenly you have someone who feels personally responsible for absolutely everything.

I've felt this myself. Leadership often feels like caring. Delegation gets hard when you've spent your whole life being the person who handles things. Stepping back feels uncomfortable, sometimes even irresponsible. I absolutely have moments where I feel guilty for making time for myself to go to the gym or for walking the dog in the middle of a call, but the reality is it's not my responsibility to hold everyone else's jobs together.

The irony isn't lost on me that, in an attempt to carry everything for everyone, it actually hurts my leadership. It doesn't help. It makes me the exhausted one, and I can tell you firsthand that exhausted leaders make worse decisions, not better ones.

"Rest feels irresponsible."

Many women understand that feeling immediately.

You sit down to rest and your brain starts listing everything left unfinished. You take a day off and feel guilty. You close your laptop and wonder if you should answer one more email. The work is never fully done, especially as a founder, especially as an eldest daughter.

The problem is that if we never stop, we lose the very things that let us lead well in the first place. Creativity. Patience. Perspective. Joy. Energy. The ability to actually enjoy the life we're building. Rest isn't the reward you get once the work is finished. It's part of what makes the work possible, and treating it like a luxury is one of the most expensive mistakes we make.

As I sit with this conversation, I don't think the goal is to stop raising responsible daughters. Responsibility is a beautiful thing. Leadership is a beautiful thing. Service is a beautiful thing. The goal is to show the next generation that responsibility and self-sacrifice are not the same thing. That leadership doesn't require exhaustion. That rest isn't earned. That asking for help isn't weakness. That success isn't measured by how much you can carry before you break.

As founders, mothers, mentors, and leaders, the example we set matters. The next generation is watching how we work. They're watching how we rest. They're watching how we care for ourselves.

Every time we choose to set something down instead of carrying it just because we can, we show the girls coming up behind us that there's another way to lead. Perhaps the greatest leadership lesson we can teach isn't how to do more. It's how to build a life where our worth isn't tied to our productivity.

If eldest daughters are going to keep becoming leaders, I hope we also become women who know that carrying everything was never supposed to be THE job.