Growing Up Like the Big Brother, Author YL Wolfe She often felt that the boundaries between her role and her mother’s role were blurred.
“When my younger brother was born, when I was almost 11, I was overcome with feelings of responsibility for his well-being. I used to sit by his crib and watch him sleep just to make sure he was safe,” Wolfe, the oldest of four children, told HuffPost.
“It’s not that I thought my mother wasn’t competent – but more because I felt we were both responsible for the family at that moment in my life”, she explained. “Like I was literally ‘another mother’ instead of a big sister.”
In other words, Wolfe is deeply familiar with “eldest daughter syndrome”. The internet is full of reflections about the situation of the eldest daughters and tweets about how we – I might as well reveal my bias here – need to unionize: “If it’s the older brother and also a girl, he might be entitled to financial compensation,” a woman played with X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Although “eldest daughter syndrome” is a popular psychology term — you won’t find it listed as an official diagnosis in the DSM-V — a new study suggests there may be more science to the pseudo-syndrome than previously thought.
A research team led by the University of California, Los Angeles discovered that, in certain cases, firstborn daughters tend to mature earlier, allowing them to help their mother raise their younger siblings.
Specifically, researchers found a correlation between early signs of adrenal puberty in first-born daughters and mothers who experienced high levels of prenatal stress.
Why is the age of adrenal puberty matter? Changes in the skin (acne, for example) and body hair happen during this phase, but also changes in brain development. Adrenal puberty processes are believed to promote social and cognitive changes; Basically, superficial physical changes correlate with emotional maturity.
When times are tough and mothers are stressed during pregnancy, it is in the mother’s adaptive best interest for her daughter to mature socially at a faster rate, said Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook, one of the study’s co-authors and an assistant professor of psychology. at the University of California, Merced.
“This gives the mother an earlier ‘help to the nest’, helping women keep their offspring alive in difficult environments,” she said.
Notably, adrenal puberty does not include breast development or the onset of menstruation in girls (or testicular enlargement in the case of boys). The study postulates that girls become mentally mature enough to care for younger siblings, even though they are not physically capable of having children of their own, which would naturally take them away from the responsibilities of older daughters.
Older siblings seem to be off the hook when it comes to this kind of parentification: The researchers did not find the same result in boys or daughters who were not firstborns.
“One reason we did not find this effect in firstborns who are sons may be that male children help less often with direct child care than female children, so mothers have less adaptive incentive to accelerate your pubertal social development,” Hahn-Holbrook explained.
Additionally, she said, previous research suggests that female puberty timing is more malleable in response to early life experiences than males.
The results of this study, published in the February edition of Psychoneuroendocrinology (let’s say it five times faster – or just once), took a long time to arrive: the researchers followed the families for 15 years, from the pregnancy phase until the babies’ adolescence.
The researchers recruited women from two obstetric clinics in Southern California during routine first-trimester prenatal visits. On average, the women were 30 years old and pregnant with one child, not twins.
It was the first pregnancy for about half of the participants. The women did not smoke and did not use steroid medications, tobacco, alcohol, or other recreational drugs during pregnancy. All were over 18 years old.
At five different stages of pregnancy, the women’s levels of stress, depression and anxiety were measured and then measured cumulatively. The depression assessment asked women to rate the veracity of statements such as “I felt alone”, while the anxiety question asked how often they felt specific symptoms, such as “nervous”.
Of the children born to these mothers, 48% were female and 52% were male.
As the children aged, features of adrenal and gonadal puberty were measured separately – things like body hair, skin changes, growth in height or growth spurts, breast development and the onset of menstruation in women, and changes in voice and facial hair growth in men.
The study also measured childhood adversity to take into account other factors known to be correlated with early maturation or signs of puberty in children, such as the death of a parent or divorce before age 5 and the absence of a father and economic uncertainties at 7-9 years of age.
Taking all of this into account, it was older girls who matured faster when their mothers experienced high levels of prenatal stress.
Other studies suggest that there is some reward later in life for highly responsible older girls: A 2014 study found that oldest daughters are the greater probability of success of any type of sibling, while a 2012 study found that those who are older are more likely to occupy leadership positions.
The findings ring true for Wolfe, the aforementioned author who said she felt like a second mother to her siblings growing up.
“I’m not at all surprised by what the study found,” Wolfe said. “My story is a little different – I went through true puberty, not just adrenal puberty, at age 12, although I suspect I experienced early cognitive maturation.”
The study is also interesting for another reason: The findings contribute to social scientists’ growing understanding of fetal programminga fascinating area of study that explores how stress and other emotional and environmental factors that women experience during pregnancy affect their children long after birth.
“This is a novel and fascinating discovery to look at through an evolutionary lens,” said Molly Fox, an anthropologist at UCLA and one of the study’s co-authors, in a press release.
In an interview with HuffPost, Fox delved deeper into how fetal programming works.
“A fascinating theory is that when you are still a fetus in your mother’s womb, you receive cues about what the world will be like, and your body can flexibly adjust the shape of your life cycle to suit you optimally. those conditions that you expect to find,” she said.
Fox and her co-authors are thrilled that their work is available for the public to read, especially after following families for so long. The fact that the findings were published just as a cultural conversation about eldest daughters broke out was just icing on the cake, especially for Fox, an eldest daughter. (She’s a twin.)
“As the oldest, I think it is a special role in any family because of the potential for closeness with my mother and the ability to help care for my younger siblings,” she said.
Spoken like a true eldest daughter.
