A psychologist detailed the complex relationship of the eldest girl with rest in a viral Tiktok Video, winning 1.2 million views.
Dr Ikeranda Smith (@Ikerandasmith) highlights the emotional and systemic burdens that older girls wear, often leaving them unable to relax or even sleep.
Nowsweek According to Smith, based in Atlanta, Georgia, and Leah Brown, 38, who has a brother four years old junior and described the role as “relentless”.
During the July 19 clip, Smith describes how older girls have been conditioned since childhood to be caregivers, providers and emotional anchors – roles that have the cost of rest, peace and self -service.
Two screenshots showing Smith talking to the camera.
Tiktok / @ ikerandasmith
A childhood of responsibility, no rest
Smith declares that the wrestling of the eldest girl with rest begins in childhood, in particular in families where the paternal figure moves away from his role.
In such families, she says, the eldest girl is placed in several adult roles from an early age. “This means that the eldest girl has been a supplier since she was a child. But not only was she a supplier, she was also a caregiver … Her brothers and sisters are now her children and sometimes even her mother,” she said.
This forced maturity, known in psychology under the name of parenting, often stems from emotionally immature parenting. “The eldest girl has been a parentrified since she was a child, so she is more than likely, of emotionally immature parents,” said Smith.
Brown and his younger brother as children.
Leah Brown
Brown of England, could not agree more with Smith. She said: “The eldest girl bears the burden of being both child and coparental.
“We must be the emotional thermostat of the family – by reading the play, by managing the feelings of others, by intervening when adults abdicate responsibility.
“My younger brother should never mediate our parents’ divorce or manage family crises to thousands of kilometers, although he absolutely shared the load in other ways.”
Agitation as an identity
The consequences of this dynamic extend well to adulthood. “The eldest girl has never rested, and she never rested, it is because she could not be installed enough in her body to relax and sleep,” she said.
According to Smith, the eldest girl often lives entirely in her mind. “She can never deactivate this thing enough to settle in her body to relax so that she can sleep and rest,” she said.
For what? Because rest itself was armed. “She had passed as a laziness, and she was told that she had to do something … This girl has been working for her family since she was able to find a job,” said Smith.
A couple from Leah Brown.
Supplied by Leah Brown
In addition, it has internalized the conviction that productivity is equal to value. “When you have been conditioned to feel as precious as you are busy, then for you, rest does not exist. And not only it does not exist, it is absolutely contradictory with what you know to be true,” she said.
Brown, the founder of The Wayfinders Group, a multidisciplinary advice in change management, said Nowsweek:: “The oldest girls become the family Crisis Manager by default, then carry this hypervigilance in each relationship and workplace for the rest of our lives (unless we could heal).
“The two take care of my brother and the rescue of my parents of their decisions in childhood made sure that life by default in adult life. This is why I am a phenomenally robust fixer, but that is also why I cannot rest – because for decades, the rest meant the abandonment of my post and leaving my brother exposed to the dysfunction that I tried to abandon it.
Sleep deprivation as survival
Today, many older girls suffer from chronic exhaustion and cannot yet rest. “Many older girls find it difficult to sleep and feel very conflict when they do it,” said Smith. “They don’t sleep much. They can’t sleep. They are standing overnight.”
To face, many turn to substances or distractions. “Many of them, I hate saying this, but they are on social networks, scroll through, scrolling the condemned … Many of them take alternative drugs to sleep,” she said.
But Smith does not blame them. Instead, it contextualizes their behavior in a system they have not created. “Even if they have dependencies or additions, based on the dysfunction of family dynamics … It’s systemic … Inherited,” she said.
Brown describes his relationship with rest as “complicated”.
She said Nowsweek: “For years, rest looked like a breach of duty. If I did not solve something, did not manage something, or did not improve something, that would?
If she could rest …
Smith offers a sincere vision of what could change if the older girls were ultimately authorized to abandon their inherited charges.
Smith thinks that the oldest girls could finally rest if they released their sense of obligation, fixed firm borders, felt free to take time and were supported by real partners, a community and people who have really seen them.
She said Nowsweek: “Rest is vital For the modeling of future generations, because it unlocks creativity, wonder and play; Things she missed in her childhood because of her parenting.
“To break this cycle, women must start to dismantle oppression systems that consider them only as work, rather nourishing their personality within the communities of women who see them for whom they are really, not only for what they do.”
Brown, the host of The longest podcast of the dayunderwent more than five years of high performance advice and coaching.
She said Nowsweek: “I learned to see my inability to rest not as a defect but as a superpower when it is channeled correctly. I healed by allowing the pain to emerge, see it, name and let it go.
“Now, I help others to cure mediation, through my white work, by creating the very institutional responsibility that I would have liked to exist when I needed it.
“I learned that real rest is not only physical – it is confident that the world, my world, will not collapse if I do not hold it actively.
“My relationship with rest has become more intentional rather than instinctive. I plan it, protect it and remind me that sustainable change requires sustainable people.”