Host: Sheryl Glick R.M.T.
Special Guest: Lisette Schuitemaker
In today’s episode of “Healing from Within”, your host Sheryl Glick author of The Living Spirit which shares spiritual awakenings spiritual awareness of human nature spiritual communication healing energies and our search for improving life welcomes Lisette Schuitemaker, author of The Eldest Daughter Effect. Lisette, who is the eldest of four, lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and is the founder of a communications agency which she sold and then went on to obtained a degree from the Brennan Healing Science School. Lisette has a private energy healing practice and also serves as Chair of the Center of Human Emergence, in the Netherlands. We will discuss today the characteristics and possible advantages of being an eldest daughter and also the possible challenges.
Sheryl wonders what gave Lisette the idea for this book. Lisette writes, “My friendship with Wies a mother of two and Lisette, a mere aunt looked very different and have shaped their lives differently yet have found after 30 years a remarkable similarity ..both are eldest daughters. This position within our families has shaped us to a large degree and this has been a stunning discovery. We have become aware of underlying patterns that we share with millions of other eldest daughters…This is a first book for eldest daughters by eldest daughters.”
Lisette tells us her book is written by an eldest daughter and includes scientific studies where Lisette had interviewed many eldest daughters including a number of well know eldest daughters so we can see patterns and established behaviors that cross ethnic religious national and social structures to show the human side of this phenomenon.
There are five characteristics eldest daughters share. Certain qualities are not as individual as we had first thought. An extraordinary sense of responsibility, a tendency to take the lead, a fear of making mistakes, being hard hit by criticism and caring for others to the point of exhaustion---these are all qualities that eldest daughters typically display. Many eldest daughters grow into hands on caring dutiful women because these traits were fostered in them as the first born.
Sheryl says…. “I am the second born 4 I/2 years younger than my older sister who seemed distant from me because of the age difference. I have a sister 2 years younger than me, but I functioned as an elder child to that sister. I have all the qualities you just described as the eldest daughter and I actually took care of my parents when they were older while my older sister was only moderately available…however she did care for a husband who needed help.”
Eldest daughters are the ones who make their parents into parents…As the eldest, you enjoy undivided attention for everything you do. …Your parents wish to get it right and feel insecure because you are a first for them. Parents bring their own education and family values or traditions with them…..Parents often have unrealistically high expectations of their firstborn. This can either work to make the child insightful loving and observant or somewhat spoiled and intolerant even narcissistic.
Angela Merkel, Hillary Clinton, Christine Lagard, Oprah Winfrey, Sheryl Sandberg, JK Rowling, and Beyonce are all first born children and first born children really do excel, but that may have little to do with innate intelligence and more to do with the expectations and doting of their parents and the help they are expected to share with responsibilities for the care of the home and other siblings. This could add to their anxiety, self-doubt, and be a motivating force for overachievement at the expense of other satisfying developments.
First born children were more than 7 percent more likely to aspire to stay on in education than younger siblings and firstborn girls are 15 percent more ambitious than firstborn boys.
In an article,
