Earlier this year, I read Stephanie Foo’s critically acclaimed memoir, What My Bones Know, a story about her violent, unstable upbringing in California as the only child of two Malaysian immigrant parents. Foo reflects on how her abusive childhood impacted her as an adult, leaving her with complex PTSD; the book charts her path towards understanding her diagnosis and healing from her trauma, rewiring emotional responses which alienated her from loved ones and caused severe and regular distress. It shows how the abuse as well as other factors including race and class coalesced to shaped Foo into the person she is.
The memoir is insightful and illuminating. Foo takes responsibility for what she can and treats her horrifying abuse with appropriate weight; she is careful to unpick the different layers of experience, and understand how each one influences her life now, rather than ascribe all of her negative experiences as an adult to just one bad part of her childhood.
What My Bones Know feels refreshing. Elsewhere in the media – in newspapers, magazines, on social platforms and other memoirs – people are eager to pathologize familiar childhood dynamics as “traumatic”, oversimplifying what trauma is and claiming that common personality traits are evidence of a deeply hindered adult life.
These pathologies appear in many forms. There’s “gifted kid burnout”, which supposedly occurs when intelligent teenagers are pushed to over-achieve and then suffer from anxiety in later life. There’s “eldest daughter syndrome”, a consequence of the household’s oldest daughter being tasked with more responsibilities than their siblings, leading to high efficiency at the expense of their needs. And there’s “parentified children”, the kids who had to perform adult tasks on behalf of their parents, and who experience stunted emotions as a result of “not getting to be a proper child”. You will find countless articles and videos explaining these phenomena, broadly considered a consequence of “outsized and often developmentally inappropriate responsibilities” or pressures.
Their popularity is hard to overstate (on TikTok, for example, there are more than 150 million videos tagged with “eldest daughter”, many with millions of views each). They have morphed into their own dedicated content verticals, where self-described experts make endless videos explaining tics, “warning signs” and ascribing “solutions”. Influencers wear these pathologies as trendy personal identifiers, creating dedicated communities (which are also often monetised). This content can vary, but it all comes with one overriding message: that if you identify with any of these traits, then you are the victim of life-long trauma.
The impulse to pathologise such experiences is understandable. I had a rocky childhood, and can identify in myself several of the traits described in these videos and think pieces. I’m also the eldest daughter and most of my best friends are eldest daughters (often of two-sister families like mine, too). It’s easy to see yourself in these broad experiences and it’s appealing to find new ways to explain why you are the way you are. It’s even easier to excuse your flaws as the result of extreme hardship, and therefore out of your control.
But is every academic child, eldest daughter, or second-generation immigrant walking around today with the heavy burden of childhood trauma? The “signs” of trauma influencers describe – be it putting others first, anxiety and people-pleasing – are traits which are not just extraordinarily common, but are often the product of something wholly non-traumatic. This content also insists that these qualities are universally burdensome in adulthood, that being efficient and giving, or feeling pressure to succeed, is something which should be looked upon pitiably as a hardship. But is this actually the case? As the writer Rachel Connolly wrote about “parentified children” for the Cut in May: “If a person reaches adulthood and their biggest issue is that they’re a supportive friend, with a tendency to push themselves to always go above and beyond, I would say, in the grand scheme of things, that this person is doing pretty well.”
For many people consuming this content, this way of thinking can breed an anxiety that wouldn’t otherwise exist: encouraging anyone who experienced a childhood at all reflected by these social media pathologies to locate extreme harm in them, even if there never actually was any. This isn’t just the case for those who had “good” childhoods – it is arguably most worrisome for someone who, for example, was an eldest daughter and didn’t enjoy it. This content encourages them to conflate a negative experience with a traumatic one, making it all the more painful, while devaluing and obscuring genuinely traumatic childhoods.
Though this is where this conversation gets complicated, as some people do experience trauma as a result of these types of childhoods. Some even grow up as an eldest daughter or a “parentified child” in a household where emotional abuse and violence are ever-present. But this online trend conflates and flattens complex individual experiences into a reductive, one-size-fits-all, “relatable” diagnosis – and offers the same fixes and treatments for all. These “solutions” not only fail to address the real root causes of trauma, but they also make the mistake of believing these experiences happen in isolation. But as Foo knows, the way trauma influences you in adulthood is rarely a clear or universal relationship of cause and effect. The same conditions on paper could create two different adults, with totally separate personalities and needs. Those problems won’t be resolved – or even meaningfully discussed – on TikTok.
Many people – many more than we realise – experience trauma at a young age. Their lives would undoubtedly be improved by learning more about why they act the way they do, how they were moulded by an environment in which they had little agency or power, and giving themselves grace as they try to unpack their adult behaviour. But we do them a disservice by flattening all human experiences into something relatable, universal and vague, and reducing our complex, challenging selves down to something unrecognisably simple.
[See also: Don’t let TikTok tell you how to dress]
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