Women Who Grew Up Being The Easy Child Usually Struggle With 10 Things As Adults
Bricolage / Shutterstock Despite being independent and joyful, girls who are seen as the easy child of the family often end up getting less attention.
Girls like this end up with their needs placed at the bottom of everyone’s list, left unaddressed until their siblings’ conflicts have been resolved and household obligations have been attended to. Of course, they deserve as much attention as any other child, but because they don’t demand it, it's easy for their parents to forget.
This lack of attention often makes them feel unloved. Later in life, they grow up to be women who struggle with specific, difficult feelings.
Women who grew up being the easy child usually struggle with 10 things as adults
1. Difficulty asking for help
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Girls are expected to mature early, especially eldest daughters. They have to take care of their siblings and serve as the emotional regulators of the entire household before they even become teenagers. So, of course, if they are praised for making their parents’ lives easier by not asking for help, it makes the thought of doing so when they're all grown up feel like something they should never do.
Their personality and self-worth are ingrained with the kinds of praise they received from their parents as kids. However, being self-reliant and never asking for help aren’t personality traits, as therapist Annie Wright explains. They’re survival mechanisms. They noticed their parents were stressed or overextended, and they tried to protect the peace by making themselves smaller, even if it came at their own expense.
2. Needing to prove their worth
Many young girls who were considered easy children felt rewarded for needing less. They were constantly praised for being self-sufficient, which wound up their self-worth in proving their independence. Now, as adults, they subconsciously try to make themselves smaller, feeling a need to prove their worth to everyone else by demanding less than they really need.
Especially for women, this often prompts people-pleasing behaviors and all kinds of negative self-esteem beliefs. Society already pressures women to be small and agreeable, and these women pressure themselves even more to do the same.
3. Dismissing their own needs
Many young girls end up being easy to deal with as kids because they have the emotional awareness to read their family members better than their family members can read them. They notice when their parents are stressed or when their sibling steps over a line. They know when to shove down and suppress their own issues to protect the family's emotional bandwidth.
Needless to say, these girls were just as deserving of attention and support as everyone else. But they tucked all their needs away and learned to dismiss them to protect the peace, and these self-silencing expectations followed them into adulthood.
4. Suppressing complex feelings
On top of learning to convince everyone that they don’t need anything, women in this role within their families often suppress any complex emotions. Whether they were dealing with feelings of shame, blame, anger, or sadness, these women learned as young girls that not being okay was something they needed to hide if they wanted validation and praise.
Doing that naturally comes at a cost. According to a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, emotional suppression adds to emotional distress and puts people’s physical well-being in danger.
5. Performing for other people
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From the outside, growing up as the easy daughter looks great. You’re praised by your parents and are always a model student at school. However, it all becomes a performance over time, in which these women feel empty inside unless they’re being rewarded externally.
It’s impossible to be okay without help all the time. So when these women feel stressed or sad, they feel forced to perform for others. They can never be their most vulnerable, authentic selves because they think showing emotions and asking for support makes them less important or valuable in some way.
6. Hiding their mistakes
No child is perfect, and every child has needs. That’s why they have parents. However, because these young girls were rewarded for not appearing to have needs growing up, they learned to pretend that everything is always OK.
Keeping up that facade means that when they did something wrong, they tried to hide it. Their entire existence was rooted in pressure to be perfect, rather than human. Instead of having the chance to learn from their mistakes and go to their parents when they needed help, these young girls learned that hiding mistakes earned them praise.
As adults, they may still struggle to ask for help or admit they don’t know something, even if it leaves them feeling perpetually stuck in every aspect of their lives.
7. Feeling out of touch with themselves
When a child’s entire life is dictated by a need to pretend all is well, connecting with and understanding their own unique identity feels impossible. They don’t know how to create space for their emotions or pain, because they’ve been subconsciously hiding and suppressing them for their entire lives.
As adults, that desire only intensifies, especially when their self-worth is almost entirely dependent on external validation. They look to others for praise by making themselves smaller and more palatable, but in the end, this only hurts them.
8. Disproportionate reactions
Especially when they are expected to suppress their own complex feelings, it’s not surprising that women who grew up as the easy child sometimes explode. The emotions and feelings they’re pushing down don’t go away. They just get bottled up internally until something finally urges them to bubble up.
Without any control over when they come to the surface, especially if they’re not asking for help or talking about them, these women usually struggle with overreacting to minor inconveniences. They raise their voice when someone’s just talking or lose their temper at a random stranger, not because they’re bad, but because they’re overwhelmed internally.
9. Hyper-independence
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Even though they're often praised for being ambitious and hard-working, the adult parallel to being easy as a kid, hyper-independent women are usually coping with unmet needs from childhood. They learned early on that they couldn’t turn to their parents for support and affection, so they had to cope on their own.
Although it typically isolates them and sabotages connections later in life, it’s become their lifeline.
10. Fawning in the face of conflict
Unlike the typical fight-or-flight responses in the face of danger, many women who grew up with an easy childhood resort to fawning. They try to protect, comfort, and appease the people around them, even if those people are actively harming them.
When things get tough, and they notice others are stressed, much as they did for their parents growing up, they immediately resort to pleasing others at their own expense.
Zayda Slabbekoorn is a senior editorial strategist with a bachelor’s degree in social relations & policy and gender studies who focuses on psychology, relationships, self-help, and human interest stories.
