Welcome to the Mother-Daughter Relationship Show. I'm your host, Brittany Scott, licensed therapist and mother-daughter relationship coach. Have you ever looked at your siblings and wondered, did we grow up in the same house? Maybe your brother got every opportunity while you were expected to help out. Maybe you practically raised your younger siblings while your parents focused on the problem child, or maybe you were the easy one, but so easy that you became invisible. Today we're talking about the roles children play in families and how those roles shape our relationships with our mothers. Not every child in a family has the same experience. The role you played, whether it was caretaker, the golden child, the scapegoat, or the invisible one directly impacts your mother wound and how you show up in relationships. Today, Welcome to the Mother-Daughter Relationship. Show the podcast for mothers and daughters who want to build stronger bonds, deepen their understanding and transform their relationships. I'm your host, Brittany Scott, licensed therapist and mother-daughter relationship coach. After years of working with hundreds of daughters. And mothers. I've developed strategies that help break generational patterns, heal wounds, and create the loving relationships you've always wanted. Each week I'll be sharing insights from real clients, expert interviews and practical tools you can use immediately to improve your mother-daughter dynamic. Whether you're struggling with communication breakdowns, navigating major life transitions, or simply wanna take your already good relationship to the next level. The show is for you. And yes, the transformation I guide my clients through can be yours too. I'll share more about how you can work with me. It's time to experience the relationship you both deserve. Are you ready? Let's dive in. I want to speak to both daughters and mothers listening. If you're a daughter, I want you to know that your experience matters. What you lived through is real. And if you're a mother who's starting to recognize some of these dynamics in your own family, I want you to know that awareness is the first step and it's never too late to make changes. Let's start with a role that's incredibly common. The parentified child or the caretaker, this is the child who became a mini adult long before they were ready. And more often than not, this role falls on daughters, especially eldest daughters. Parentification happens when a child is placed in adult roles and responsibilities that they shouldn't have to carry. Let me give you some examples of what this might have looked like. You were responsible for taking care of your younger siblings, not just making sure they got home from school safely, but actually playing a part in raising them. You managed your mother's emotions when she was upset. You were the one comforting her, calming her down, being her emotional support. You had to stay home instead of going out with friends because you were needed to watch your siblings or handle household responsibilities. You were expected to be the good example for your younger siblings at all times. You became a mediator in family conflicts, even though you were just a child yourself. There is a difference between age appropriate responsibility and parentification. They're not the same thing. Healthy responsibility is like making sure your younger siblings get home from school safely, helping out with dinner occasionally, or just making sure. Things are ready for your mom to make dinner as soon as she gets home. Like taking the meat outta the freezer, doing your own chores, and making sure that you contribute to the household. That's healthy responsibility. Parentification is not being able to join an afterschool activity because you have to watch your younger siblings missing out on being a kid because your mom needs you to be strong, being built in childcare instead of having your own childhood. Can you hear the difference? The key difference is that parentified children don't get to make mistakes. They don't get to be kids. They're carrying adult burdens on child shoulders. So what happens to parentified children when they grow up? What are the common things that we see in my practice? I see women who never learned what it feels like to make a mistake and have it be okay. They carry this weight of needing to be strong, to have it all together, to take care of everyone else's needs before their own. It's almost like people pleasing. They struggle with asking for help because they were the help. They feel guilty when they prioritize themselves because they were taught that their needs come last. They're taking care of everybody else first, and they may have a hard time being vulnerable because they had to be the strong one for so long. When you're parentified, you lose the emotional support that should have flowed from your mother to you. Your mom needed you to be strong for her. That's a reversal of what should happen. Children need their mothers to hold space for their emotions, not the other way around. If you're recognizing yourself in this description, I want you to know that you were not meant to carry that weight. You deserve to be a child. You deserve to make mistakes and still be loved and told that it's okay, that you're not the example for your siblings. You know, parents are the examples for their kids. You deserved emotional support from your mother not to have provided it to her. Now let's talk about another role that impacts family dynamics. The golden child. The golden child is the one who can do no wrong in the parent's eyes. They're favored, prioritized, and often protected from consequences that other siblings face in many families. The golden child is a son, and this creates a specific dynamic for his sisters. The golden child. Often a boy gets opportunities that his sisters don't. Parents might pay for his sports, his lessons, his college education, even. That might be an extreme example, and they tell their daughters that there's not enough money left over for her activities or her education. Again, that's probably extreme, but you get where I'm going. He might get away with behaviors that would get his sisters punished. His achievements are celebrated while hers are expected. So even though they want the same things from her, hers aren't celebrated in the same way. His potential is invested in while hers is overlooked, and sometimes the daughter is expected to help facilitate her brother's success. She might be asked to care for him, to support him to step aside so he can have more to celebrate him and to just be happy for him. Of course not every golden child is a boy. A family with all girls can absolutely have a golden child dynamic. This is really about favoritism, not gender, but gender does often play a role in who gets selected for this position. The golden child can also have a mother wound. Just because they were favored doesn't mean they had a healthy relationship with their mother. They might feel pressured to maintain their position to always be perfect, to never disappoint. They might have a shallow relationship with their siblings because of the resentment that the favoritism created. They might struggle with a false sense of self because they were loved for what they did, not who they were. When the golden child doesn't live up to the expectations placed on them, sometimes the fall from grace is swift and brutal. The child who could do no wrong suddenly becomes disappointment and they don't have the tools to cope because they never learned how to handle failure or criticism. If you were the sibling of a golden child, you know the sting of feeling less than of watching resources. Attention and love flow more freely to someone else. This creates a specific kind of mother wound. You learn that you had to work twice as hard for half the recognition. You learn that your worth was conditional, and you may have learned that no matter what you did, it was probably never enough because it was just something you were supposed to do anyway. And if you were the golden child, you might be recognizing that the pedestal you were placed on was actually a prison. That the favoritism didn't really protect you, it isolated you and put impossible pressure on you whether you were the golden child or the sibling watching from the sidelines. These dynamics weren't your fault. Children don't create these roles themself. The family systems do. Okay, moving on. Let's talk about the scapegoat or the black sheep. This is the child who gets blamed when things go wrong. The one who's seen as the problem, the one who can't seem to do anything right in their parents' eyes, no matter how hard they try. So what lands a child in this role? In my experience, scapegoats are often the truth tellers. They're the ones who call out the dysfunction. They see what's not working in the family and they have the audacity to say it out loud. They might push back against unfair treatment. They might question family rules that don't make sense. They might refuse to pretend everything is fine when it's not. And for that honesty, you know, for that refusal to play along with the family narrative, they get labeled as difficult, rebellious, or maybe problematic. The scapegoat might be the child who questions authority or challenges. The status quo expresses emotions that the family doesn't want to acknowledge, refuses to maintain the family's image or secrets, develops behaviors that are actually reactions to family dysfunction, but get blamed as the cause of the family problems gets compared unfavorably to their siblings. Being a scapegoat can be isolating. You feel like you're on the outside of your own family, like you don't really belong there. Maybe like something is actually wrong with you. You might have grown up wondering, why doesn't my family like me or what's wrong with me? There was nothing wrong with you. The family system needed someone to blame and you might have become that person. Scapegoats are often the first ones to leave. They're the ones who get out of toxic family dynamics. The first chance they get, they saw the dysfunction and didn't stick around for it. And while that departure might've been painful and lonely, it was also an act of self-preservation. It took courage to walk away, to choose yourself over a family system that was harming you. That's bravery for scapegoated daughters. The mother wound might run really deep. Your mother might have been the primary person labeling you as the problem, or on the flip side, she may have stood by quietly while others did and did nothing to protect you either way. You didn't receive the unconditional love and acceptance that every child deserves. You learned that love was conditional on compliance, that being yourself meant. Being rejected, possibly that your perspective didn't matter or worse, that it made you the actual problem. As adults, the former scapegoat might struggle with feeling like there always a problem in relationships, difficulty trusting people actually like them, a sense of not really belonging anywhere. Or they may just have hyper vigilance on being blamed or criticized, so they try to steer away from that. If you are the scapegoat in your family, you weren't the problem, the family system was dysfunctional and you were being brave enough to see it and name it. Your willingness to leave, to protect yourself, to choose a different path was brave and maybe survival. You deserved better than what you got. Now, let's talk about a role that's often overlooked, which is fitting because that's exactly what happens to the child in this position, the invisible or silent child. This is the easy child, and I'm putting that in quotes. The one parent say they didn't have to discipline as much or stay on because they knew they were okay. They were doing the right thing. And on the surface that sounds like a good thing, right? But it's not. The invisible child is one who never caused problems. So they never got attention, did everything right. So parents assumed they didn't need anything, kept their emotions to themselves because other siblings were taking up all the emotional space or just chose not to share because they didn't really get the space to share. Learned early that the way to survive was to not make waves, to not need anything, just go with the flow. And the invisible child might have gotten praise for being so easy or no trouble at all, and while their siblings were getting attention, the invisible child learned to fade into the background. When one child is getting a lot of attention because their behavior or their situation, maybe they're struggling with. Whatever we can fill in the blank. This could be a lot of things they could be struggling with. Maybe they're the golden child who's being centered. The good child gets neglected in all of this. Parents assume, well, she's fine. She doesn't need me. I need to focus on the one who's having problems. But children always need their parents. Even the easy ones. I mean, especially the easy ones. Being the invisible child means you still needed a healthy amount of attention. Love and support from your parents, but you didn't really get it, and that's lonely and isolating. You might've felt like you didn't matter as much, like you had to earn attention by being more perfect or more independent, or more self-sufficient. Or maybe on the flip side, you learned that if you did something bad, then you'd finally get attention because your parents would be surprised that. You did that, that you're not the child who does that. What is going on, what is happening with you? And they don't recognize that you actually just wanted their attention. You learned that your needs weren't as important. That asking for help was a burden that the safest thing to do was to handle everything yourself and not really bother anyone. For the invisible daughter, the mother wound can manifest as emotional neglect. Your mother might not have been cruel or abusive, but she wasn't emotionally present for you either. She didn't see you, she didn't ask how you were really doing. She just assumed you were fine because you looked like you were fine on the outside. The lack of emotional attunement, the absence of truly being seen and known by your mother, creates a wound. As adults, former invisible children might struggle to express their needs relationships. Feel guilty for taking up space or asking for attention. Minimize their own problems because they learned early that others problems matter more, have difficulty recognizing when they need help. They may feel invisible in their adult relationships too, or they over function and are hyper independent and just have learned to not really need anyone. What makes this role difficult is that people don't often recognize it as trauma. There was no obvious abuse, no dramatic conflict. You were just overlooked. And when you try to talk about it, people might say, but you were the good kid. Your parents must have loved that. They don't understand that being the good one came at the cost of being seen. Even if your parents did love that you didn't, if you were the invisible child, your needs mattered then and they matter now. You deserve attention, care, and emotional support simply because you exist. Being easy and good shouldn't have to mean being ignored. You weren't asking for too much when you needed your mother's attention. You were asking for what every child deserves. Now, as an adult, you get to practice taking up space and being seen. You get to practice expressing your needs, and I really hope that you will. I do want you to know that I have generalized all of these roles and generalizing real humans and real families is very hard to do. Um, humans are messy. Humans are different. No two families are really the same. So even though I've generalized these roles, and maybe you might hear your role or hear one of your siblings roles in this. Know that there can be some outliers. Some of this may fit and some of it may not fit. This is really just an overgeneralization to give you an idea of what these roles look like and what can actually show up inside of families. So we've talked about all these different roles, the parentified child, the golden child, the scapegoat, and the invisible child. Now let's talk about what this means for you today and how you begin to heal. For some of you listening, just hearing these roles described might be bringing up a lot of emotions. Maybe you're thinking, oh my God, that was me. I'm not crazy. This actually happened. Awareness is often the first step in healing. Sometimes it's not about changing anything, it's just about finally having language for what you experienced. It's about validating that what you felt was real. Now that you're an adult, your family dynamics might still try to pull you into the same role during family gatherings, but awareness helps you accept what you experienced and stop asking yourself if it was real. These childhood roles don't just stay in childhood, though. They can follow you until your adult relationships, maybe your careers, maybe your own parenting, or just affect your sense of self. The parentified child might struggle to receive help or support because they were always the helper. The golden child might struggle with perfectionism and fear of failure because they were only loved for their achievements. Going back to the parentified child, they might also struggle with people needing them or needing support from them, and they might run from that too, and it's like they just wanna be with people who aren't needy, but they might actually struggle with, is it actually needy or is this healthy part of a relationship? Okay, back. To going through the list. The scapegoat might expect rejection and struggle to trust that people actually want them around. The invisible child might have difficulty expressing needs or taking up space in relationships. I believe that all behavior makes sense if you look at context. So these patterns make sense. They were survival strategies in your childhood, but as adults, you do get to choose differently. All of these roles create some form of mother wound because they all involve a lack of appropriate emotional support flowing from mother to daughter. The Parentified daughter gave support but didn't receive it. The golden child received conditional support based on performance. The scapegoat received blame instead of support, and the invisible child received no support because she seemed fine in each case. What was missing was proper emotional support. Being seen for who you really are, being loved, not for what you do or don't do, but simply for existing. If you're a mother listening to this and you're recognizing that you've placed your children in some of these roles, I do wanna talk to you for a moment. First, take a deep breath. Okay? I don't mother blame here. You're safe too. Awareness is uncomfortable, but you can't change what you don't see, and you're seeing it now hopefully. If you've parentified your daughter, you can reverse it. You can start treating her like your daughter instead of your co-parent. You can stop relying on her for emotional support and start being the support she needs. If your children are adults, and you're listening to this, you may not be able to reverse what happened in their childhood, but you can acknowledge that you understand what you did and that it wasn't okay, and please understand that goes a very. Long way. Most daughters just want acknowledgement for what they experienced. If you've created a Golden Child dynamic, you can work on distributing attention and resources more equitably. You can celebrate all of your children, not just one. If you've scapegoated a child, you can own that. You can apologize. You can work on seeing them for who they really are instead of who you've decided they are. If you've let a child become invisible, you can start seeing them. Ask them how they're really doing. Show interest in their life. Spend some alone time with them, without the other siblings. Let them know they matter. Don't beat yourself up. Don't start shaming yourself. Don't let guilt get in the way. Just work on changing it. It's never too late to repair. If your children are still open to it, it's never too late to repair. All you have to do is acknowledge that what they felt. It was not what you intended to do. You have to be willing to acknowledge that their lived experience is real. It doesn't have to be real for you, but it was real for them, and you can acknowledge that. I promise it's not hard, but that's how you keep your children. I also want to address how these roles affect sibling relationships. Often well into adulthood. You might feel resentment towards the Golden child sibling, even though they didn't create the dynamic themselves, the parents did. You might feel distant from the invisible sibling 'cause you never really knew them. You might have conflict with the scapegoat because they left and you stayed. Maybe you resented them for leaving or maybe you were jealous that they left and you didn't. The strain you feel in your sibling relationship is because of these rules, but siblings can heal together. You can heal separately. It really just depends on your relationship and whether everyone is willing to look at these dynamics honestly. Sometimes siblings bond over shared experience. Sometimes they can't because they have completely different experiences with the same mother. Both are valid. But understanding these roles can help you have compassion for yourself and for your siblings. You are all just kids trying to survive in the system you were born into. Now that you've listened to this, I want you to reflect on whether you experienced any of these roles. You probably already. If you experienced this now after listening to this, or you knew before, and this just validated it, but I want you to ask yourself, what role did you play in your family? How has that role shaped who you are today? How do you respond to family dynamics now? Are you still playing that role or have you stepped out of it? What would it look like to release that role completely? And if you have siblings. Consider, what roles did they play? How did those roles affect your relationship then and now? Is there healing possible between you if there is a strain in the relationship? Healing these family roles is not about blaming your parents or your siblings. It's about understanding what happened so you can make different choices. Yes, parents carry the responsibility of what took place and the roles that were created. Of course, they do. But placing blame is not necessary to heal. You get to decide who you are outside of that rule. You get to practice new ways of being in relationships. You get to give yourself what you didn't receive. You have all the power now if you're an adult. So you could decide what a lot of this looks like as we close out today's episode, I just want to remind you the role you played in your family wasn't chosen by you. You were a child doing the best to survive, to get your needs met, to find your place in a system that was already established before you arrived, or maybe as the children arrived in the family that it, the dynamics just kept shifting. Whether you were the parent to fight daughter who had to grow up too fast, the golden child who lived on a pedestal, the scapegoat who carried the family's blame, or the invisible child who learned to disappear, none of it was your fault. But as an adult, now you have the power to step out of that role. You get to decide who you are outside of those family dynamics, and you get to decide how you are inside of the family dynamics. You can set boundaries and change some things up if you need to. Your experience was real, your feelings are valid, and you don't have to keep doing this like was assigned to you as a child. If you're an adult listening to this to remove the assignment, I know easier said than done. Like you could say that out loud. Doesn't make it easy to do. Some family dynamics are difficult to break once you all are in the same room together. But if you are the parent to fight daughter, you can learn to receive help from other people. If you are the scapegoat, you can believe that you were not the problem, and maybe you already believe that. And so it's just hard to go back to a place that sees you as the problem. No matter what role you played, you get to decide who you want to be as an adult. You get to take up space, get your needs met. And be supported by other people. If you are a mom listening to this and you recognize yourself in some of these dynamics, remember awareness is just the first part of change. You can't undo the past, so you don't have to feel guilty and shame and do all of those things. You can change how things are today by acknowledging what did happen. Your daughter needs to know that she matters for who she is not for the role she plays. She needs to know that her needs are important. She needs to feel emotionally supported, not emotionally responsible for you. Okay? If your daughter is willing, it's never too late to repair. That is all I have for you today. I hope this episode was enlightening or validating or just felt good to hear and I will catch you in the next one. That's all for today's episode of the Mother-Daughter Relationship Show. Thanks so much for spending this time with me. I hope you picked up some valuable insights that you can start using right away in your own relationship to create deeper connection and understanding. If something from today's episode resonated with you, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with the mother or daughter in your life who needs to hear this message. And while you're at it, please consider leaving a rating. And review so we can reach more families and transform the way mothers and daughters relate to each other. For those ready to take the next step, you can visit my website to learn more about my private coaching programs and my program designed specifically for mother-daughter pairs. Whether you're dealing with communication challenges, life transitions, or just wanna strengthen an already good relationship, I'm here to help. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you in the next one.