The Pressure of Being a Good Daughter on Work-Life Balance (with Dr. Allison Alford)

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Allison Alford to talk about something we almost never name out loud: daughtering. We explore the invisible labor many women carry in their families — the emotional, logistical, and mental work of keeping relationships connected across generations. This conversation opened my eyes to how much space this role takes in our lives and how acknowledging it can actually bring relief, clarity, and healthier boundaries. If you’ve ever felt stretched between work, parenting, and family expectations, this conversation will help you see that dynamic in a completely new way. 

 

In this episode, we unpack: 

  • What “daughtering” actually means and why most women don’t realize they’re doing it 

  • The invisible labor daughters carry in keeping families emotionally connected 

  • How daughtering contributes to burnout, overwhelm, and the mental load 

  • Why defining what a “good daughter” means for you can change everything 

  • Practical ways to set boundaries and balance family responsibilities with work and life  

Work with me: 

Connect with Dr Allison:

Transcript

Today on the podcast, I have a very special guest, Dr. Allison Alford. Allison is here on the podcast to talk about a subject that is not talked about enough for us as women, and that is daughtering.

Allison's research focuses on what good daughtering means, how it shapes family dynamics, self-worth, and even contributes to burnout.

In this amazing conversation, Allison and I will talk about the concept of daughtering, why it matters for you to understand your role as a daughter and give words to that role, as well as the impact that role likely has in a balanced life.

You're not going to want to miss this interview.

Are you ready? Let's get to it.

Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms podcast, your go to resource for integrating your career ambitions with life as a mom, I'm distilling down thousands of coaching conversations I've had with working moms just like you, along with my own personal experience as a mom of two and sharing the most effective tools and strategies to help you quickly feel calm, confident, and in control of your ambitious working mom life. You ready? Let's get to it.

Rebecca: Working moms, I am so excited to be bringing this guest to you today.

Today I have Dr. Allison Alford with us, and I'm going to let her introduce herself here in just a moment. But I'm very excited about this conversation. This has actually been a sort of a requested topic for a while now, and I have an amazing guest who's going to share all about it with us.

And so thank you for being here, Allison.

About Dr. Allison Alford. 

Allison: Yes, I'm delighted to be here. Thank you so much, Rebecca. I am — you said tell a little bit about myself — I'm Allison Alford.

I have a brand new book. I'm going to show it because it's pretty and it's pink. I love it. Good Daughtering: The Work You've Always Done, the Credit You've Never Gotten, and How to Finally Feel Like Enough.

And this book has in it all of the research that I've been doing over the past decade, plus speaking with women about what daughtering is and what daughtering means to them in their life.

So I know that's what we're here to talk about — what is daughtering for adult women in the middle of their lifetime. Yeah, I'm delighted.

Why “Daughtering” Matters for Women Balancing Work, Family, and Life

Rebecca: So good. I'm so glad that you're here chatting with us about it. I think it's — I mean, I kind of put this into the umbrella of talking about the sandwich generation on some level, right. 

Because when I think about daughtering, my mind immediately goes to us as kids. Right? I think about my daughter, who's 11 years old, and yet we are obviously daughters our entire life. We get to play that role.

But it's become even more — I was going to say crucial — but it has such a bigger impact, maybe, than it ever has before in this generation.

And so obviously, on this podcast, we talk a lot about work, we talk a lot about home, we talk about being a parent. But this role of daughter is another big one that comes into play for so many of us as we start to think about balancing life.

And so I'm curious, as we kind of get into this conversation, what does daughtering look like today? How do you sort of define that? And why do you think it's such an important kind of conversation for today?

Allison: Yeah, you know, I think many women do like what you're thinking about. I'm 43, and so sometimes somebody brings up daughter, and you think of your own daughter.

But I'm not talking about our daughters. I'm talking about you and me. We're the daughter.

Rebecca: Exactly.

Daughtering Is the Invisible Work Women Do to Keep Families Connected

Allison: And really what I'm interested in helping women see and think about is the ways that we are doing daughtering, meaning how we show up in our extended family, in our intergenerational relationships with our parents, and the things that we do that really matter for keeping a family connected.

And the thing is that daughtering includes emotional, logistical, cognitive, and identity labor, much of which is invisible even to the women who are doing it.

And the women I speak to are often exhausted by doing it without even realizing that you've been doing it for decades and have decades yet to go.

The Different Expectations Placed on Daughters in Families

Rebecca: Yeah, yeah. I mean, as you were just describing that, I was thinking about the role that I play as the daughter in my family.

And I have a brother and I have a stepbrother as well. So they certainly play into the picture, but my role is very different than their role. And I know that, and I think they know that.

And what my parents put on me — and I don't necessarily mean that in a negative way — but what is sort of expected of me as my parents age, I kind of already know what that role is.

I've sort of accepted it, but I probably am not even aware of how much that might have an effect on me. And right now, my parents don't need me much, but that might not be for very much longer.

You’ve Been Doing Daughtering for Years — You Just Haven’t Been Given Credit for It

Allison: See, that's — you're the perfect person for me to talk to because I think that many women of our age sort of think like, yeah, I'll start doing that when my parents need me. Right?

And my point is that I am coming to women to say, you are actually already doing daughtering. You've been doing daughtering ever since you — you know, we're talking about adulthood here.

We're talking about things like phone calls, organizing events for holidays, being the one to pick out a gift, being the one to call your dad if your mom and dad are together and saying, Dad, did you get Mom an anniversary gift?

It's things like — if you have a brother and a stepbrother — it's things like calling the brothers and the sisters-in-law or other in-laws and saying, “Are y'all coming? It really matters to Mom and Dad that you come.”

This is daughtering I'm talking about, not what we do when our parents are old or sick. I'm talking about what we're doing now.

You're a prime example, Rebecca, not giving yourself credit for the fact that you're doing this every day.

You're thinking about your parents. You're worrying about them. Maybe you're planning. Maybe you're putting aside finances. Maybe you've got a trip in mind. You're thinking, how do I get them access to the grandkids? Is everybody happy? Are there fights among the siblings or my parents and their extended family? How can I help? What should I be doing?

Rebecca: Absolutely.

Allison: And that is really so important for us to look at our daughtering today and give ourselves credit that we're actually doing a lot, and it's beneficial.

Rebecca: Why do you think it's important to give ourselves credit?

When Invisible Daughtering Work Leads to Burnout and Resentment

Allison: I think we have to give ourselves credit because otherwise what happens is we get really burnt out. And if we get burnt out, we either have a reduced well-being or our body starts to hurt.

Our — you know — we get a migraine, something lets us know. Or we start to feel used and abused, and then we don't want to do these things.

We're like, fine, nobody else is doing anything. I won't plan the family vacation this year. Let's just see what happens. I won't plan 4th of July and see if anybody remembers to show up with the hot dogs.

Rebecca: Yeah, yep.

Allison: And then you are angry, you're burnt out, and truly, nobody else does it.

Rebecca: Well, then you're resentful about that, right? Because you dropped it and nobody else picked it up. And you're like, well, what have I been doing all of these years? And does any of it — nobody even cared anyway.

Allison: Yeah. And the thing is that I think people do care, or they can care if they were to see it. And it's just like if I go behind my kids all the time, you know, as a mom. So let's talk about mom stuff. Or we could talk about friendship or we could talk about marriage.

If I am always showing up and doing something for another person, they get used to it. And so of course they don't typically thank me for it. If I'm the friend in the friend group who always plans trivia night, and always makes it at my house and always texts everybody, my friends get used to that and they may not realize.

It's not that I'm upset by it. It's that what we need to notice is that it's work. It takes resources, time, energy, and emotional bandwidth. It takes our battery.

And the number one thing we need as daughters is just people to see that we're doing it. We need to talk about it, and that gives us a lot of relief in feeling like we're not alone.

I do have options. I'm not stuck in this trap just because I'm the girl in the family, and I can find partnership or relief or different ways of doing this that work for my lifestyle.

Rebecca: In your research, or I'm just curious, as you've gotten into your research, what has been some of the most surprising things that you have found as you've kind of dove into the subject of daughtering?

How Research on “Daughtering” Began

Allison: Yeah. What I thought was really interesting — so if you go back to when I was in graduate school. When you're in graduate school for getting a PhD, the one that I was in was a really research-heavy program. You know, you're going to write a dissertation.

Well, a dissertation is basically you conduct a study of some kind and then you write the results of that study. And ideally later you then publish it for the scientific community. But when you're thinking about what kind of study you want to do, you need to do something that nobody else has done before.

Right? It doesn't make sense to redo somebody else's study. Or you can take something that's been done and slightly change it, like a different population or a different study method.

The Invisible Labor That Holds Families Together

So I was really thinking a lot about invisible labor, keeping family relationships — you know, how our society depends on family care for filling in the gaps where our healthcare system doesn't or our childcare system doesn't. We rely on family.

And I started doing this research where I was aware, like, I'm showing up as a daughter in my family, and I can see these ways that my peers are doing that. But none of us have ever talked about it.

So I start doing a research study, and I'm asking women about their daughtering, and all they keep telling me is about their mom. They're like, well, my mom does this, or when I'm with my mom, my mom says that.

And I was like, yeah, but what about you? What do you do? What do you think about? What do you talk about? What do you bring to the table?

Why Women Dismiss Their Own Daughtering Work

And so the thing that I noticed right away was how women don't notice their own hard work or we diminish it. We're like, well, that's just what daughters do. That's just how our family is. Or that's just what it means to be loving to someone.

And we can say that we're being loving and that's what our family is like, and still also at the same time say, I'm giving a lot of resources to that. I'm putting my energy into it. I'm doing it with my whole chest because I like the results of being part of a family.

And sometimes it's a lot, and sometimes it's a big pressure, and sometimes I need a little bit of a break.

The Mental Load Women Carry as Partners and Daughters

Rebecca: You know, what this is reminding me of is — I mean, I talk about this a lot with my clients. And as we start talking about work-life balance, obviously the subject of your partnership comes up, if you are with another partner of some kind.

And, you know, sharing the mental load of being parents, right? Oftentimes the female — and as research would show in the relationship — takes on more of the household management duties and the parental duties and the mental load of that, and the invisible labor that is associated with managing the household and so forth.

And I think now more than ever there's been more research. There's more awareness of how much women take on in this dynamic, in this partnership, more than ever.

I have never thought about it from the lens of a daughter and a son. I've never thought about it, but we're kind of talking about the same thing.

I mean, I know we're talking about the same thing.

Daughtering Is a Lifelong Identity We Rarely Talk About

Allison: Yeah, yeah. No, I mean that's — it's an elegantly simple concept. Once someone introduces it, you're like, yeah, I get it. I just hadn't realized that. Never even realized we weren't talking about it.

Which is really so strange if you think about that, because I've been a daughter all my life. I was born a daughter.

And our research shows that you will be a daughter until the day you die. You don't have to have living parents, you don't have to be face to face with your parent to be daughtering. It is something that you also embody as an identity.

So why is it that this role that I do my whole lifespan has somehow been back-burnered as less important than being married or being a parent?

And to be clear, not every woman becomes those things — married, or a parent, or a worker, or a community leader, or a neighbor. But we're all daughters.

And it really deserves a position of respect in our lives and in the front of our brain. Talking about it, highlighting it, saying, this is a beautiful role that's very important to our families and very important to society.

Rebecca: Yeah, and it comes along with it a bunch of expectation and taking up of your mental capacity and your emotional capacity in ways that you know, are under appreciated by everyone else and even ourselves.

The Visible Work of Daughtering: Tasks and “Doing”

Allison: So when I started doing the research, what I found was, okay, let's try to categorize the ways that daughtering is work or how daughters show up in a relationship. Because I think that one of the easiest, quickest ways to see it is when we're doing something, right, like buying a gift or hosting a family dinner. And so doing or tasks is the first way that we are showing up and giving labor as a daughter.

Many daughters often feel like if I don't do enough visits or phone calls or access to the grandkids or going on a trip or planning the trip or, you know, buying stuff, I'm not a good daughter. And we're really focusing on that doing.

The Hidden Mental and Emotional Labor of Being a Daughter

But what I learned through my research is there's a bunch of other types of labor. And so that's thinking labor, feeling labor, and what I call being labor, which is identity.

Thinking labor is giving mental space to something. Like I'm sitting at my desk, I'm typing, I'm at work, but I'm thinking to myself, oh, I wonder if my mom got that magazine in the mail that she said she'd been wanting. I mean, I'm just thinking of the person. Maybe I'm worrying. Maybe I'm planning. Maybe I'm just being.

I call it being the cruise director, you know, like Love Boat. It's like I am facilitating. So that's thinking work.

Emotion work, or feeling, is when I try to make sure everybody in the room is happy. I'm trying to manage and soothe and smooth emotions. I'm taking on emotional burdens to try to help everybody have a good time, so it seems like it's a Hallmark movie.

Identity Labor: Carrying Forward the Legacy of the Family

And then the last one is identity work, or being work. And it's how we represent ourselves as a daughter of the family, even if nobody else is around.

How do I continue the legacy of our family, the traditions of our family, the moral courage of our family? How do I continue those things onward? And that takes some effort. It takes some emphasis on it. It doesn't just magically happen on its own.

Rebecca: Right, right. I mean, I'm just thinking about how today I walked my kids to school, as I do most days, and then I knew my parents had just left on an international trip and I hadn't heard from them yet.

And so I thought I should double check to make sure that they're okay. So I opened up my WhatsApp and I texted, and I just said, you know, hey, everybody all right? Did you make it there okay?

Allison: Yeah. That's a perfect example.

Rebecca: That's something I do every day, you know, thinking, thinking.

Allison: Yeah, I love to check on my parents on the Maps app. You know, we've just had some icy conditions here in Texas, and I'll just open up the map and be like, are they at home? You know, did they go somewhere? Are they walking around? Are they driving when they shouldn't be driving?

Rebecca: What are you gonna do if you found out that they were driving?

Why Caring for Your Parents Isn’t “Parenting” Them — It’s Daughtering

Allison: And I think that this takes us into one of those places that is a great point to go to, which is sometimes we make the mistake of, as daughters, talking about, well, now I'm parenting my parent. I'm trying to raise these people. I'm trying to get them to be sensible.

And that's such a misnomer, and using the wrong word actually hinders us from getting a full picture of what it's like to do daughtering.

When I care about my parent, when I worry about them, when I check on them, when I tell them to do better, I'm daughtering my parent.

And I'm really proud of being a little porcupine if I have to, you know, a little crawl in their side. I'm never going to be their parent. I'm their daughter who loves and cares for them.

Rebecca: Yeah, yeah. And that would fall — you would probably see that in all three, really. The thinking, the feeling, and the being when you're in that zone.

The Gardening Metaphor: Understanding the Work of Daughtering

Allison: Yeah. These elements overlap. And one of the things that I talk about in the book — I use kind of a metaphor of gardening and being a gardener to try to understand what it's like to do daughtering.

Okay, so a gardener is gardening when they're out in their garden and they're tilling the soil. And I mean, a gardener lives for the fruit, the vegetables, the flowers to bloom.

And as daughters, we would love for there to be beautiful moments by the fireside, and we play a family game and everybody's laughing. But a gardener also has to think about their garden when it's time for the weeds.

A gardener is thinking about their garden when they're at the bookstore buying a book or new gloves. A gardener is a gardener when they're making a TikTok video about garden talk. And those are the same things about being a daughter.

We are daughtering whether we're at the bookstore, making a TikTok, or standing face to face with our parent — in the flowers and in the weeds.

Why Daughters Often Bring Up the Difficult Conversations

You know, I think it's so important to think about this. Daughters are often the prickly people who have to bring up the difficult things.

I mean, are their sons going to do it? I don't know that the sons do it. Not always.

Rebecca: It depends. 

Allison: Yeah, absolutely.

The Sandwich Generation: Caring for Parents While Raising Kids

Rebecca: And kind of going on into this subject a little bit, we keep going a little bit further and we kind of start talking a little bit about being a part of the sandwich generation.

Because I would imagine — and I don't know, you tell me — because I have done little to no research on this. But I would imagine our roles as daughters have probably shifted quite a lot as our parents are aging, as they're getting older and living longer.

And then expectations around caretaking have shifted dramatically in — at least in America — over the last, you know, several centuries. I would not — centuries — over the last, whatever, many years.

Allison: Decades, yeah. Social Security and all the things. Generation…

Rebecca: Yeah, I’m curious how you see these things coming together and the impact of how this all plays out in being the sandwich generation. At least you and I are for sure.

What the “Sandwich Generation” Really Means for Women

Allison: Yeah. So the original term of the sandwich generation means I'm a woman in the middle of my life, but I have aging parents who need me and young children who need me.

Okay, and there's also this sort of partner or romantic relationship component that we don't always say out loud. But in addition to that, many of us as women are working, in paid employment, or building careers.

And so the idea of the sandwich generation was meant to say that we're being squeezed and needed from all sides.

The Myth That the Pressure Only Starts When Parents Get Sick

And I think it's such a great term. But in a way, the sandwich generation ideology makes us think that we're only being squeezed if our parents become sick or very elderly, or if they need intense caregiving like driving them to the doctor.

And I want daughters to recognize that we have been giving and providing for our family connection for decades already. We've been doing and giving and helping that system stay in place over a long period of time, not just when a crisis shows up.

How Daughtering Changes Across the Lifespan

But it's so important for us to recognize that what a 20-year-old daughter does is different than what a 50-year-old daughter does. And it doesn't just flip a switch and all of a sudden our parents need us in that moment. It is incremental.

So one thing that happened to me this week — or maybe it was last week — is my parents sent a group text to what we call “adults fam.” It's all the adults in the family, the big adults, you know. And then we have “big fam,” which includes the children as well, even the teenagers.

And the text was about legal services. They're ready to update their will and were wondering which lawyer to use and where they should do that.

Daughtering Doesn’t Change Roles — It Expands Them

Now, my parents live together, they live alone, they drive, they're very independent. So they don't need caregiving from me. But they wanted some feedback, not because they're incapable, but because they wanted to share this decision about their will or trust and legal services. Which city should we do it in? Which lawyer should we use?

And I think that's a great example of how over a lifespan small shifts happen until we find ourselves in new territory.

What the research shows is that this is not a role change. We don't suddenly become our parents' parent. What it is instead is role expansion.

My daughtering becomes daughtering plus. It takes on new shapes in the same way that my mothering changed when my child went from 10 years old to 17 years old and needed a different kind of parent. And the same thing is happening here. My parents need a different kind of daughter, and I'm learning and growing and we're recalibrating all the time.

Rebecca: Yeah. So I want to circle this back to the topic of this podcast, which is work-life balance, and how this fits into that subject.

So I'm curious, as you hear that and as we kick that off, what are some of the things that start coming to mind?

Why Daughtering Should Count as a Legitimate Use of Your Time

Allison: Some of the most important things that come to mind are that when we're at work and we need to take a call or help our parent with something or organize something, or our parent comes to town and we need to take time off, we need to calculate that the same way we would calculate PTO for something else.

We need to recognize this is taking my resources, and this is a valid use of my resources because keeping my family connected is valid. And if I feel odd or awkward about taking paid time off or telling my employer where I'll be and they don't seem to think that that's reasonable, then what I need to notice there is that they need to catch up with the times.

Because as a woman, a career woman, I have care responsibilities for lots of people. So just like I could take off for a dentist appointment, I can take off because my parents have come to town and it's my responsibility to give them a tour around town, or they're having an ankle surgery and I need to take off.

And if my workplace doesn't value my intergenerational support, that is a workplace problem, not a me problem — that it's not a valid way to take off work.

Recognizing the Real Cost of Daughtering on Your Energy and Work

So I can start to calculate or count up the ways that being a daughter takes resources. And if it takes resources, that means time, energy, finances, and it impacts my mood. And that is therefore going to impact my work, my career work. And I need to first start by being aware of it so I'm not surprised.

Like, why do I have a headache? Oh yeah, I just spent 30 minutes helping my mom with the Medicare system. And I kind of need to calculate it the same way I would calculate if I spent 30 minutes on a call with my kid's teacher.

And that matters. It's family, it's important. But it cost me something.

And so I'm going to have to weigh that in the balance with my career. And it might mean that sometimes I need to say no if I don't have the bandwidth for that daughtering at this time because of a work project.

The Guilt of Saying No to Your Parents

Rebecca: Yeah, let's talk a little bit about that, because I have no doubt that saying no to your parent is a much harder no than almost any other no that might come up. I mean, certainly saying no to our kids can be as well.

But to say no — I can't do that for you — to your parent for work reasons or other demand reasons, like, whoa.

The amount of daughter guilt that might show up because of that feels like a lot. Are we allowed to say no to our parents, Allison?

Allison: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just picture — let's say you and I are at work on a Wednesday and it's 10am and my child has a cutesy little recital at school.

And I'm thinking to myself, why did they schedule this for 10:00am, you know?

Rebecca: Why do they do that?

Balancing Responsibility Without Being Everywhere

Allison: I know, I know. And so if I can't go at 10am, what do I do? I get my partner there, or I get my sister there, or I get a sibling, or I get another mom to record it for me, and I tell my kid, I'm so sorry I couldn't be there, but I want to celebrate with you after school. I want to get you a cupcake.

We figure out ways to balance it, and it doesn't mean the guilt goes away, but we also have to determine sometimes as adults what's reasonable. I can't take off every Wednesday at 10am if the big client meeting is at that time.

Bringing Daughtering Work Into Awareness

I think what happens as daughters is we're not really bringing how much we're doing to the front of mind, and we're not — it's not scheduled like that — so we're not noticing times when I need to say yes and times to say no.

So part of the book is about bringing to the forefront what am I doing as a daughter. And then I can calculate or calibrate how much do I have to give.

And then if I can't give to that event or that family drama of the moment, or that in this season, what I can do is either send in my emissary, which is equip my brother to do it, equip my spouse to do it, equip one of the older grandkids to do it, or I can say no, or I can say, let's talk about this after work.

And so those are the kind of things that if we don't ever look at what it's — what is happening or what it's costing us or talk about daughtering, it kind of is like we gaslight ourselves that we're not doing enough. But actually we are.

The Antidote to Chronic Daughter Guilt

And actually these boundaries are really reasonable. And that's kind of the antidote to feeling chronic guilt, is talking about it and showing everyone around us what's reasonable and what's unreasonable for us to participate in.

Rebecca: One of the conversations I have with virtually every client is what does it mean to be a good mom? Because that's a subjective idea. And you just get to decide what a good mom means and what kind of mom you want to be and what kind of motherhood experience you want.

Because it's not going to look like anyone else, right? You just get to decide and decide what those expectations, on some level, are for you.

And it strikes me as exactly the same concept here as we talk about being a good daughter. You just get to decide what a good daughter means.

It does not have to mean answer every phone call, go every time they need you, show up every time you're requested, coordinate every event, make sure you're connecting X, Y, or Z.

It could mean that now for you — and maybe this is the first time you're ever hearing that — you get to recalibrate those expectations. And if that's true, I — please — I hope that's your takeaway, and go do that.

But it strikes me as this need, this starting place of actually defining what does good daughter mean to you?

Creating a Personal “Rubric” for What Good Daughtering Looks Like

Allison: Yeah, yeah. And that's kind of what we talk about in the book — putting language to daughtering gives us a way to start talking out loud about what is good daughtering.

Now I'm a professor. I'm a professor at Baylor University. So when I teach classes and I give an assignment, I always give a rubric. And the rubric gives students the opportunity to understand how can I make a perfect score, a decent score, a meh score, or a bad score, you know.

And why I think that we need a rubric for daughtering in the same way that we probably need a rubric for parenting.

Like if I were to say, I'm going to go to three of those little plays a year, and if there's more than that, I'm not going to be able to make it, but I'm not going to feel bad about it. So we make a rubric.

For me, part of that rubric is saying here's how many times a year I'm going to visit. Here's how much money I have to give toward a family vacation.

Or just last night my husband and I were talking about whether we should be putting money in an account that's for the future. It's for 10 years in the future.

So maybe I'm calculating how much money I have. Or if you live across the country from your parent, money is a big deal, because every time you go see them it's a plane ticket and a hotel room.

I think it's reasonable to put an estimate on each of those things. Here's how much money I have for visits for this year or this season. And also to say things like here's how much time I have. You know, again, for phone calls, I'm going to call once a week or I'm going to call every day but for five minutes. I mean, you decide.

But sort of the key is you've got to make it permanent. You've got to write it down or you've got to tell people.

Rebecca: Right?

Allison: And then my second hack for that is so first write it down, make a rubric, make sure you've got kind of an idea of what do I think a really good daughter does in my family, in my life. 

And then my second tip is aim for a B plus. You're not going to hit every row of the rubric.

Rebecca: Amen! Preach it all the time. B plus is great.

Why Being a “Good Enough Daughter” Is the Real Goal

Allison: A B+ daughter. And it really comes from this idea of parenting. I talk about the good enough mother that Donald Winnicott talked about with Attachment Theory.

This idea that if you were a good enough mother, your kids would turn out great. You don't have to be the perfect mother. You don't have to be the always-on-call mother. You just have to be a good enough mother and your kids will turn out great.

And you don't have to be the perfect daughter. And you won't ever be able to be a good enough daughter if you don't calibrate where the goal line is or what the rubric is. But once you've calculated that or calibrated it or written it down, just aim for B.

And the good news is that for most of us, our family members are still going to love us, they're still going to want us around, they're probably going to give us a pass. We need to give ourselves a pass in order to find that balance.

Feeling Overwhelmed with Family Doesn’t Mean You’re a Bad Mom

Rebecca: I was just talking with a client yesterday who was trapped in their home in the snow for days now, as you are experiencing where you're at. And she was really exacerbated with the whole situation. She was just kind of at the end of her limits with being trapped with her immediate family.

And she was feeling really bad about that. She was feeling really bad about not wanting to be with her family anymore, that she had been trapped long enough and it was challenging for X and X reason, right.

Why Boundaries with Family Are Just as Important as Work Boundaries

Rebecca: And I responded back with a conversation around boundaries and how boundaries with our family are no different than boundaries we might talk about between work and home.

And how important it is to put up those boundaries and then not feel bad about them. Putting up a boundary with your family — whether we're talking about your kids in this case, or we're talking about your parents, your adult parents — either way, you don't have to feel bad about protecting yourself and your time and the things that are most important to you.

This is your life, right? You get to decide how you want to live it and what rubric you want to live by and what expectations you want to live by.

The fact that you have to put up boundaries doesn't mean anything's wrong. It doesn't mean that there's a problem even. It means that you are doing what you need to do for yourself to live life the most successfully across all areas of life.

Reframing the Feeling of “I Don’t Want to Be Here Right Now”

Allison: Yeah. You know, sometimes what that tells us, I think, when we're thinking I don't want to be here in this moment, and we feel bad because it seems like we want to leave that space, another way to reframe that is that my body is itching to go do these other things that I'm good at — my career, my friendships, my community, my thought leadership that the world needs.

And as women, we're so hard on ourselves thinking that we should want to and be good at these care roles, and particularly parenting. But I think that daughtering is another one that requires a lot of care.

And we have to ask ourselves, why do women feel that way? My answer to that is because we live in a society that values women primarily as carers, as maternal bodies, and our society doesn't do as well at valuing our knowledge, our work, our leadership, our moral courage.

Your Parents Want You to Have a Big Life — Not Just a Caregiving One

And that's not really something we have to lean into and agree with. If we agree with the idea that I should want to be with my kids all the time or I should be enjoying family life 100% of the time, we're denying the skills that we have for other areas of our lives.

And I think as a daughter we have to remember our parents want us to achieve. They want us to have big goals and dreams. They want us to travel. They want us to make money and be better than their generation. They want us to make friends and be out there in the world being change makers.

So at the same time that they want to see us, they also want us to have big, bold lives. And it's okay for those two things to exist at the same time.

We might have to say no to one thing while we're embracing another thing. And yes, they might miss us — but they'll also be proud of us.

And I see that happening in my life, in my family, in my immediate family and in my extended family. Would my mom like to talk to me on the phone more often? Would my dad like me to visit more? Yeah.

But they're also so proud of what I'm achieving and accomplishing, and those two things can absolutely exist at the same time.

Rebecca: Yeah. I don't necessarily want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but I just want to acknowledge the family situations that exist where we experience a lot of guilt tripping from our parents.

And I'm curious your thoughts on handling parents that use that kind of language with us. That can make it really hard to get over that guilt individually, because it feels like such an external narrative coming from our parents.

And how do we deal with that?

Boundaries Are About What You Choose for Yourself

Allison: Yeah, well, you talked about setting boundaries. I think boundaries is such a great term, and it's kind of good to define it. A boundary is something that I'm going to do for me regardless of what you're doing. This is what I've decided to do for me.

In families that develop boundaries and healthy communication, it doesn't mean it's easy or pleasant just for it to be healthy. Just like drinking green juice may not be easy, but it's healthy, right? Going for a two-mile run may not be easy, but it's healthy.

So we have to have a perspective of what's healthy and what's effective. And especially for those of us who are moms, we also need to think about what am I modeling for the next generation? What do I want my kids to feel like they can do with me, or what they can go do out in the world?

Modeling Healthy Boundaries for the Next Generation

So while there may be some discomfort with my parent who is unhappy, I am not responsible for all of their happiness. They have to have a purpose in life. They have to find ways to fill their life that are not fully dependent on me to fill that up.

And if I make a boundary where I refuse to be their entire world, I'm not just denying something to my parent. I'm modeling something healthy for the next generation. I'm modeling for my spouse or my partner that I choose them, and not just choose my parent all the time.

“I've chosen not to abandon myself.”

Life is full of discipline and denial. So when I deny my parents something and they're grumpy about it, I could look at that and think sad, blaming, shame, terrible. Or I can look at it and say I've chosen not to abandon myself. I've chosen this other family, this career opportunity, this joy in the world.

Those things can coexist. My parent can be upset, and I can be upset that they're upset, and still go find happiness in that same space. So I think there's a lot of internal talk to do. And finding healthy relationships isn't fast and it isn't easy. Everyone will not always be happy all the time.

Rebecca: Yeah. And it's not one-sided. They may or may not ever understand. They may or may not ever change. Likely they're not. I mean, it just is what it is, right?

You still get to be who you want to be and prioritize the things that matter to you, and they still get to be them.

And now it's just a decision about how you want to interact with that in a way that feels joyful to you, and that brings about all of your priorities, not just the one.

When Daughtering Also Requires Grieving and Support

Allison: Yeah. And maybe that involves grieving. Grieving that your parent can't come to that place with you, or is no longer in that space in their life where they understand the multitude of things that you're doing.

And for many women it's important to say, maybe you want to process that with a coach. Maybe you want to process that with a therapist.

And you know, for my book I'm really talking to women who are in pretty decent relationships with their parent, and they're just trying to make it a little better or they're trying to talk to themselves better.

If you're in a bad relationship with your parent — you know, there's a narcissist, there's trauma, there's abuse, there's drugs, there's sexual abuse, there's some sort of mental illness — definitely go get help. And don't tell yourself, I should be able to handle this on my own.

What the language of daughtering brings us is a much bigger community — a daughterhood — that we can share the highs and the lows and the struggle and that tension of living between giving to our families and keeping some resources back for ourselves.

Why Daughtering Must Be Part of the Work-Life Balance Conversation

Rebecca: Yeah, I am coming back to this almost fundamental understanding that as we put language to daughtering and more fully embrace that role — and recognize how much time, thinking time, emotional space, and physical space it takes up in our life — we start to see that it is a piece of the puzzle that needs to be considered when we're talking about a holistic, balanced approach to our life.

We don't want to discount it or fail to give credit to this role that is very important to us and that takes up some of our resources, to your point.

It is going to be a part of the picture. It's not as black and white as sometimes we like to think about work-life balance, which is the focus of this podcast. It really isn't that simple on many levels.

And there are so many layers we could talk about — roles in marriage and things like that too. But daughtering is one that needs to be a bucket of its own, and we need to give it that weight.

Embracing the Full Humanity and Complexity of Being a Daughter

Allison: Yeah. We deserve as women to think of ourselves in our full complexity, our full humanity, our full beauty. And sometimes we get narrow in thinking of just wife, mother, and we forget about thinking of ourselves as daughter.

Daughter deserves to be cared for. Daughter is caring. You know, it brings us into our full humanity. And I think we can find some generosity for ourselves in that space.

If I think of myself as a daughter in the same way that I would be generous and gentle with someone else's daughter, then I can find that gentleness for myself.

And when we model for the world that women have this full spectrum of identities, roles, and places, it brings us closer to thinking woman — congressman woman, doctor woman, neighbor woman, leader woman, daughter woman, mother woman, caregiver.

We might put those in a different order, and each of us has a different order.

And every single thing about us doesn't have to be soft and kind all the time. Sometimes we're prickly and we're pokey, and we're the ones who are out front saying, go, fight.

I don't know. I kind of went off the rails there a little.

Rebecca: Okay. I love it.

Allison: I like to think of women in so many capacities, and I think when we get into that mindset of considering daughtering in that way, it helps us expand how we think of women and what we allow ourselves to be.

What Changes When We Put Language to Daughtering

Rebecca: So I want to give you a chance — we only have a couple more minutes here — to share anything else that we need to know. And then I also want to hear about where people can find your book and all the things.

But one last question that's coming to mind is what changes for us when we embrace, or put language to, our role as a daughter?

Allison: What I've heard from women over and over again is that when we start to put language to daughtering, daughterhood, what does it mean to be daughterly? What do daughters do in relationships? How do we connect with our families? What's hard about being in a family, but what's also beautiful and supportive and what are we grateful for?

What I have heard over and over again is that women find relief.

It's not creating more conflict to point out to everyone, hey, I'm doing daughtering. What it does is create relief by just opening up our field of vision to a new part of ourselves and loving that part of ourselves.

How the Book Helps Women Redefine Their Role as Daughters

So what I've done in the book Good Daughtering is that every single chapter has an activity at the end. It starts at the beginning of the book with thinking activities — just thinking about what we're doing, noticing it, finding an awareness.

In the second part of the book, it moves on to saying, okay, I'm going to do some deciding. What do I think a good daughter is? What do I want my life to be like? How do I want to show up in these places, and what do I want to stop doing?

And then in the third part of the book, it moves on to okay, let's say I need to recalibrate and shift some things around.

How do I talk to my best people? How do I talk to my siblings? How do I talk to my boss? How do I talk to my partner or my children about daughtering? And there are scripts in the book for those conversations.

You can find me online at daughtering101 on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. My website is daughtering101.com.

And I really think there’s an opportunity here for us to come together as a community of women who share the real, beautiful, blessing-hard parts of being an adult daughter.

Rebecca: So good. Thank you for coming on the podcast and sharing. Your book is, I have no doubt, the beginning of many, many amazing conversations for people. So I'm grateful that you've put that out into the world.

I assume we can find that anywhere and everywhere when it comes out — Amazon, all the things. I assume so.

And we'll definitely link to the websites and all the things in our show notes so we can make that easy for everybody to find you.

Thank you. Just thank you. Thank you for being here. Thanks for what you're doing in this world.

Allison: Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Rebecca: Thanks, Allison. All right, working moms, until next week, let's get to it.

Feeling Behind Every Day? It Might Not Be a Time Management Problem

Hey, before you go, quick question. Are you ending most days feeling behind? No matter how much you get done.

If this is happening right now, it's not a time management problem. It's a pattern. And stress patterns don't fix themselves — they compound.

Most working moms don't actually need more time. They need to feel back in control.

Inside my Break Free from Stress Strategy Call, we spend 30 focused minutes identifying exactly what is driving your overwhelm and mapping out a clear shift so you stop reacting and start leading your life again.

If you're tired of white-knuckling your week, don't put this off. Go to the show notes and click on the Break Free from Stress Strategy Call link to schedule your call right now.

All right, working moms, till next week, let's get to it.

Rebecca Olson