Why You Don’t Feel Like “Enough” as a Daughter with Dr. Allison Alford

Tati: If you’ve ever felt like no matter how much you do for your family, it’s still not enough. This episode is for you. I’m joined by Dr. Allison Alford, who holds a PhD in communication studies with a concentration in interpersonal communication, and she’s here to name the invisible labor that so many daughters carry, and help us to explore how to untangle our worth from sacrifice and reclaim what healthy daughtering can look like.
So I’m excited to be here with Dr. Allison Alford and really excited for this conversation. I know that it will resonate with a lot of my audience here. Um, thank you so much for being on the Calmly Coping Podcast, Allison.
Allison: Thanks. It’s great to be here and I can’t wait to talk to your listeners about all the things, invisible labor and working, and you know how to be a, a high achieving person who also finds peace wherever you can.
Tati: Yes. I love that. And to dive into things. So really what you are speaking about is this term of daughtering, and I’m sure it’s something that, you know, when I first heard it, it wasn’t something I had ever heard before, that many people might be wondering. Maybe they have an idea of what it means, but not really the specifics.
Can you describe what that term means?
Allison: Yeah. So when you think about doing any kind of role in your life, then it, it’s turning something that’s a role into the verb or the active way of doing it. So, uh, as a daughter, an adult daughter, I know how to do that. I, I mean, I’m doing it already by just being a daughter and being in relationship with my family, but I use the term daughtering.
Uh, to think about how I make choices and show up in my relationship with my parents and how I meaningfully contribute to keeping that connection going. And by doing that, I put some language on. That type of activity in the same way that if you were a parent, you might call it parenting, you know, you’re not just standing around, you’re like actively thinking of stuff and doing stuff to be an adult daughter in a family.
We’re doing a lot, and when we have the word. To describe what it is that we’re doing, we actually start to notice it more and bring it to light and talk about it. And then that helps us to make decisions about how we want to show up in our relationship and, and we have agency, um, with making those decisions.
Tati: Hmm. Yeah, and I, I think a lot of times it can appear as though being a daughter is more of a like receiving role, especially if you think of in childhood and adolescence and growing up. But what you’re talking about, I’m hearing is more about in adulthood, maybe that role starts to shift or maybe responsibilities can be different.
So what might that look like being. An adult daughter and, and maybe the unseen work that might come along with that.
Allison: For sure being a daughter changes over a lifespan. You know, when we’re younger, when we’re in child, when we’re in adolescence, when we’re teenagers, until we really like move outta the house and separate our finances from our parent, we are at kind of the mercy.
Of this, this person, you know, our parent. And so we’re being parented. And there’s a sense that when we hear that term, or we think about that term that the daughter or the child role is very passive, like we just have to do whatever the parent sends our way. And the danger in not talking about how that changes over a lifespan is that we can continue to think that daughters are just there, that we’re just like a vessel that’s being filled up by mothering or parenting or, you know, it could be a mom or a dad or a stepmom.
Stepdad. Um, but what I found in my research, I’m a social scientist and my background is in communication studies. That’s what my PhD is in. So I’m really interested in. How do people relationally form or create things into being in their lives? And what I found first, just by noticing my own life and the women around me, but then by doing the research, is that adult women are really showing up a lot in our families.
And we are, we’re a huge part of what makes the family go, but there’s very little. Notice of that, there’s not discussion about it. We don’t have words for it, and that means that it stays in the shadows and it stays invisible. So the labor of thinking about my mom or my dad calling them, asking them about their workday, planning a visit, giving them access to the grandchildren, putting money in the bank, or paying for something on a family vacation.
All of that labor. Is, is is getting swept under the rug or just not noticed even by us, even by the women who are doing it. And so it’s very different to be an adult daughter in your twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, than it is to be the 15-year-old teenage daughter. I have a teenage daughter at my house and she is wonderfully contributing to our.
Relationship, you know, together. But she’s like basically under my control. She’s under my roof, she’s under my finances, she’s under my health insurance. I pay her cell phone bill. And so she doesn’t have a lot of, um, you know, control or power and in that relationship because she’s a, she’s a minor child, but very shortly in our lives.
That will change. And we have to remember to notice where that changed and how that has changed for us as adults, where that changed in our lives and how much opportunity we have to impact the type of family that we wanna be in, that we can impact that on purpose and not just let family doing, family being in a family happen to us.
Mm-hmm. We, we have some control.
Tati: Yeah, I, I think that’s a great point and, and it sounds like it’s starting with recognizing that this is actually a thing. And what I’ve noticed is that I think that it can be something that is, and I think you mentioned this in the book, like it’s these unspoken rules of interacting or communicating or things that are maybe.
Expected but not necessarily communicated. Like I notice in my family at get togethers, it tends to be the women that are the ones that are responsible for planning and preparing the food and cleaning up and organizing things. And it’s, it’s something that I’ve noticed, but I’ve never really, like, I’ve questioned, I’ve been frustrated like, why is it this way?
But it feels like it’s, we’re stuck in these patterns. It’s so hard sometimes to shift out of them.
Allison: We all grow up with scripts and scripts can come from, you know, the, so script is like if we’re in a play and it’s like, this is how to do it, this is how to do family, this is how to do my role. And as a daughter we can get our script.
From our family members, we’d be like, well, this is how my mom does it. This is how my grandma, my aunt. So this is how we do things here. But scripts also come from watching our peers. You know, if we think, oh, well my girlfriends all take their moms on a mother-daughter tea or luncheon, I’m making things up here.
But then you might think, well, I need to do that. That’s what a good daughter does. We get part of our scripts from watching movies, you know, where we see like, uh, I’m 43, so I love the movie Steal Magnolias. So I’m like, we get scripts from seeing like, how did these women interact on screen and I’m going to accept that that is appropriate or culturally appropriate.
Um. Or we can watch crazy people on screen and be like, I reject that. Good daughters don’t do that, so I’ll do the opposite. But we, without realizing it, we have made up a, a set of rules and norms. You know, not everything’s a rule like I have to do this, but for sure a norm is like, this is kind of the normal way we do it.
And I don’t know why I would go around and just break that, uh, for how to be a daughter. How to be an adult daughter in our family. And so we do those things without ever kind of taking a step back and going, do I like this? Is it working? Does it work for me? Do I think it’s cool? Do I get any benefit from it?
And I think that we do ask those questions about other relationships that we’re in. I think that we do take stock of our friendships and think is, is serving me? Am I, am I more of the inviter? Am I somehow paying and they’re never ven mowing me back? Like we take stock of that. We do that when we’re dating and in marriage, but we don’t.
To probe our lives that way. When it comes to being a daughter in a family, there’s a lot of stuff that’s taken for granted and because we take it for granted. Don’t talk about it. Don’t share it, don’t probe it. We feel the weight that it can never change or that we’re stuck in something because we’re not noticing our own ability to impact it.
Tati: And what inspired you to go into this area of kind of exploring more about Daughtering and what that means?
Allison: Yeah, I have always been kind of a self helpy person, if that makes sense. Like
Tati: mm-hmm.
Allison: Maybe some of your listeners can agree, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re working hard at school, at your job, at your whatever, and, and somehow you still feel like you have time to self actualize.
Like, what should I be doing to make myself better? Um. But I, I also grew up in a family. Um, my mom is a marriage and fa and family therapist and she went back to school when I was in middle school and earned that train, you know, did the training and earned the degree. So I was really front row seat to watching this, you know, boss, babe, woman, um, change her life, learn something new, and really altering some big family systems, not just my life as her child, but some.
Big family patterns that needed to change. And, um, and so I, I, I kind of come by naturally in my, in my family, you know, from my mom in this training, thinking about people and how people talk and interact and what’s healthy and what’s effective. Um, but I also. I’m this self-actualizing person, and so this kind of combo came together while I was in graduate school and I was earning my PhD.
And when you’re earning a PhD, you have to produce some sort of research project. And your research project can’t be something anybody else has ever done. And I mean, because that wouldn’t make sense, right? So you have to either. Pick something that somebody’s done and change it a little like the population or the study method, or you have to pick something just far out from left field that’s brand new.
Although actually you’re kind of penalized for doing that because they’re like, whoa. You can’t do that. That’s, nobody’s ever done that. Um, so of course I made life harder for myself by doing that and picking something that wasn’t really, uh, related to the, the work that anyone else was doing at that time.
Um, but I, I just wanted to ask women, what is it like to be a daughter? What is it like to. Probe or examine that role and what does that mean to you to even start thinking about it? How does that change or shift things in your life? So that’s what I’ve been doing for over 10 years is talking to women about doing daughtering and both hearing from them what they already think about it before I ask the questions, and then going back to them and finding out what does it mean to you now that you’ve thought about it and started making changes.
What’s happening? In your life that, that feels different.
Tati: Hmm. And so I’m sure there’s probably a, a wealth of information that you’ve gathered in, in learning about this, but I’m curious what stands out to you as far as what you’ve learned from these women about what. It means like what’s their response to that question of what it means to be a daughter and how it shows up in their life and how it affects them.
Allison: For many women, when you say, what does it mean to be a daughter, what’s it like being in your relationship? The first response is about, is actually about their mother. They start saying, well, my mom, blah, blah, blah, and they’re talking about the relationship, or they’re talking about the way they’ve received parenting, and it can often be really difficult to take a look at yourself and say, this is what I’m doing.
Because we don’t have that recognition. And I have this great story that’s in my book, um, that’s coming out good Daughtering, and it, it really happened to me in real life. I was talking to a friend and my, my good friends know what I study and I talk about it all the time. And she said to me, um, I’m just not.
Doing as much daughtering as you’re talking about in your research or you keep talking about in your books. And I said, what do you mean? Like, well, tell me what is a typical interaction? And she went on to tell me she’s the oldest of four and all four of those adult kids have big families. And then there’s parents and then there’s grandparents.
And she told me about a typical holiday where she hosts. She pays, she cleans up, she tries to make sure everybody is happy and satisfied. And then she’s exhausted and everybody says thanks, and just like walks away and, and I ask her like, is that fun? Do you enjoy that? And she’s like, I mean, I’m glad I can provide it, which is not the same thing as thinking I had fun.
Tati: Mm-hmm.
Allison: Um, and I said to her, you are doing it. You’re doing daughtering. You’re providing a space for your parents. You’re providing this life that they wanna be a part of where the family gets to gather. You’re doing it for the benefit of your siblings as well. And she said, I just don’t feel like my mom even really knows me.
And I said, what’s preventing you from talking to her about that? And she said, well, I wouldn’t wanna hurt her feelings. And I was like, that’s daughtering there where you’re, so it’s not just the hosting of the event, it’s that you are protecting her so much, even emotionally that it, in this case, to your detriment that you’re not getting what you need and.
But so many women think if I’m not super close with my mom, I’m not daughtering or I’m not doing enough. And those are different things. You know, closeness and intimacy versus how much you’re participating in making a big experience for the family are really separate. Things that we’ve gotten conflated or we’ve gotten confused because we have so many people talking about being best friends with their mom.
Or we’re talking about, we use the wrong word, where we say, I’m mothering my mother, and we don’t have the right way of talking about it to be able to see actually how much you’re already doing. And that’s really what I find when I talk to these women is they don’t, most of us don’t. Take a really good, strong look in the right ways at ourselves and see, oh my gosh, I’m actually doing quite a lot.
I am pretty good at this Daughtering thing. And um, and they’re lucky to have me.
Tati: So it sounds like there’s a lot that is. Happening not just in the doing, like the tasks and the planning and the organizing and all of that, but there’s also, you mentioned that emotional piece and so what comes into that or, or how does that show up as far as maybe like emotional labor that daughters are doing?
Allison: Yeah, exactly. You nailed it. There is the most obvious thing that we see is the doing. Right. And, uh, the doing is the, the part that’s most visible to the world. And if we were to calibrate, how am I, how am I doing as a daughter? Or how am I showing up? We would notice and calculate things like phone calls, visits, money.
But those are, um, again, the most kind of showy ways that daughters do daughtering. And what I found from my research is that there’s three additional important ways that daughters do daughtering. So there’s the doing and then there’s the feeling work, the thinking work and the being work. So we’ll start with the feeling work.
That’s really the emotional labor and emotional labor. Um, I don’t wanna go too far into it ’cause I’m kind of a nerd about these things, but it’s like both how we. Um, use our emotions to help others feel emotionally grounded and stable. But it’s also the work that we do to make ourselves seem like we’re okay even when we don’t feel okay, just so we can all get along.
And those two types of, um, emotion work or emotion labor, they drain a lot of our resources. They drain our energy, our fortitude. They take our calm and um. We don’t always realize if I give that to my family, I don’t have that for other spaces. I don’t have that for my partner or I don’t have that in my workplace because I drained that bank account of emotional reserves for my parent.
The next way is the, the thinking work or the cognitive work. I notice this a lot with daughters and, and these, this is one of those things that’s happening when you’re not. Directly face to face with your parent. So for all those daughters who live across the country, or you think, I don’t really see them very often, this is a type of daughtering to notice in yourself thinking work is planning, organizing, being a CEO.
It’s worrying. It is. Um, there’s one daughter who I interviewed who told me she started putting money in a bank account for, for her parents. Um. When she was 25, she started putting money in this account, but it was intended to be for 20 or 30 years later for her parent when they needed care. And she didn’t tell them about it, but it was part of her thinking, part of her planning, and she’s an only child.
So it was also some self-protection that she wanted to know that when the time came that she had that ready. And so it was a financial. You know, resource that she was doing as well as the thinking and the preparing and the planning and agreement with her partner to have this asset ready for the parents.
Um, so there’s lots of ways that we see thinking work show up and um, again, that’s not gonna be visible to anyone else. Nobody’s gonna know how much you’re ruminating or tearing. About something because it’s happening inside of you. Um, unless you narrate it. Unless you bring it forth and tell people about it.
And, and so the last one I really love and is very, very much hidden and not talked about enough, which is the being work of being a daughter. And that is your identity as a daughter. How do I carry myself around in the world feeling like I represent my family well? I carry the family name, I carry on traditions or legacies.
I, um, I work hard to make people think that my family is good or put together. I. Let my parents put photos on their Facebook, bragging about the family. Even when I think that’s kind of cringe, I am allowing or, or working on this, this identity of being a good daughter and I have to give away parts of me to allow that.
I think that Facebook one really resonates for a lot of people where you think, I would never put that on my TikTok or my ig, but my parents wanted this. Beautiful family photo because they want their peers and friends to think a certain kind of way about them. And when I allow it, then I am working on my identity as a daughter and my identity as a family member.
And it’s a critical piece of being part of a family. So as I describe each of those types of work, and we think of them as resource dependent, meaning I can only do those things when I have the resources to give to it. Um. I, I want to note that that’s how you can see where you’re showing up and you’re already giving a lot and you’re already doing enough in your family, and you can give yourself a little break and say, I didn’t realize I was actually doing quite a lot and, and giving towards that, and that maybe I need to cut myself, you know, a little break here, give myself a pass that I don’t need to do more.
Or some invisible set of rules or norms when I, you know, that I just made up that I’m pressuring myself with. Um, or that’s, that feel like there’s pressure with, um, but I can kind of find ways to embrace my enoughness in my family by noticing these invisible ways that I’ve been showing up and acknowledging they’re not just.
Natural stuff daughters do. They are me deciding to give my resources to these people as a gift out of love, out of a desire to be a member of a family. They’re, they, they increase connection and I can be proud of myself for offering those things.
Tati: If you’re enjoying this conversation and you want more support to feel calm, balanced, and confident in your daily life, then I invite you to join me free at my weekly ish [email protected] slash newsletter, I share practical tips, personal insights and resources designed.
Specifically for high achievers managing stress and anxiety so you can feel more grounded and in control. Again, that’s calmly coping.com/newsletter. I’d love to have you join us now back to the episode. Yeah, I love that shift. So it sounds like in recognizing all of these ways that you are giving, showing up for your loved ones, for your family, maybe that’s a, a.
It sounds like that’s a shift from, this is an obligation, this is something I didn’t even think twice about to this is a choice and kind of reframing the relationship that that we have with that kind of work.
Allison: Absolutely. The first line of defense, and this is kind of what I go into in the first third of my book, is that mindset shift.
So noticing. Making visible the invisible. That’s, that’s the first part of it is just being aware, like, oh, huh, I didn’t know that was a thing, as you said. I love that. Um, and, and then once we’ve noticed and we’ve shifted our mindset to appreciating what we’ve already been doing and appreciating how we’ve already been showing up in our families, then we can pivot to making decisions about.
Do I like this? Is it giving? What? What are the benefits? ’cause we do need to notice the benefits of being in a family and feeling good and loved and supported and flourishing. But if we’re not seeing benefits, we can begin to calibrate. How do I want to show up in my family? What kind of daughter do I wanna be?
What do these people even want from me? If I’ve never asked them, I can start to ask them. And then that, that, so you can, so you notice, then you calibrate and then the third option becomes change. So you. Begin to make changes in your life if you desire in your family life. Through conversations, through narrating your experience by asking for help, or most importantly, setting boundaries around your resources.
You know, they say good fences, make good neighbors so we can build some good fences so that we can enjoy. Boundaries so that we can enjoy our family and enjoy being part of a family.
Tati: Yeah, and I, I think that that’s something, it sounds like. Is the, with the intention of protecting your own time and energy.
And I’m curious because I know that when it comes to setting boundaries with family, that can sometimes be the most challenging place to do it because these patterns are so entrenched because there’s maybe the guilt or the, you know, consequences that might happen. What, what are your recommendations for beginning to, to set boundaries if you notice that something isn’t working for you?
Allison: Yeah. As somebody who loves communication, I think the first place to start is what around my house, what we call narrating your life and narrating your experience. So before. Trying to set a boundary which might be telling someone, what if they do this? I’m gonna react in this way. And it feel, and it can feel very tense or stressful for the other person to hear start instead as, as sort of the precursor to the boundary setting, the narrating.
Here’s what I’ve been doing. Here’s how it’s impacting me when I do this. I have less reserves for this, but you know what, when, when I do this or we have this, I feel filled up and this happens. So I think a huge part of of changing our daughtering starts with narrating to our, our partners. I enlist my husband and my kids as allies in big family experiences and partnering with me to, to make sure to protect my resources and my reserves.
Um, I narrate my experience to my sibling. I have a, an older sister and I try to tell her like, Hey. I don’t know if you know this, but I sent mom and dad 50 bucks for that Thanksgiving meal. Like I just, I, I don’t try to be a martyr and keep it hidden. I try to narrate that out loud and um, for me, over the past, I’d say two years, I’ve noticed a huge.
Shift in people in my family, noticing my daughtering, and then they can shift themselves. And first they have to shift their mindset and then they can shift their behavior. So I think setting boundaries is a long process. It’s a slow process. It’s like getting a pair of braces and your teeth are not gonna change overnight.
They’re gonna take three years. And that was with that braces in place. All day long, you know, um, for three years. So start with narrating. Start and then move on to asking what is it that you want? What is it that if you, if you, if you could have your perfect daughter, what would I do? How many phone calls would that be?
How many visits, how much money? What is it you want for me to, uh, pursue and achieve in my life outside of you? And how can I have time for that? So then we ask questions. Nothing’s changing, and then we. Institute some boundaries. You know, this is, this is what I’m gonna do to protect my time, or I’m not gonna be able to visit once a month.
I’m gonna change that to once a quarter because I’m gonna be using that money to go to culinary school or whatever. And so we really just need, in general, more communication with our family. And nobody, I’m not saying it’s, I’m making it sound easy. It’s not easy, it’s gonna be really uncomfortable. But if we jump too quickly.
To just boundary setting. Our family members do get confused because it’s not the paradigm, it’s, it is it, it would be a big shift in the paradigm. So I really encourage, um, women to start just talking about the experience of being a daughter. Talk to yourself about it. Write it down journal. Talk to your family members about it, and then think I can.
And will and deserve to make changes, but some changes will happen just by people observing and understanding me. And then further change can happen if I need to to set a boundary. And I wanna clarify one important thing here, which is my work and my book are really for those women who are in pretty decent relationships with their family, right?
If you’re in a toxic, abusive, narcissistic. You know, drug abuse influenced, um, family system for sure. Get some additional help and recognize that’s a much more extreme case and, um, really valid and important to get, to get professional help. I think when it comes to my research and what I’m suggesting to women is it’s, it’s most of us in the middle who we don’t feel like our relationships with our parent are perfect.
But they’re kind of okay, decent, good enough, but we would like to, uh, optimize them. And that’s where these tools can come in for people who really wanna stay connected in their family. We wanna keep being in a family, we wanna keep being a daughter, but we just like to optimize it some more.
Tati: Yeah. Yeah.
And, and what I’m hearing and what you’re describing is it’s really the process of making what had been invisible or unspoken or internal before. Making it something that people are aware of, like you’re, you’re aware of your family starting to become aware of because you are communicating it.
Allison: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a huge thing is just the noticing.
It’s like seeing that, okay, if, if I’m gonna be, um, if, if I was a CEO in a company, what does A CEO do? They manage everything. They don’t make the widgets. They manage the people making the widgets, and they make a really great salary, in fact, one of the best salaries in the whole organization from being the manager.
We need to notice the ways that we are being a CEO. Our family because many adult daughters are in fact the most in charge person of the family. Dynamics in in my family, my larger family, the get togethers, the holidays, the fun family things only happen when the two adult daughters decide we we’re available and this is a good place and a good time to go.
And it’s both a privilege to be the one saying that, and it’s a huge responsibility ’cause we’re the only ones. Making it happen. And I mean, like, no, we’re all going on vacation. Everybody gets your wallet out, you know, we’re, we’re, and if you don’t have it, I’m gonna, I’m gonna cover you because we’re going, we’re doing family time.
Um, so I think a lot of women find themselves in that position of family, CEO, um, and you maybe don’t wish that it was like that. You’re like, but why is it. Mom doing this, or my aunt or my grandma, like they’re older, more responsible, more powerful, and they have the money. Um, but they’re just not making it happen.
They’re not. And so it’s on me to make these family experiences happen. So you, if you see that and that’s where you’re at, you need to recognize that is accurate. That is true, but also the CEO has to get paid, right? Meaning. There’s value in that managerial work, and you have to have the resources preserved to do it, or the others have to show up enough bringing the value to the experience that you feel like you’ve gotten.
Paid in a sense that you got a value out of that big family experience as well. Mm-hmm. Um, because we’re not, you know, CEOs are not martyrs who are giving their whole paycheck away while running the company, you know, towards success. So if you are in your family and you’re like, I’m the CEO, I’m the only one responsible, no one will do anything unless I do it and I’m spending my.
Time and my thought and my vision and my leadership and my skills, and then I don’t even feel good or excited about it. That’s where, where you need to put your focus is how can you start to feel like there’s some benefits, some enjoyment, some. Mattering that it matters that you’re doing that and some thanks from your family members.
Um, but they don’t know to do it. Just like we didn’t even know this was a thing before our talk. Mm-hmm. So you have to, you have to tell people about it and you have to tell them you want thanks, and you have to tell them what you want out of this family connection and experience.
Tati: Yeah. Yeah. Very well said.
And you know, the name of your book is Good Daughtering, and, and you know, some of what you talk about is feeling like you are doing or you are enough as a daughter. And I know that many of my listeners struggle with things like perfectionism and feeling like it’s never enough. So what would you recommend for somebody who’s, who’s feeling in that place?
Allison: Yeah, this is, this is the book I’d love to show, the bright pink cover. Good daughtering. Love it. Um, and the subtitle is The work you’ve always Done, the Credit You’ve Never Gotten, and how to finally Feel Like Enough. So there are so many of us that feel like we are showing up, we are doing it, and if we’re not getting the credit, we’re not getting notice, we’re not getting thanked, then it’s really hard to feel like it’s.
Checking the box, you know, that, that we feel like enough. Um, so we are, are kind of doing this to ourselves. So we keep trying harder so that maybe it’ll be noticed more so that then we can feel finally feel good about it. Um. And, and I, I really think that is a, a pattern that many of us are stuck in. The, the, the hardest part of the pattern is we didn’t, we haven’t created a rubric for ourselves, right?
Like if you’re in school, I’m a professor, um, and somebody turns in an assignment, there’s a rubric. 10 points for this, 10 points for that, 15 points for this. And before. The student ever turns it in. They can check the rubric to see if they’ve maximized their points. We are operating as daughters with no rubric.
We just keep moving the goalpost. We just keep expanding the points, value of the activity, and so I recommend, I highly recommend. Putting down on paper, writing down somewhere, you know, making a note on your phone or doing like the activities in this book. There’s activities at the end of every chapter that create a visible concrete list of what do I think a good daughter is?
What do I think is enough? Let me quantify that. Let me calculate that the same way I would. Calculate the cost of my groceries or the cost of childcare and decide, you know, cost benefit. You know, what’s the ROI here?
Tati: Mm-hmm.
Allison: Um, we haven’t been doing that as daughters, and so we just keep making up bigger and bigger assignments and rubrics and moving the goalpost.
But if we would plant the goalpost and say, like I did in my family, I’m gonna visit once a quarter, and it was really hard to say it out loud and to feel like. Is everybody gonna hate me and are my parents gonna be sad? And does this, you know, will I be mad at myself later years later when they’re gone that I didn’t visit more?
Tati: Mm.
Allison: Um, but by. Planting a flag and saying, this is what I’m gonna try to do. I gave myself a, a real set marker instead of some ambiguous way of trying to show up as a daughter. And I gave myself permission to just try it like a beta test. I’m just gonna try this for one to two years and see if it feels right, and if it feels wrong, I can change it again.
But I am an agent of change and I deserve to also make a rubric for myself knowing. This is, this is, this is what enough looks like, and I’m gonna be my first champion who says to myself, I am enough. Look at all that I’m doing. Not just the visible, showy stuff, but the invisible. The thinking. The feeling, the being work that I am bringing to the table because I do love my family and they love me.
So now I just, I need to, um. Start believing that message. So, so that’s really a way that women can proceed forward in changing our mindset. A lot of times it comes from saying it out loud, writing it down, sharing it with others. We plant that marker and then we can really, um, try to feel good about it.
After, right? We, we can plant the flag and say, oh, this feels bad at first to make these changes or to ask myself to change or my family to change, but I’m just gonna go ahead and do it. And then I can see if later I start to feel good about it. And if I don’t, I can change it again because I’m an agent of change.
Tati: Yeah, so it sounds like it’s really an empowering process of that you know, is gonna be uncomfortable. Like you mentioned. It’s gonna be challenging, but really the goal is to recognize the work that you are doing and kind of. Assess, is this working for me? Do I want things to be different? And you mentioned, you know, I love the activities that you have in the book.
One that stood out to me was like making new traditions and kind of like that freedom, creativity to do things in a different way that maybe works best for you and for how you wanna approach things, rather than just the default of, okay, this is what everybody else in my family has done up to this point.
Allison: Yeah, if the existing traditions in your family are all centered around a particular holiday or birthdays or, um, you know, we make photo books or we make calendars or things like that. You know, we, you might stop and ask yourself, where did this tradition come from? You know, did my mom or dad make it? Did my grandparent Is this multiple generations long?
And we don’t have to get rid of those traditions, but we could start a new tradition that works for our lifestyle. We could say new tradition. Everybody spends a weekend in New York City and we go watch Broadway shows, you know, once a year, every other year. This is daughter’s weekend. And you can speak into existence, both things that help you enjoy and love your family, but that also work for your lifestyle.
Basically, you make everybody come to you and you, um. I can notice though that those are ways to have fun. I think when, when I, when I just think about my regular daily job, I’m a professor at Baylor University. There are seasons where I notice like I’m not having fun because I’m just going, I’m just doing the thing.
And in a, in a, in a university, it just repeats on the semester patterns and you kind of realize like, oh, I was just showing up and doing it, and there’s some good feelings in that, but I need to spice things up so that I remember why I like it here and we can. And so I do that at work occasionally. You know, I’m like, oh, let’s have a coffee chat, and I invite the students to something.
Or, I recently had a Christmas party at my house. I haven’t done that in a decade, but I had all these students over and we had such a great time, and it reminded me how much I love my job. Well, we can do the same thing in our family by creating a new tradition or a new event or a new activity. We don’t just have to go with the ones that already exist.
If you create a new tradition or a new event, not everybody’s gonna be on board or think it’s cool the, the moment they hear about it or they may not wanna put the money to it, but you can. Hold the fact that you want this new tradition and people in your family will be difficult and it might be tense and some people may miss the first annual event and still go forward with it.
Um, because you see the value, because now you are aware of all of the invisible that is important in families, and you can hold that as true and real and valuable even when your family members haven’t been trained to see it yet.
Tati: Yeah, and you know, this is such, I think, an important conversation, bringing this to the forefront.
There’s so much more that you mention in the book and you know, I would recommend it for anybody who is listening to this and and curious about exploring more of how they might be. Participating in these unseen forms of doddering and, and how to make these shifts. Uh, can you talk more about the book and, and where people can find out more about it?
Allison: Yes, so the book is Good Daughtering, and it’s out February 17. So if you are hearing this after that date, then you can get the book and it’ll be on your doorstep right away. Anywhere fine books are sold. Who needs to have this book? Anyone who is a daughter knows a daughter loves a daughter. So if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, but I’m the mom, you know, I’m, I’m 70, well buy it, internalize it, give it to your daughter, do the activities together, and, um, and recognize that.
The process of growth and of changing our mindset is, is both. One that we, we have to allow ourselves the time to do and put the energy toward, but also see the value in. It’s an investment. So for me, the work of thinking about daughtering, sharing the idea of daughtering and talking about it even on podcasts, like this is about changing this cultural narrative that that.
You know, everything related to daughtering is hard or unpleasant or, um, you know, training and to say, let’s shift that a little bit, which is. Everything that’s worthwhile I have to put effort into. I do put a lot of effort into my family. I also see that because I am someone putting effort into my family, I have choice.
I have options, and I have opportunities to make this more pleasant for me, for my family members, and noticing that. Healthy families are good for society, you know, and, and it’s great to have people around who love and support us and lift us up even if those people are annoying. I mean, I frequently tell my mom how annoying she is and she lovingly says it back to me.
And we, we do, we just try to kind of keep it real. We’re not pretending that, um, but it’s easy all the time, but it’s still worth it. To, to be together and, uh, uh, and in a big family system. And a lot of people benefit such as our partners and our children. And if you are a, a, a woman who has children, part of doing this work of Daughtering is making change for the future.
Making an example of what do I want my kids to see and how do I want them to treat me when they’re 30? And um, and. So we can be cycle breakers, pattern changers on this meta level. It’s not just about making the next Thanksgiving a little bit better. That is great too. But it’s about thinking, what kind of life do I wanna lead?
How do I wanna show up in that life? Where do I wanna distribute my resources all throughout my life and to the people in my life, but how can I enjoy my life? And that’s what the activities in the book are designed to help you move toward is finding ways to enjoy the people in your life. Find your own wellbeing, your own calm, your own centeredness and balance.
Um. Without just throwing up your hands and opting out of everything, it’s finding a way to stay opted in to family.
Tati: Yeah. Yeah. And I love how you kind of expanded it out to that bigger impact more so than just the one decision, but how can that impact, you know, the generations to come? And I’ll of course leave the links to all of that, um, to the book in the description.
And if anybody, any listeners are interested in connecting with you further, where can you, they find you?
Allison: Please find me at doting one oh one.com where all of my socials are at Doting 1 0 1 and I have a great substack. Um, that’s substack.com, doting 1 0 1, um, where I share regular updates and ideas about kind of the, some of the niche topics that come up.
And I’d love to hear from your listeners, you know. Challenging topics like, what about this and what about that? And we can address those too, because there’s just an infinite number of contexts. Um, so I appreciate your, you letting me come on here and talk about this, but your listeners also giving me a chance.
’cause I know that everything I say may not apply to every person. Um, but hopefully it’s moving us forward toward better relationships and better lives.
Tati: Excellent. Yeah. Thank you so much for such a great conversation and for being on the podcast.
Allison: Thanks, Tati.
Tati: I hope this conversation gave you language for something maybe you’ve long felt but couldn’t name.
If it resonated, then share it with someone who needs to hear. They are already enough. And remember, setting boundaries doesn’t make you a bad daughter. Just makes you a real one.