The Hard Work of "Daughtering" With Dr. Allison Alford

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1:20If you're ready to launch before Black Friday, just go to Shopify.com slash anxiousachiever and start your free trial. I like figuring stuff out with other people, and that's why I like Notion. Notion is the AI workspace where your team's knowledge, projects, and agents all come together in one place. Teams using Notion move faster, and they cut friction and cost by consolidating tools, and they stay aligned. But Notion is really good for people because you know what? You put your idea down, you put your rough draft down in Notion, your colleague can access it, hash it out, give feedback, and it's all there and organized.

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2:31I'm Maura Aarons-Mele, and this is The Anxious Achiever. What does it mean to be a good daughter? You know, all the daughters I know, and I know a lot of them. I am one myself, of course. I think that we spend a lot of time thinking about this through our lifespan, probably from when we're older kids into teenagerhood, and certainly as we become adult women ourselves, and then of course round into the caregiving years. My guest today, Dr. Allison Alford, is a professor at Baylor University, and she's written a book called Good Daughtering. To offer daughtering, to daughter, is a verb. It's the act of caring practically for your parents, of thinking about them, right?

3:25Of checking in, of making sure that they're taken care of. It's also a question of family tradition and meaning making and magic making, as my friend Leah Rupaner would say. And it's also a question of identity. How do I think of myself and the expectations that I have of myself as a daughter, the expectations I think you have of me as a daughter? That one's a thorny one for sure. And of course, this varies, right? If you're close to your parents, if you don't speak to your parents, if you grew up in a single parent household versus you grew up with two parents in partnership. it's such a complex issue, but it's really important because I'm going to leave you with this.

4:13How we are as daughters affects how we show up at work. It really does. I want you to take a minute if you're a daughter or if you're a son, Alfred also talks about sunning, being a son. And how do the expectations in your family of you as a daughter reverberate in your role at work, as a parent, as a partner, as a community member, as a friend? It's pretty profound, I bet. So enjoy my conversation on daughtering.

4:50Well, Dr. Alison Alford, welcome. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. it. We've had some scheduling here, there, and everywhere. And so I'm like delighted we both made it happen today. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. And also, you know, I know that we both have teenage sons and I don't actually know about your parent. I've listened to interviews, but why don't you sort of, if you don't mind, since it's relevant for the show, why don't you like situate us in your phase of life, like how you are as a daughter, a partner, a friend, a spouse, a mom, all that stuff. Absolutely. Yeah, I am a daughter.

5:37I wrote about daughtering. I think about daughtering every day. So both of my parents alive and well and married for gosh, maybe, oh my gosh, maybe 45 five years, something like that. So something, something really cool. So grateful for them. I am the younger sister and have an older sister who lives very nearby to my parents and I live farther away. So I do a lot of distance doddering. I am a professor at Baylor University. And so I've been here in Waco close to 10 years. And I feel like I'm just now getting settled in this area. But I have a wonderful husband, Joe, we've been married for, oh, I should know this 22 years this year, not quite there, but we're, we're at 22, we'll hit 22 soon.

6:32And we have two teenage kids, a son, who's a graduating senior and a daughter in high school. So we definitely have busy lives. And, you know, it's, it's one of those things that I, I'm, I'm what I call an old elder millennial, right? Some, some might say a grand millennial, or others might say like a cusper, you know, kind of like, but not, not old enough really to call myself Gen X. But I also feel a little bit older than like the typical millennial conversation. Let me guess you're like between 43 and 45? Yeah, I'm 44. There you go. You got it. 1982. So I, I actually, I think of myself really as a curious person.

7:20I do a lot of thinking about other people. I love, you know, tools like the Enneagram and also think that they're completely made up. What Enneagram are you? Oh my gosh, you're never going to believe this I'm actually an enneagram four I am um I have well with a wing three so I really have my highly productive side but I really have my sort of interior life melancholy deep thinker alone need a lot of alone time side is is more prominent but I don't usually bring that side to podcasts how about you what are you i'm i'm a i'm a god i think i'm a seven i i'm not into the enneagram okay what does a seven mean the seven is like the adventurer always trying to make new plans and adventure and go and like doesn't want to deal with deep thinking or stuff like that just wants to go go go new fun things to do oh then i don't think i'm a seven.

8:24Okay. Anyway, it's whatever. We'll have another day on that. We'll have another day. God, I think it's really interesting, this personality test, but I'm, you know, I'm not a fan in general, although people love them and that's cool with me. So, all right. So now I've got a picture of you. I love that. I love that. And you're a professor. So you teach, you teach undergrads, grads? Yes. Yeah, I teach in the business school at Baylor. I'm so grateful for my job. I love how practical it is. I love my students. The students at Baylor in the business school are very, they're just so smart, but they're also responsible, respectful, kind.

9:05So I teach undergrads in business communication, which is how to write professionally, present, how to do cross-cultural communication. And then I also teach in the MBA program, of course, on managerial communication. So that's like how to get along with others as a leader and, you know, inspire others to do things. But from the communication side, how do I tailor my communication to achieve those effects? So that is my full-time main job. But as part of my job, so I do a lot of teaching, I also do research. And so I've continued the research that I started over 10 years ago as part of my doctoral program while I was at UT Austin.

9:51And so it's kind of funny because I study, I research, I write about, I think about family communication, even though my day job is this sort of business world. But I really love that because it gives me a kind of a separate mental space to go to, and I can go into that world whenever I need to. So yeah, that's what my recent book launch is. I have it right here. Good Daughtering. So I just put this book out in February and it's a culmination of all that research and helpful tools for women. So it's been such a privilege that Baylor has given me the space to do that and the encouragement and the cheerleading to do that.

10:36Well, I can't wait to talk about it. I literally, you know, I get a lot of pitch emails from publicists of authors. And when I saw yours, I'm like, I'm pretty sure I whooped. Let's start with definitions. So in your book, daughtering is an active verb. You also have sunning, which is not sunning like a cat suns in the sun, but sun, S-O-N. What is daughtering in your definition? Yeah. So daughtering is the often invisible labor, the emotional, mental, logistical, and identity labor that women do in families in order to try to keep the family connected. And many women are doing a lot of it without realizing it until all of a sudden they're burnt out.

11:24And so I talk about daughtering in a couple of ways that are, I think, unique. one is it's active it's a choice that we make it's a gift that we give to our family you know we we do this toward our parent but includes all the members of our family because we're just really being the glue in order to keep everything going it is work in the same way that we would say that being a parent is work which doesn't mean you don't like it it doesn't mean you want to do it, don't want to do it. It doesn't mean you're complaining about it. You're just categorizing it as effortful. So, so making sure to frame daughtering is not just this sort of passive lolling around in the family system, but really intentional much of it.

12:15And, and yeah, I think in the book, a lot I compare, I, I talk about what daughters do versus what sons do, because there are a lot of cultural expectations on women and on daughters. And a lot of women think about how to be a good daughter or how to be a good enough daughter. So I am not an expert on sons or sonning for many reasons, but mainly because I just didn't build a career around that. But I absolutely think sons, adult sons do a lot of sonning, and that's extremely important in families. It just a bit, one of the big differences is that men aren't expected to do it in the same way. They're not as expected to be calling up their families all the time, taking the emotional temperature of the room, soothing and smoothing.

13:09Oftentimes when men do sunning, they're praised and it's this over the top, what a good boy, you know? But I've really learned so much by watching my own husband be a very loving and intentional son. And I think he's learned a lot from me by realizing how much choice he has in his sonning compared to the amount of choice that daughters feel we have, because there's just so much more pressure and expectation and so much more of a kind of a script. and so as I've raised my own children as I have a teenage son on the cusp of adulthood I've had a lot of intentionality around teaching my children what it is that I want them to do in adulthood as members of the family and also what I don't want them to do or don't expect from them right because you have a daughter too you said I do yeah I have a daughter too you know when I talk about daughtering and my and the research I've done it's all adulthood so you know I don't study adolescence or child development and I think it's important to say that adult daughtering is certainly framed by that and learned in childhood but most of what I'm talking about I'm not putting that lens on my own daughter but on myself on yourself as on myself got it so daughtering is a verb, but is being a daughter in your research an identity as well?

14:42Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, so I talk about four types of daughtering work, and one of them is just the actions that we do, the stuff that's really easy to see, like if you plan a holiday or fill mom's stocking or go help paint a room, you know, that needs painting, then that's really visible daughtering. And then there's some other kinds of doddering that are invisible. And that's the mental load, the thinking and the planning. It's the emotional work, which is the, you know, conflict resolution or preventing, you know, conflict or soothing emotions or even withholding your own emotions so that things don't go wild.

15:26but the fourth and last one is identity work and i think that being a daughter is uh about carrying on a legacy reminding your children or others what the family goals are what is the family intention what are the traditions and so so in the sense of you know in communication studies the study of roles versus identities versus who am i who how do i behave who am i in what setting there's a lot of important distinctions um there or nuances that we could go into but to try to keep it really simple i just like to make sure to talk about daughtering as an active um choice and sometimes when we think of identity people just think of it almost like a label but it's still it's still something that you have to capture that you have to hold on to that you have to create and recreate over time.

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20:49I would actually love to hear a little more about roles versus identities. And I don't know the communications studies lens at all. I mean, one of the things that I reflect on myself having, you know, a very strong family systems bent and, And, you know, just thinking about psychology and attachment, you know, in my own experience as a daughter is how I had to sort of un-daughter myself for a while so that I could re-daughter. I'm overusing a metaphor, but, you know, I think in my family growing up, I definitely had eldest daughter and we can get into eldest daughter syndrome, but my mother and I were, we were codependent.

21:34Like we were really enmeshed and being a daughter was way too big a piece of my identity until I had my own children, I would say. And then I really sort of had to be like, I'm just me. I'm not actually, you know, 50 % a daughter anymore. And now my mother has Alzheimer's and I care for her. So I'm a very active daughter. but it's without the hopefully without so much emotional enmeshment and like weight i don't know if that resonates with you at all yeah you know i think that so much of talking about daughtering and or our relationship between ourselves and our mother or between ourselves and our father is about having the right words to get to the nuance that we mean and so i think using words like enmeshment and independence and codependence and healthy attachment and things like that those are the terms and knowing those terminologies help us get into the nuances of which categories or which dimension or which frame we're describing the relationship and so in communication studies area what we try to focus on is is shared meaning making so the relationship is built through shared meaning making and I and how I communicate that and how you receive it so it's not really just about how do I exist over here and what am I thinking inside my body but what is it that I'm communicating that the other person then can grab and then if if they grab it in the way I mean it then now we're on the same page and so so much of that understanding comes through language and which is kind of cool because that's what we're doing now we're we're meaning making together.

23:25And, and so that's kind of what I found through my research is we just don't have enough words and language or shared language to describe the experience that women are having over a lifetime. And what has happened is that the role of the daughter or the experience of daughtering has been subsumed by these other bigger categories of length of words and terminology that people understand like like what mothering mothering caregiving friends friendship and we borrow those terms because they seem kind of right i mean they it seems easier to use in general conversation than talking about the the really important distinctions within meshment you know not everybody knows exactly what investment is like okay well now i need a counseling degree to talk about this or attachment well now i need a psychology degree to talk about this you know sense making now i need a communication degree to talk about this um and so that's why i want us to notice anything that we're doing in our daughter role toward our parent is a form of doddering and there are many forms of that doddering takes over a lifespan so the but we can notice that if the daughter is doing it as the daughter in the role, that's not mothering.

24:52That's not friendship. That's not neighboring. That's not marriage. That's daughtering. But we have to allow daughtering to be differently shaped over a lifetime. So the daughtering that you're doing now is very different from the daughtering that you were doing in your 20s or 30s. 100%. And yet it's still, is both daughtering and caregiving. Right. And so the way those two are bound up in each other is really important. Many, many women are doing a lot of daughtering without the caregiving, although we foresee that into the future. I really think that's such an important distinction in your work that I want to dive in on because obviously caregiving is a huge topic of conversation as it should be because it really impacts many people.

25:41But you distinguish between caregiving for your parents and doddering. You say that doddering could be something like sending them a card or a funny reel on Instagram, or again, maybe checking in on them if there's going to be a storm, just being around, making sure there's holiday plans. It's very much about what my friend Leah Rapanner would call the mental load of magic making, the mental load of meaning making, of dream fulfilling, family identity. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah, I think daughtering deserves its own life category. And really, when we think about working, mothering, parenting, friendship, we recognize a thousand different contexts in which to describe that.

26:39And in friendship, there's going to be my best friend, my lifelong friend, my work friend, my friendship breakup, my friendship vacation that we take together, my long distance friend, my only Facebook. We allow that category to have a thousand options, right? When we talk about parenting, we know that that could be your newborn, or it could be that you are parenting your 35-year-old. And that could be parenting like just gentle, like, oh, very low touch because they're an adult, or extremely high touch. This is an infant who will not survive if I'm not looking at them 23 hours a day. And daughtering is its own category like that, meaning that there are a wide variety of expressions.

27:28So the college-age daughter who goes, let's say she goes off to college, her choice begins to be how much do I allow my parent in? How much do I gift them the gift of knowing what's going on in my life? How much do I gift them the gift of whether or not I choose to go home for this holiday or do something fun with friends on spring break. So daughtering at that point, maybe looks a little bit more like allowing. When we have kids, daughtering can look like allowing. How much do I allow my parent to be around my kids? And so I'm also making a grandparenting choice for my kids, but I'm making a choice to, you know, to let them in.

28:16And so in this case, so daughtering doesn't always look like doing outward. I go there. I call. I send. Sometimes it looks like letting someone in and there's a vulnerability to that, that they have a piece of you. And so when we're doing things with our parent in middle adulthood, we're often, what kind of characterizes that and what I sought individuals for my research to talk about is you're not dependent on your parent for housing You're not dependent on your parent for finances. You often live separately, not always, but mostly live separately. So there's an independence and an interdependence of that timeframe.

29:01That's what's very different about childhood. And obviously that's what's very different about illness. Your parent is no longer independent. And so caregiving, the term caregiving is when you are providing someone for something who needs mental or physical health care, well-being care. They are no longer fully independent from you, just like two adults on parallel highways. Now they're on your highway. You've got to push them along. and and so caregiving is very different than just care or caring or what another term for it we use is support provisions and I think that we can kind of see some of those differences if we go back and think about COVID when a lot of adult children were just like checking on their parents a lot but we also couldn't make them do anything we couldn't make them stay inside we couldn't make them get a shot or not get a shot.

30:02We couldn't make them cancel the family reunion or, you know, but we wanted to influence them, but also they were so independent that we weren't in charge of them. Yeah. When you're caring for your mom with Alzheimer's now you're in charge. Yeah. But you're not her parent. You're the daughter in charge, which is a new, bigger, different form of doddering. And it is also a form of caregiving. But if a son were doing caregiving, that would be sunning and caregiving. If, you know, her sister were doing it, it'd be sistering and caregiving. And so we just want to notice kind of the Venn diagram of things and give each thing its due respect and also the complexity of what it's like to do that.

30:49And let me ask you, so I I want to get into what good doddering is. Yeah. What, what, why? Why do we need, why? What does this do for our own happiness, self-efficacy, joy experience to, to understand our role as a daughter and to define it clearly? When I was talking to women and I was trying to recruit women to talk to me, or I would just be talking to friends. And I would say, well, I'm doing these, this research on daughters. So many women said to me, well, you wouldn't want to talk to me. I'm not the right kind of daughter. I'm not a good daughter. Or I'm not good enough. Or I'm not good like those other people.

31:33And I learned very quickly that women have a lot of expectations on themselves about their quality of doddering, their quantity of doddering, the expectation for when and how and what it should look like and how performative it is on Instagram or how much I need to tell my sister or brother about the doddering I've been doing. And there are all these layers, but in general, women feel some sort of expectation. And we are kind of running towards the goal line of being a good daughter. And much of the time we feel like we're not there, or we might feel it in fits and spurts. You know, if we have Mother's Day coming up, right?

32:21if I rally everyone together, plan an event, have that day. My mom's happy. I got her a nice new plant. Dad's happy. Food is served. The grandkids are running around. Let's just go with this super idealistic version. And we're kind of like, yes, I did the daughtering. And then all of a sudden, there's like a word or a phrase said like, well, I'm sure it'll be another six months till we see you oh yeah and then all of a sudden it's like you go back down and you're like man i just did all these things i've tried so hard and then i'm reminded somehow it's still not enough or i see that my friend did something for mother's day but it was like they gave their mom a cruise and i'm like i don't have five thousand dollars to give my mom a cruise there's always feels like these you'll do one thing and be like on a high and then something happens and you feel like but I still didn't reach that pinnacle or that way or that and we have this constant expectation on ourselves but women tend to do that with mothering we tend to do that in our workplace we tend to do that in our community in our neighborhoods you know I'm like oh I should be a better neighbor I should take food over there I should take cookies to the new people and that has to do with the cultural expectations on women to always be good, to always be going, to always be smiling and friendly and making an effort.

33:53And so the book is about, first of all, seeing how much you're already doing that you're not giving yourself credit for, because it's invisible, and nobody else is giving you credit, because nobody knows how to talk about this. And then empowering women to take over and say, no, this is an active choice I'm making. That means I can shift and change it. And so there's activities and discussions and prompts in the book to help you feel good about the daughtering that you're doing and take charge of it as you go forward. So you can feel like you're good enough and you can relieve that weight. I like figuring stuff out with other people.

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35:25That's all lowercase letters, notion.com slash achiever and try Notion today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. You know, I love mushrooms. I am fascinated by them. One of my favorite things to do is in New Hampshire to go on mushroom exploring walks with a renowned naturalist, Riley McHugh. Riley has taught me to put on my seeing eyes. And when I do, I see purple mushrooms and red mushrooms, big mushrooms, gross mushrooms, cute mushrooms. And I was thinking about the holidays upcoming and, you know, how we use mushrooms as a decorative theme. Think about it. You probably have a mushroom ornament or a little mushroom figure that you may put out sometime in the fall or holidays, mushrooms.

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36:58shopify.com slash anxiousachiever to hear your first. You know, the other day I was talking with my friend who is both certified financial planner and a financial therapist. We were talking about money and emotions. Money is way more than dollars and cents. It's emotional, right? And I'm trying to teach my kids to have healthier emotions around money than I did. But I'm getting better every year. And part of it is that I use Monarch. Monarch simplifies, identifies, and helps me have a plan for my money. Monarch is like having a financial advisor in your pocket. It has easy to read diagrams that help me visualize exactly where my money goes each month.

37:49And it has investment views so I can compare my portfolio, say, to how the S &P is doing. all kinds of great tools that help me frankly take some of the emotions out of money and make it more practical and working for me. Most apps only tell you what you've already spent, but Monarch helps set goals, map out big purchases, and see if you're actually on track before it's too late to adjust. You can write your own money story with Monarch. Use the code achiever at monarch.com and get your first year of Monarch Core at half off just$50. That's$50 off your first year at monarch.com with code achiever.

38:30Could you take us through an activity? I, I, my, my audience loves exercises and reflections. Um, I think while you're finding it, I'm going to say that what's interesting is that doddering is almost entirely relational, I guess by its definition, it's totally relational. And it, it asks us to define ourselves in relationship to our parents, but I would assume that to get to the place where you know what kind of daughter you have to be, you want to be, you need to know what kind of person you want to be. Yes, exactly. And I go over that in the book, right? And one of the things that we talk about is, and this is from positive psychology, is what is happiness?

39:17What is a good life? And I talk about eudaimonic happiness versus hedonic happiness, like what makes me happy in this moment, and what maybe is kind of like taking out the garbage, but I makes me feel happy in the long run that I live in a garbage free environment, you know, and daughters have to metaphorically take out the garbage sometimes. And it's not very pleasant in that moment. But it is part of what makes a good life. And each of us gets to decide is a good life mean having children? Does it mean having a dog? Does it mean homeownership? Does it mean travel? Does it mean a really big retirement account?

39:56Does it mean owning a motorcycle or a boat or a car? Each of us is defining those things in our lives generally, but we can do the exact same thing with our daughtering. and then we can sort of calibrate am I there yet or am I way overdoing it like I bought 10 motorcycles and I'm like I don't really need 10 you know in our daughtering I'm way overdoing to try to achieve something and actually I don't need to be doing that much to be good enough at this daughtering which also is a psychology concept of enoughness and mattering yeah so So, yeah, I think those are the important questions. And this book prompts readers to consider that for themselves.

40:47There is no one right answer. That answer has to be determined by you and what matters in your life. This is the end of chapter one in the book. And the quiz is called Quiz for Daughtering Work. And it says, I challenge you to think about the many ways you do daughtering, particularly the less obvious ways. remembering that daughtering can show up as acting feeling thinking or being work and so this has uh those four different categories of work and for each line you give yourself a score from one to five where one means you do very little of this type of daughtering and five means you do a lot and then at the end you add everything up and there's three categories of daughters tell us the tell us the categories again though just the top category okay so the you know here's the end of the clip but the top category middle so the doing or acting work is called daughter work the feeling work is called daughter sentiment the thinking work is called daughter think and the being or identity work is called daughter frame so those are the four areas and the score categories you can come out as an attentive actor a committed carer or an aware anchor and this lets you know how how much you're doing um okay so the first category is actions the stuff that's visible and here's kind of a screenshot moment if you want to and so it asks about practical efforts.

42:28And so it says, I support my parent with practical help. Examples include tech, errands, taxes, household, and lots of other things. Another one is planning and hosting. I initiate and plan family gatherings, celebrations, or outings to keep us connected. Another one is tradition and legacy. I proactively maintain our family traditions and also start new ones. And another one is decision involvement. I stay involved in my parents' major life decisions like living situation, finances, or their future. Wow. And so each category of these, you'd give yourself a score from one to five. So you could have up to 20 points now.

43:13And then we move to the second category. Do you want me to keep going? I love this. Okay, which is the feeling category or what I talk about as daughter sentiment in the book. So item number five, if you're writing this down, is providing affection. I express love, gratitude, appreciation, or affection to my parent regularly. Six, emotional availability. I offer emotional support and allow for hard conversations with my parent. Seven is meaningful presence. I'm present and engaged during our time together, prioritizing meaningful connection over superficial. And eight is supporting with empathy.

43:55I listen, empathize, and comfort my parent when they're struggling. And there's so many more items that you could add on here. And I, you know, that I, that I, even as I go through this, think I would probably add something like I keep myself calm during difficult situations. It was a psychologist, Arlie Hochschild, who talked about daughter, or excuse me, emotion work versus emotion labor. And one form of emotion work is making myself believe or act like and feel what I'm saying. So let's move on to category three, which is daughter think, the thinking work, monitoring and anticipating. I check on my parents' well-being and anticipate challenges or needs on their behalf.

44:51Calibrating and flexibility, number 10. I assess and recalibrate my daughtering to match changing needs and life circumstances, both mine and theirs. Next is reflecting and improving. I regularly reflect on my role as a daughter and consider how I can better show up in the relationship. Collaboration. I communicate and coordinate with siblings to support our parent together, sharing what I know and learning what they know. and i think that could extend to aunts cousins of course you know step parents step parents in-laws the neighbor next door who's always checking on my mom you know things like that fairness and equity i balance attention and support toward each of my parents treating them fairly in comparison with the other so this might especially be you know you take this quiz you're thinking of one parent if you take this quiz again and you put stepdad in the top you know maybe you notice like i really don't do much for my stepdad you know you know so that might be not a problem but just a noticing boundary setting i set and communicate reasonable healthy boundaries to protect my time and energy and that of my partner and children and so we come down to the last category, which is daughter frame, which is identity work.

46:1715, considering the self. I view being a daughter as an ongoing part of who I am, not just something I do. Public awareness. I talk about being a daughter with others, owning this identity publicly and personally. Relational encouragement. I encourage and enable healthy relationships between my parent and other family members. I think this one is a huge interconnectedness. The next is culture and religion. I support my parents' cultural and religious values. I also engage in these beliefs and foster them in my children as far as they align with my own values. Examples include celebrations, food, or dress.

47:03Yep. Respectful interactions. I show respect through my actions and attitude even during disagreement navigating conflict i try to resolve conflict with maturity avoiding toxic behaviors or escalating i try to avoid letting things fester or become chronic now as you see so we've finished here that's 20 items with the score out of 100 and as you can probably see some of these may overlap in different categories or you may feel like there's even more to add, but you add up your points here. You, and you notice by taking a quiz like this, you notice perhaps a lot of things that actually you're quite good at that you were thinking, well, I didn't take pie to the last birthday or I didn't spend, you know, my sister spent$500 and I only gave$50 at the retirement party.

47:59So, So, you know, we tend to only notice those big things or the obvious things, but this allows us to notice quite a few relational things. Or some places where we have not been connecting interpersonally, but rather thinking that money or time or a gift was its own band-aid. so the points add up the lowest category is attentive actor 20 to 55 points and that would be if you just gave yourself a one in every category you'd be you know in uh ones to threes basically you're actively contributing and doing daughtering for your parent you've started to recognize the ways you support your parent overtly and subtly and it just goes on to say it shows what you're currently doing but maybe this is an opportunity to learn where you could give more people in the middle 56 to 75 points committed carer you are an engaged daughter providing substantial support provisions and i think here this is where we say if you're a c or a b plus you're you're doing it you're doing it you know you've passed you're in a passing score and um this deeper recognition of your role highlights how your consistent involvement impacts both your parents life and your life noticing like whoa i'm giving here here here here here here that is a lot of giving from my toolkit and lastly the top uh points area 76 to 100 aware anchor you demonstrate intense dedication to your daughtering role The vast array of daughtering you undertake, encompassing both visible and invisible efforts, permeates your life.

49:55Meaning that you are making daughtering part of every facet of what you're doing, thinking, saying, offering, withholding, etc. And so this awareness should help you reflect on how your daughtering is integrated into your life, but you may notice a need for more balance. while maintaining your other responsibilities. So I don't think I gave this, but this is the second page of the quiz. And these are the categories of the points. And so what I thought of when I created this was I want women to take this and it goes on from here to provide options of what to do next. And then a place to journal a little bit about what you learned from this.

50:46but take the quiz repeatedly for each of the different types of parents in your life and you can also notice some differences there I think it's really interesting of course I'm also conscious of people who you know think their parents are unhealthy right and do not want a relationship or you know grew up in a household where it's not safe to be with a parent you know I would imagine that's outside of the scope of that quiz, but that you may not speak with a parent, and yet you still may think a lot about them. Yeah. And they may be a big piece of your identity. That's such a great point. I think you can answer one in every category and be like, wow, I'm still a 20 out of 100, even though I don't even see this person.

51:36I don't let them talk to my kids. I don't call them on the phone. And yet, look at how much I am still connected as a daughter. And so that kind of reinforces the point that it's almost impossible to be someone's daughter and stop daughtering entirely. Meaning to stop thinking about it, to stop planning for the future, to cut off all contact, to never have to answer questions from your own children about your role as a daughter. There is, and you can minimize it if you've been hurt. Now, again, my book is really for people in the middle, not those toxic trauma things and not syrupy, saccharine, sweet, pretending everything is, you know, that there's zero issues there.

52:21It's for the normal folks, the typical, the vast majority of us that are pretty okay with our parent, but also need some revisions, some optimizations. And mostly we need to give ourselves a little bit of encouragement, a pat on the back and give ourselves a break. But some women may find they're doing tons and they don't want to stop. They just want acknowledgement. Some other women may realize, oh, I could do more, but I could do that by just sitting right here at my desk and doing the more. I don't have to move home. I don't have to move into my hometown. I don't have to send money. go there more often and, um, and I can still be doing things or, um, some women may need to do less or do different types of activities.

53:14And this book is designed to give you that flexibility and the choice based on what your life is like. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Alison Alford. That was really great. Thank you.

53:28that's it for this week's show if you like the show follow us and tell your friends and please leave us a review it really helps the anxious achiever get found by people just waiting for our content i'm your host maura aarons mealy lots more to come in the next episode

53:57Thank you.