Sibling rivalries go back beyond Cain and Abel, or Romulus and Remus (depends on who you are asking). But the modern version is less about founding empires and more about who gets the bigger half of a shared bedroom. Often, these roles are assigned at birth by the real directors of the drama: the parents.
There’s the responsible oldest, the default parent, and the precious youngest, who must be shielded from all harm. This delicate, if deeply unfair, ecosystem relies on everyone playing their part. For one young woman, trying to resign from her lifelong, unpaid position was treated as an act of treason.
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In many families, the oldest daughter is handed a crown of responsibility she never asked to wear
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A 20-year-old’s social life was being systematically destroyed by her parents’ demand that she be a nanny for her younger sister
Image credits: andreas / Freepik (not the actual photo)
The conflict escalated when her parents taught her sister ‘anything she owns is yours’ and forcibly took her things
Image credits: freepik / Freepik (not the actual photo)
Having reached her breaking point, she launched a protest by locking herself away from her family
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Her parents were furious at her protest and retaliated by forcibly taking her Wi-Fi to ‘force her to talk’
For this 20-year-old woman, her job description was written the day her youngest sister was born. She was the built-in babysitter, the responsible one, the family’s designated adult-in-training. It was a role she never asked for but was expected to perform without complaint. As an adult trying to build her own life, she’s finding out that this “job” is actually a life sentence, and escaping is not an option.
She is forced to share a room with a 10YO, and she’s branded “selfish” for simply having more belongings. Her parents have even started teaching her younger sister a toxic and bizarre family rule: that anything OP owns belongs to her too. This twisted philosophy reached its peak when her parents forcibly took one of her possessions and gave it to her younger sister, a violation that finally pushed her over the edge.
Having reached her breaking point, she shut down. She locked herself in her room as a protest against the years of being treated as a resource instead of a person. Her parents’ response was a petty and controlling act of retaliation. To punish her for her silence, they “forcibly” took away her Wi-Fi privileges, a move designed to break her will and force her back into her designated role.
The root of this toxic dynamic, she explains, is her mother’s own unresolved childhood trauma. As the youngest of her siblings, the mother is now projecting her own history onto her daughters, casting the narrator as the “tyrannical older sister” she grew up with. The narrator is fighting a ghost from her mother’s past, a battle she can never win, and it has sent her into a “spiral of rage.”
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This family is trapped in a deeply toxic dynamic. Imi Lo explains that one of the most common toxic sibling dynamics is the “Golden Child and the Black Sheep” model. In this setup, one child is forced into a scapegoat role, while another can do nothing wrong. This is exactly what’s happening here, with the narrator being saddled with all the responsibility while her sister is given all the privilege.
The parents are the active architects of this dynamic. Dr. Gale Gross writes that parents can foster sibling rivalry by failing to respect kids’ individual needs and boundaries. The parents’ decision to tell the younger sister that anything OP owns belongs to her too is a direct and destructive act of fostering this rivalry, teaching one child that she is entitled to her sister’s life and the other that her boundaries are meaningless.
The long-term consequences of this kind of favoritism can be devastating. As reported by the BBC, being the “less favored” child can lead to a lifetime of mental health struggles, including anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. The mother’s projection of her own childhood trauma is a cycle of harm that she is now inflicting on her own daughter, creating the exact kind of “tyrannical” dynamic she claims to have hated.
Their decision to punish their daughter by taking away her Wi-Fi is a desperate act of control. They are punishing her for daring to break out of the role they have assigned her. Her “spiral of rage” is a completely normal and healthy response to a family system that is systematically trying to erase her as an individual.
What do you think this OP should do? Share your advice in the comments!
The internet identified her as a ‘parentified child’ and labeled her parents’ behavior as a clear case of exploitation
