The Eldest Child in the Marriage: Parentification and the Ghanaian Firstborn
In Accra, the eldest child who raised the younger ones is praised for it for life. Marriage is often where that training stops working, and the reason has less to do with money than it looks.
At 9:40 p.m. on a Sunday, in a rented flat in Sakumono, Dede Ayitey had a spreadsheet open on her laptop with 5 columns: 1 for her mother and 1 for each of her 4 younger siblings. Her mother's blood pressure tablets sat under the column marked Mama, GH¢450 a month. The cell for her youngest brother's rent in Kaneshie was highlighted in yellow because it was late again. Her husband, Atanga Ayamga, came to the table with his phone and the floor plans of 2 flats they had viewed that weekend near Community 18. He asked which one she wanted. Dede, 35, an audit manager at an accounting firm in Cantonments, studied both plans and chose the bigger flat, because the 3rd bedroom would fit her brother if his landlord threw him out. Atanga put the phone face down on the table. He had asked what she wanted. She had answered with a room for somebody else.
Dede has a title in her family, and nearly every Ghanaian family has a version of it: the senior one, the eldest, the responsible one. Psychologists use a less flattering word. Parentification describes a child who takes on a parent's work, the feeding, disciplining, budgeting and soothing, before she has finished being a child. In Ghana it is rarely called a problem, because it so often produces adults like Dede, dependable and promoted early. This article is about what that training does to a marriage, where the person across the table needs a partner, and the old competence keeps answering on behalf of everybody else.
Dede's training began at 11, the year her father took a contract job in Takoradi and her mother's provisions shop at Makola started opening at 6 a.m. She bathed 2 small brothers before school, checked homework by a rechargeable lamp during power cuts, and learned to tell a fever from a tantrum. Adults praised her for all of it. Her aunties called her a little mother. Nobody in that house was cruel. A family with 5 children and 2 working adults needed a 3rd adult, and the eldest girl was the nearest one available.
The arithmetic behind that arrangement is national. When the Ghana Statistical Service released the 2022 Demographic and Health Survey, the Government Statistician, Professor Samuel Annim, reported that fertility had fallen to 3.9 children per woman, from 6.4 in 1988. The professionals now marrying in Accra in their 30s were born into the era of 6.4. Large households, long working days and a thin public safety net made the eldest child a piece of household infrastructure: a deputy who cost nothing and was always home. Migration deepened the arrangement. The Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, drawing on the 2011 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, estimates that about 17% of Ghanaian children live with neither biological parent. Behind that figure stand grandmothers, aunties and, in many homes, the oldest child in the house.
Accra has since changed the job description without retiring the worker. The eldest who once bathed the younger ones now pays for them. School fees became university fees, then rent, then a nephew's admission, then a mother's hospital bills, all routed to the mobile money number of whichever sibling has the steady salary, and that is usually the eldest. In Dede's spreadsheet the columns are new. The reflex behind them is 24 years old.
The easy reading calls all of this damage, and much of the counselling literature written in Europe and North America treats it that way. That reading leaves out what the arrangement has built over time. In a country where families, more than the state, absorb illness, job loss and old age, the eldest child functions as the household's insurance policy, and a good number of Accra's managers, nurses and auditors learned their competence at a kitchen table long before any office trained them. Johannesburg offers a useful contrast. South Africa counts children living in households with no adult at all: about 30,000 in 2024, less than 0.2% of all children, according to the Children's Institute at the University of Cape Town, working from Stats SA's General Household Survey. A survey can find a home without adults. It rarely finds the 11-year-old doing an adult's work in a home where both parents are alive and simply busy. Ghana's version of parentification lives mostly in that 2nd kind of home, which is why it is so easy to praise and so hard to see.
Marriage bears this cost in no subtle way. A recurring pattern shows up in counselling when 1 spouse is the eldest child of a large family: the other spouse describes feeling handled. Decisions come to the fore already made and already costed. Offers of help are turned down as though help were an insult. The eldest partner, meanwhile, feels unappreciated, because the competence that earned love at 11 earns complaints at 35. Couples in this position usually argue about money, since the transfers are the part of the pattern that is quantifiable. Underneath the transfers sits a person who knows how to give care and has very little practice receiving it, and is married to someone who wanted to give it.
The conventional answer for couples like Dede and Atanga is boundaries: cap the transfers, tell the siblings no, put the marriage ahead of the family group chat. That answer has a strong case. Money that leaves a household every month never becomes a deposit on a flat, and siblings who are always rescued have little reason to stand on their own. Many couples need exactly that budget conversation. Boundaries, though, may not be enough; an eldest child can stop every financial support and still run her marriage the way she ran her mother's house at 11, deciding for her husband, anticipating his needs, refusing to be looked after. The change that lasts tends to come later and cost more. It begins when the eldest stops filing her childhood under achievements and counts what it took from her: the school excursions missed to mind a baby brother, the evenings spent carrying messages between quarrelling parents, the years in which nobody asked what she wanted because she was busy asking everybody else. Grief is an unfashionable word in Ghanaian homes, where gratitude is the expected response to a hard childhood. The couples who come through this pattern tend to make room for both.
Dede did not close the spreadsheet that night. She did not cancel her brother's rent either, and Atanga did not ask her to. The following Saturday they drove back to Community 18 to see the smaller flat again. In its spare bedroom, the one with a window over the road, Atanga asked what she would put in it if the room were only hers. Dede stood in the doorway for a long time. She said she did not know yet, which was the most accurate answer she had given anyone in years. Her phone rang in her bag. It was her youngest brother. She let it ring 4 times before she picked up.
PG Sebastian
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