Mother-Daughter Relationships: Home

Motivational speaker/mom Silvana Clark, in concert with her now-teenaged daughter Sondra, confirms in this book the confusion and possible unpleasantness tween girls and their moms around the world face in these sometimes-trying years. Through surveys and interviews with some 100 mother-daughter pairs, the Clarks show us what preteen girls are thinking and wanting, how mothers can successfully help their daughters navigate these years to avoid the potential minefields, and how they can successfully guide their daughters while keeping a respectful and loving relationship intact. The tween years--ages about 9 to 12--are a time when girls seem to grow astonishingly quickly toward establishing their independence and adult identity. It is a time of testing new feelings, thoughts, and behaviors, and can be a time of testing mom's patience, persistence and energy. From cell phones to body piercings and hair dye, seductive clothes and strange boyfriends, girls want to test the waters and experience what the world has to offer. Motivational speaker/mom Silvana Clark, in concert with her now-teenaged daughter Sondra, confirms in this book the confusion and possible unpleasantness tween girls and their moms around the world face in these sometimes-trying years. Through surveys and interviews with some 100 mother-daughter pairs, the Clarks show us what preteen girls are thinking and wanting, how mothers can successfully help their daughters navigate these years to avoid the potential minefields, and how they can successfully guide their daughters while keeping a respectful and loving relationship intact. What's a mother to do during these tough years? The good part is that (although they likely wouldn't admit it) mothers remain the number one role model for girls at this age. Setting and keeping rules and boundaries with a tween can be challenging, though. Sondra, now a spokeschild for charities working with children in developing countries, shares insights into the way that pre-teen girls think today. And her mother shares her own successful approaches and those of dozens of other mothers with tween girls. Topics addressed include emotional and physical development of tween girls, dating, drinking, clothes, friends, music, money, and more. Step-by-step scripts for handling mother-daughter conflicts are provided, along with tips for communicating with tweens.

Written by family therapist and bestselling author Judy Ford and her nineteenyearold daughter Amanda, Between Mother & Daughter is geared toward both mothers and teenage girls who want to maintain or create healthy relationships during the tumultuous teen years. This book is proof of the benefit of positive parenting to empower mothers and daughters.

This volume examines communication processes within the grandmother-mother-daughter relationship. Using observations of and interviews with six sets of middle-income, Caucasian female family members, Day offers a heuristic account of intergenerational mother-daughter relational communication.

The mother-daughter relationship has preoccupied feminist writers for decades, but typically it has been the daughter's story at centre-stage. Mothering the Self brings together these maternal and daughterly stories by drawing on in-depth interviews with women who speak both as mothers and as daughters. This study examines the ways in which these mothers and daughters participate in their understanding of class, gender, and race locations, both using and resisting them. The result is a fresh start from which to consider the far-reaching implications of this relationship - not simply for mothers and daughters, but in terms of how we understand the shaping of the self and its place within the social world.

We all know - have perhaps told a few - stories about mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law. It seems the stories are nearly always about relationships filled with conflict and abrasive words or actions. But why is this relationship so difficult? And is it always as bad as popular belief would have us think? Deborah Merrill, a woman's advocate and Sociology professor at one of our nation's top universities, has been studying the relationship for nearly a decade and, in this book, explains where the difficulty is rooted, how friendly pairs have made it past problems that surface between a man's mother and his wife, and how they became friends. Dozens of interviews with pairs of women made in-laws by marriage illustrate Merrill's points, from harmful ideas and actions to helpful approaches. At its core, this book holds that marriage requires the creation of a new and separate family, which requires changes in roles, as well as a redefinition of relationships. Hence, family boundaries need to be made permeable to allow for integration of the daughter-in-law, and to allow the son to create his own separate and autonomous family. Family members need to be aware of, and prepare for, this, says Merrill. That, of course, may be easier said than done. But dozens of women who have become friends with their in-laws -- some so much so that they drop the in-law and just call each other mother and daughter -- explain how they got past the old, popular notions and social structure, to create goodwill and grow stronger families.