Mothering our daughters into adolescence

My oldest daughter turns ten this month! I am faced with many new moods, likes and dislikes and a new tone that has crept into her voice.

Luckily a good friend recommended a great book to me. I would like to share this with you no matter where you are in your mothering journey.

The book is entitled: The Mother-Daughter Project: How mothers and daughters can band together, beat the odds, and thrive through adolescence. The authors are SuEllen Hamkins and Renee Schultz. Here is what they say:

“Welcome to the Mother-Daughter Project

Today’s world offers unprecedented opportunities and dangers for adolescent girls, but limited support for the tough work of mothering teens and few models of close, loving mother-daughter relationships. In the Mother-Daughter Project, our intention is to help create communities that simultaneously nurture girls, mothers, and mother-daughter relationships.

‘We want to join with other women in exploring how we can continue to nurture our daughters through pre-adolescence, adolescence and into adulthood. We want to find ways to support each other as mothers and support our daughters as they are challenged by the restrictions placed on them by our culture. We want to explore ways that we can welcome our daughters into the powerful community of women.  (from our original mission statement)’

The core principles of the Mother-Daughter Project

1. Mothers can continue close and loving relationships with their daughters right through their teen years.

Girls need – and want – a close connection with their mothers – as long as they are respected for their growing maturity and can be cool in front of their peers.

Girls best discover who they are in the context of loving relationships. Maturity means getting better at both autonomy and connection – including with mom.

When girls say they want “space,” they don’t mean distance. What they want is for us to make space for them in our hearts and in our lives to develop in their own ways. When they go in a new direction, especially one new to us – whether giving up classical violin to play bass for a garage band or dropping basketball to join the math team – our daughters want us right there, supporting and cheering them. Girls want to confide in their mothers, and with their mother’s interest and support, it’s easier for them to make it through minefield of adolescence.

2. Girls thrive when mothers thrive.

To be able to raise daughters who can flourish, mothers need ongoing support and tangible resources. Our project is not about doing more as mothers – it’s about mothers getting what we need to do one of the hardest jobs in the world.

Mothering in today’s world is incredibly stressful – even more so for mothering adolescents. When young girls are bombarded daily with internet images of skeletal celebrities partying without underwear, it’s an uphill battle to teach our daughters to love their bodies, respect their minds, and have healthy relationships. Individual mothers need the help of other adults who care about girls to be able to raise daughters who can thrive.

Our daughters are watching us to learn what it means to be a woman. Impossible expectations of being a ‘perfect mother’ are damaging to girls and mothers alike. Girls’ self-image is enhanced when they see their mothers thriving. Our project promotes the win-win approach women have been waiting for, in which the needs and hopes and dreams of mothers are as important as the needs and hopes and dreams of their daughters.

3. Mothers and daughters need the support of other mothers and daughters.

Fostering communities that nurture mothers and daughters is the heart of the Mother-Daughter Project.

As teens grow up through adolescence, they look beyond their immediate families to discover who they are and how the world works. That’s why it’s much easier for mothers to forge close relationships with teen daughters in conjunction with other mothers and girls who value the same thing. Your thirteen-year-old might not go to the movies with just you, but she’ll go with a friend, her friend’s mother and you.

Teen girls need other adults who can give them a positive vision of themselves and their future and who can open doors for our daughters that we can’t.

It’s excruciating to parent in isolation. Other mothers are one of our most important sources of wisdom and support. Now as the Internet changes every day and dangerous trends spring up overnight, other parents of teens are a lifeline.

Some of us already have the support we need from loving, helpful extended families or caring communities of parents, adults and children. For those of us who don’t, joining together with small groups of other mothers and daughters is a simple yet revolutionary model that works. Any mother can create a fun, supportive mother-daughter group that meets her needs and fits her life. Go to Start your own mother-daughter group for practical information.

4. Each mother and daughter has a unique vision of what thriving means to her.

As mothers, we share common hopes and dreams for our daughters and ourselves, and we have hopes and dreams that are unique. Our different cultures, family traditions and experiences inform our different priorities as parents. We don’t need to accept one-size-fits-all mothering – we each get to decide our own parenting values. We can support one another in clarifying our values and preferences and in creating our own vision of what it means for our daughters, for us, and for our relationships to thrive.

5. It’s gotta be fun – or we won’t come.

Fun for girls and for moms. We promote a mother-daughter movement full of laughter, joy and play. We want us all to do more of what we love – and what we love changes as we change, no matter what our age.”

For more info visit their website at: http://www.themother-daughterproject.com

The Mommy Myth is alive and well…

…. and selling Electrolux.

Watching these two commercials made me grab a couple of books from my shelf…..

Susan J Douglas and Meredith W Michaels subtitle to their book The Mommy Myth reads: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women.

Alyson Shafer’s book Breaking the Good Mom Myth: – “Discover the truth behind the myths that keep moms flying at a frenetic pace, spending countless dollars they often don’t have, and losing endless hours trying to become “experts” on everything from ear infections to the safe heating points of hard plastics. When did neurotic become normal?”

Here is what Judith Stadtman Tucker says about “The Mommy Myth”.
A few years ago — in the winter of 2000, to be exact — I wrote an article about the proliferation of expert advice to mothers on the World Wide Web. I’d reached the conclusion that the “new media” (as we called it back then) was just as culpable as the “old media” in perpetuating unrealistic cultural expectations about women, mothers and mothering. I saw an insidious image coming to the fore in media representations of motherhood, an unfortunate creature I described as the “New Model Mom.” If you’ve ever thumbed through the pages of a popular women’s magazine, you know her — she’s the athletically slender, well groomed, perennially smiling woman with attractive, easy-going children who are content to amuse themselves with a stimulating assortment of non-messy developmentally-appropriate activities and have a perfectly balanced diet (they especially like veggies and organic fat-free tofu cut into animal shapes or little smiley faces). There she is in an family advice article in the current issue of Parenting magazine, jumping gleefully on an unmade bed with her preschooler while – get this – wearing a lampshade on her head. There she is again in a product advertisement, artist’s brush in hand, painting a watercolor landscape while the blond baby at her feet happily stacks wooden blocks on a spotless white carpet.

Even with my cynical worldview, it looks like these gals have a pretty enviable lifestyle. If I thought buying upscale baby gear and ascribing to some crackpot’s advice on how to become the ultimate mom would transform my life into a maternal paradise where cleanliness, tranquility and merriment reign supreme, I’d definitely fall for it. But like I said, I’m a cynic. And I hate to be the one to break it to you, but those mothers aren’t real, and the kind of motherhood you see in mainstream magazines and on TV doesn’t exist – not in the good old U.S.A., not anywhere on planet earth.

If you don’t believe me, you’d better run out and grab a copy of Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels’ new book, The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women. If you do believe me, that’s an even better reason to read this clever and provocative book. Not only do Douglas and Michaels attack the ascendancy of the deplorable “new momism,” they fill in the back story of the changing political tides that reinvigorated the idealization of intensive motherhood just as women were finally breaking free of traditional gender roles.

But don’t expect some boring treatise on the cultural conflicts of motherhood and the disastrous social consequences of the steady rightward drift of U.S. politics. With a jaundiced eye turned to the gritty reality of mothering, Douglas (whose earlier book, Where the Girls Are, explores the influence of mass media on the formation of the women’s movement in the 1970s) and Michaels wisecrack their way through an examination the evolving image of motherhood in the media in the final decades of the 20th century. Chapters cover the mainstreaming of feminist ideas about women’s rights, panic generated by mid-80s media hype about imminent threats to children in and outside the home, and the profusion of celebrity mom profiles that raise doubts about the maternal qualifications of average, normal mothers who might be deluded enough to think it’s perfectly OK to love your kids in an average, normal way.

Unfortunately, there are a few points in the book where the authors’ smart-ass style and non-stop pop culture references obscure the importance of what’s being said. Happily, most of the book — and its core message — survives the authors’ sardonic wit intact. But unless the reader is paying close attention, the fact that The Mommy Myth is also a very scholarly work might escape notice. (This is probably intentional, given the publishing world’s contempt for serious works about mothering and motherhood. Though Douglas and Michaels may have had legitimate concerns about coming across as too academic, a real bibliography would have been a nice touch.)

The Mommy Myth offers a short course in the historical development of a new, highly intensified cultural ideal of motherhood — “the new momism.” Douglas and Michaels reclaim the term “momism” from Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers (1942), a vitriolic diatribe against the American way of life which vilified mothers for bringing up their hapless sons to be spineless sheep instead of manly men. According to The Mommy Myth, the new and improved version of momism “insists that the formation of a child into a successful, happy person is exclusively the handiwork of one person: ‘Mom’. Mom– however lofty her own hopes for herself, and whatever her financial circumstances, whatever embattled neighborhood she lives in, however scarring her own upbringing, however lousy her educational options– must simply make the right choices. If she doesn’t, too bad for her kids, and for her.”

The rules of play for the new momism are spelled out in media messages that invite mothers to compare their flawed human lives to unrealistic and unattainable ideals of motherhood. Those who might be tempted to see through the fallacy of it all are regaled with news reports emphasizing the unspeakable tragedies that await children whose mothers dare to deviate from the One True Path of momism. Douglas and Michaels go beyond analyzing prime examples of the new momism in broadcast and print media to muck around in the unwholesome stuff lurking below the flimsy plastic face of the New Mom. This (surprise!) turns out to be the conservative-led cultural movement to breathe fresh life into our old foe, the patriarchy. As Douglas and Michaels emphasize in their chapters on the “war” on welfare mothers and the defeat of popular legislation for publicly-funded child care, so far the bad guys are winning.

The Mommy Myth lays out the ugly details of how the hell we ended up living in an extremely wealthy nation that lacks basic social programs to support working families, and why no one seems to care. As a woman who came of age during the high point of the second wave, I’ve had ample time to ruminate over what happened in the 1980s to derail the bright promise of the women’s movement and why, by the time I started my own child-bearing adventure in the early 1990s, popular representations of motherhood were so boldly incompatible with real life. How did “feminism” become the most reviled “f” word in the American vocabulary? How did the issue of state-supported child care become so politically poisoned that the new breed of mothers’ advocates won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole? Why is middle-class mothering tied to such a distinctively warped ethic of over-consumption? Why do work and family still conflict when employed single parents and dual-earner couples are overwhelmingly the norm?

Why does our culture constantly up the ante on motherhood so women who mother can’t possibly respond to their own needs and ambitions and fulfill the needs of their children in the same lifetime? Or, as Douglas and Michaels write, “In a society where autonomy and success go hand in hand, isn’t it a little bit suspicious that successful motherhood requires relinquishing one’s autonomy to a sometimes dangerous, always preposterous view of women and children?”

So I welcomed The Mommy Myth as an expose of the deadly combination of regressive thinking and collective angst that’s pressing contemporary mothers back into a neo-traditional mold of motherhood. But this book might be even more illuminating for mothers in the so-called “opt out” generation, and for young mothers who support gender equity but remain reluctant to self-identify as feminists. It is not, however, a book that will appeal to everyone; if you consider yourself a conservative — even a compassionate one — The Mommy Myth will probably make your blood boil.

Douglas and Michaels outline the beginning and middle of a continuing saga of the cultural reconstruction of motherhood in “postfeminist” America. And they supply a possible ending, although I had a hard time appreciating the hackneyed humor that dominates the concluding chapter (my apologies to the authors, who I think are brilliant, but Ann Crittenden has been telling that Survivor joke for years – so go ahead, laugh it up, but at least go for something original). The Mommy Myth suggests that a better future for mothers depends on taking motherhood as we know it apart and piecing it back together in a way that supports civilized things like shared parenting and gender equality, and a welfare state that actually helps mothers, fathers and children lead more secure lives instead of making matters worse. The starting point is recognizing and resisting the new momism, loud and clear, whenever and wherever we find it. From there, we can begin to imagine how we might cultivate the collective consciousness necessary to mobilize a progressive mothers movement and tie up the loose ends of the feminist agenda.

To short-circuit the power source of the “mommy myth,” every mother who dreams of social change must drop the pretense that motherhood can be perfect if mothers just do and feel and think the right thing at the right time. Mothers need to start telling it like it is — to each other and whoever else will listen. Because the truth about motherhood — the whole truth, and nothing but — will make you free.

Judith Stadtman Tucker
February 2004

Breaking cycles of dysfunction

Mothering is tough at the best of times. But when we come from dysfuntional families and are stressed out in the present, we tend to resort to automatic, reactive ways of dealing with our children and our stress. And things get worse..

This is a book that can really help!

I posted a review of Carey Sipp’s book, The Turnaround Mom, on Amazon over a year ago. I re-read it the other day and was again struck by what a wonderful resource it is.  It is a deceptively simple and profoundly useful book about mothering when your family of origin is dysfunctional and /or addicted.

I love the way Carey Sipp demonstrates and describes so clearly how easily the cycle of dysfunction and abuse is transmitted across generations; and how this can be interrupted.

It’s message is very uplifting and hopeful. No matter how bad things were in your family of origin, you CAN break the cycle of abuse and neglect and create a working, functional family for your children. Carey Sipp demonstrates how it can be done: It takes courage, self-reflection and self-honesty, yes! But she goes further than that, there are practical steps you can and must follow: extreme self-care, recovery from addictions, the dedication to building a support system and then consistently asking for help and feedback from your community and friends, and the willingness to slow down and think things through.

Each chapter focuses on one of these necessary changes and is beautifully organized into four parts:
1. A description of an aspect of the authors own toxic childhood
2. A description of how she begins to repeat that aspect with her own children
3. How she manages to turn it around and break the pattern
4. Practical steps for how the reader can turn it around.

For example, chapter 8 is titled: Avoid Toxic Intensity. The first step she recommends is as follows:

“If your life is filled with anxiety – drama over relationship, tension about money, stress about work and other major issues, consequences of drinking or using drugs – stop trying to handle it all on  your own. Get help from a mental health professional, and find appropriate twelve-step support group, be it Al-Anon for friends and family members of alcoholics, CODA for people who struggle with issues of co-dependence, Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, or other groups that deal with your concerns…Do not suffer. If you do not have the money for therapy, simply go to the twelve-step program best suited for you. These programs are free. You will find help there. It’s likely that the longer you suffer, the greater the effects on  your problem. (178)”

I recommend this book to all moms. There is something here about valuing our role as mother and caring for ourselves for each and everyone of us.