Reply to What helps a mom maintain a good relationship with her daughter?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My mom was embarrassing and annoying, but she NEVER criticized my looks or clothes and never took my teenage sassy attitudes and rebellions too seriously. I wasn't always nice to her but I always felt safe with her. I would talk to her in a show offy kind of way, trying poses out.  She always seemed interested though looking back I must have been insufferable.

She and my sister had a different relationship.  She criticized her a lot more.  Worried about her more.  They are best friends now and my mom is 100% accepting of her (though she is a mess) in ways she wasn't at all ages 10-20. They fought like crazy.

So it may be more personality driven than anything you can do.

But don't criticize looks.[/quote]

OP here. Thank you for this. You hit on several things that make me think of my relationship with my own mom. She was very critical, in an invasive way, of my appearance, how I dressed, etc. I think often she thought she was helping me.[b] As an adult, I’ve talked in therapy about the idea that my mom overidentified with me and was working out a lot of her feelings of self-loathing on me. [/b]It’s the biggest reason we are distant now— I always feel like she is trying to draw me into her own self-hating and self-destructive patterns.

But it’s good to hear a story of someone who weathered the tough teen years with that relationship intact. My husband and I were just talking about how tough tweens and teens can be, but how so much of it us just driven by hormonal shifts and the inherent discomfort with your body and place in the world in that time. But it sounds like your mom didn’t take that stuff personally, which is my goal too. [/quote]

This was very much the dynamic between my mom and I, too, and one I try really hard to avoid with my DD. I will say that when puberty hits, there’s a very delicate line between trying to help your DD learn to take good care of her body and potentially making her feel criticized. Particularly if your kid doesn’t naturally care much about her looks. It’s one of the things I love the most about my daughter—that she really doesn’t care if she fits in with mainstream ideals—but it also sets her up for teasing/shunning/etc. which is obviously really hard to watch as a parent. (And if you spend enough time in the tween/teen forum here, you’ll start to feel like a failure if you don’t have a dermatologist on speed dial from age 9.)[/quote]

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