Mothers and Daughters Around the World
To celebrate International Women’s Day, Mother-Daughter Coaching International (MDCI) and Women’s Federation for World Peace (WFWP UK) joined forces and organized a free online conference on “Mothers and Daughters Around the World”. The conference was moderated by Rosjke Hasseldine, founder of MDCI, and Mitty Tohma, president of WFWP UK; Yingli Wang a mother-daughter therapist; Bibi Jamieson a mother-daughter therapist; Dawn Pollitt a community activist; and Brittney Scott a mother-daughter therapist spoke about their personal experiences and learning about the mother-daughter relationship.
The conference challenged the common belief that the mother-daughter relationship is a complicated relationship to understand. It highlighted that when we understand how the mother-daughter relationship tells the story of how families and society treat women, the underlying dynamics between a mother and daughter reveals itself more easily. When we recognize how the mother-daughter relationship tells the story of what it means to be female in a family, culture, and society, the mother-daughter relationship becomes a powerhouse for lasting generational change.
The role of motherhood was one of the conference themes. Dawn Pollitt shared a moving account of love and mothering in her family. Yingli Wang explained the concept of “Filial Piety” in Chinese culture. She explained how the expectation that a daughter is responsible for taking care of her parents creates a climate of duty, obligation, obedience between mothers and daughters, which can harm the mother’s and daughter’s ability to voice their needs and individual autonomy. Bibi Jamieson talked about how it takes a village of mothers to mother a daughter, and how mother blaming is infused in some male child development theorists. Brittney Scott connected the dots between the history of slavery and racism in America, and how this impacts how young daughters are expected to grow up quickly. And Mitty talked about how daughters desire to know their mother’s story so that they can understand who their mother was as a woman. They want to know what dreams their mother had, and whether she was able to realize them. And whether their mother received the nurturing she needed.
The silencing of women and girls and mothers and daughters was a strong theme in the conference. The conference unpacked how patriarchy silences women’s truth, and how this silencing harms women’s and girls’ emotional development, emotional empowerment, and the mother-daughter bond. Mothers and daughters are shamed into silencing their needs and emotional truth through the gender role stereotype that women, and particularly mothers are expected to give selflessly of themselves. And if they claim time for themselves, they are accused of being selfish and uncaring.
At the heart of understanding the mother-daughter bond is the understanding of women’s generational experience with sexism and patriarchy. When the language that inquires after what women feel, think, and need is not spoken in a family, culture, and society, mothers and daughters are set up to fight over who gets to be heard. When the concept that all women deserve to be heard and emotionally supported is not understood or normalized within a family, culture, and society, mothers and daughters end up fighting for the scarce emotional reality of being heard, understood, and emotionally supported, which, as many of the speakers revealed, will harm the flow of love that is wired into the mother-daughter bond.