No Mother, You Can’t!

Mother-daughter conflict is today’s canary-in-the-coalmine, and as I wrote in my 4-part blog for Medium on today’s estrangement trend, young adult daughters are revealing something vital about what it means to be a mother and a daughter in our patriarchal society. Attachment Theory, a popular human development theory about the emotional bond babies need from their primary caregiver for their emotional and developmental wellbeing, suggests that a mother’s lack of emotional availability when her daughter was a baby can lead to her daughter feeling angry at her mother when she is an adult. It is true that daughters need their mother’s emotional attention when they’re a baby, but suggesting a single causal reason for an adult daughter’s anger with her mother is inaccurate and defies logic. This single cause diagnosis ignores the countless influences that can cause a daughter to be angry, for example, a father’s emotional unavailability or emotional manipulation that divides a daughter from her mother, gender inequality, the way patriarchy harms the mother-daughter bond, violence, racism, and current and past life events. This single cause diagnosis also repeats the patriarchal narrative that blames mothers, not fathers, for their daughter’s (and son’s) problems.

When therapists and coaches, mothers and daughters, and family members blame the mother for causing her daughter’s anger, without any real…