A difficult dynamic … Rachel Griffiths (left) and Sally Field play daughter and mother in Brothers & Sisters.

From Sunday Life
"People assume Lulu and I are oppressed by our evil mother," wrote Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld in a recently published open letter to her mum, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother author Amy Chua. "That is so not true. Every other Thursday, you take off our chains and let us play math games in the basement."
Whatever you think of Chua snr's ultra-ambitious, only-A-grades-are-acceptable approach to mothering, her kid does have a sense of humour (as well as a place at Harvard and performances at Carnegie Hall). But when both mother and daughter have gone public about their relationship - "no tea party," according to Chua jnr - it does suggest things may sometimes get a little ... intense.

Advertisement: Story continues below

But you don't have to be studying at Harvard to feel the heat that mother-daughter relationships generate. For every woman whose beloved mother is her very best friend in the universe, there's another who will never forgive the old bitch for ripping her confidence to shreds, and two more with mixed, but equally powerful, feelings towards the person good enough to squeeze them out into the world. In between thinking about our mums, talking to them and discussing the mothers of our friends, we spend time and energy on their pop-culture counterparts: in the movies (Mommie Dearest), in books (Margaret Atwood's Moral Disorder) or on television (Kath & Kim, Brothers & Sisters).
In part, perhaps, the intensity is inevitable. Mothers tend to be our primary carers - on average, Australian women spend more than twice as much time with their kids as men do - and children tend to model themselves on the parent whose gender they share. So the mother-daughter relationship is a double-whammy; patterns of "mother-daughter inheritance" have been identified in areas ranging from our notions of beauty to our tendency to smoke. And nobody ever stepped gracefully from a pedestal. It's hardly surprising that we tend to be extra-bitter when our mothers get it wrong.
The traffic isn't just one way, though. Mothers are twice as likely to be critical of daughters as they are of sons, according to a British survey published last year. Psychotherapist and social critic Susie Orbach has argued that mothers want to help their daughters find acceptance, so young women are taught to seek approval - which often means suppressing their own needs in order to fulfil those of others. But by trying their hardest, parents may be making things worse.
Our obsession with the psychology of motherhood is a fairly recent one; Sigmund Freud may have studied children, but it wasn't until the 1920s, when his daughter Anna and his follower Melanie Klein began practising, that real children were regularly psychoanalysed. Once they were, mother and child became a unit, in which the child definitely came first.
Ninety years later, a good mother is still seen as one who is on permanent call for her kids. Australians are becoming more conservative about gender roles once again, researchers reported recently: nearly three-quarters of women surveyed in 2005 believed stay-at-home mothers were better for children, whereas only 57 per cent thought so in 2001. In those four years, the proportion of men in favour of a male-breadwinner family model rose from less than 30 per cent to more than 40.
The French feminist Elisabeth Badinter argues that this phenomenon, dubbed "l'enfant roi" - the child is king - is as bad for kids as it is for parents. "The interests of the mother are clearly secondary. And that, in turn, brings with it the desire to have the perfect child." Not all women find looking after babies totally fulfilling, she points out. Even those who do will only spend a couple of decades doing it, "but the average life expectancy for a woman is now over 80. Should women be expected to devote their entire lives to raising kids?"
As a result, she says, "Many of today's young mothers believe that if they're going to make the effort to stay at home and completely dedicate themselves to their children, they want them to be perfect, too: perfectly raised, intelligent, balanced ... I honestly wonder how this affects children in the long term."
If those British statistics are anything to go by, the answer seems to be: more seriously, if they are girls. More than one in five surveyed mothers felt they let their sons get away with more; boys were more likely to be described as playful, cheeky and loving, while girls were considered stroppy, eager to please or argumentative. But mothers' apparent disdain seems to spring from their greater worry for, and investment in, their daughters. It's not unusual for women to describe daughters as extensions of themselves, and most bring the baggage of their own childhood.
"In criticising [my daughter], I'm really criticising myself," says Anne Karpf, who writes about families for the UK's Guardian newspaper. "On the other hand, a daughter who rejects most of what you represent (and as teenagers they almost all do) can feel like a reproach - a rerun of your own mother."
Finding harmony in mother-daughter relationships is perhaps a matter of taking parenting a little less seriously. Easier said than done. Even Amy Chua - a professor at Yale when she's not tormenting her kids - remains uncertain. "We're all anxious," she told an interviewer recently. "Chinese mothers. Western mothers. I started off as bizarrely overconfident, and I think, in a way, fate evens things out. I couldn't be more anxious now."
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/lifematters/your-mother-yourself-20110801-1i6zl.html#ixzz1TkNCAUZu