Why Teenage Daughters and Moms Fight
Teenage daughters and their mothers have the most fraught relationships in a family, experts say. (Photo: Corbis Images)
The relationship between teenage girls and their mothers is perhaps the most intense one in many families: best friends one moment and at odds the next. The dynamics of moms and their adolescent daughters have long captured attention — especially in pop culture, ranging anywhere from the dysfunction of the pair in Mommy Dearest to their friendship in Troop Beverly Hills.
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In a recent Wall Street Journal column, writer Elizabeth Bernstein calls the relationship between a teenage girl and her mom “the most consistently fraught relationship among relatives.” In the piece, she profiles mother-daughter pair Michelle and Kelly Skeen, who were close when Kelly was in middle school but started having conflict when she entered high school and often chose to hang out with her friends over her mom. “I don’t like conflict, and Kelly doesn’t like to feel like she’s disappointed anyone, so we avoided a conversation,” Skeen said. “She would mumble a quick apology, and it would all be over — except that it wasn’t.”
Deborah Carr, a sociology professor at Rutgers University and the author of Making Up With Mom, says that while this relationship has always been fraught, the intensity of the dynamic has increased in recent years. “Family size is smaller today than it was in the past,” she tells Yahoo Parenting. “When there are a lot of siblings, you can deflect problems to other people in the family. But with only one girl, the mom can have a lot of expectations for the one daughter, and it’s a lot of responsibility — and a pressure cooker.”
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While moms may certainly be close with their sons, they don’t have the same expectations for boys to follow in their footsteps. “Mothers and daughters have tension when the mom wants the daughter to be like her in many ways, but the daughter wants to be an individual,” Carr says. “With mothers and sons, that is not as intense, since men and women tend to lead different lives.”
And the screaming matches and slammed doors we associate with mothers and teenage daughters are a product of female relationships. “Women are very verbal,” Carr says. “They share feelings and articulate thoughts even when they are half-formed. Both mothers and daughters often air out loud the things that make them agitated, instead of waiting until the storm has passed.”
Social media and women’s increasing career success are the final pieces of the puzzle that have intensified the relationship — making mothers and daughters closer than ever but also creating more dramatic conflict. Sites like Facebook and Instagram have erased a lot of the privacy that daughters used to maintain. “The level of information exchange is higher than ever before,” she says. “Today mothers and daughters share with each other on Facebook, and the boundaries of privacy have kind of dissolved.”
Add to that the one source of pressure that may have previously been unique to fathers and sons. “A daughter’s quest for independence has always been one of the sore spots of the relationship, but mothers today are often accomplished career women, and it might be hard for a daughter to try to walk in her footsteps,” Carr says. “In many ways, there are pressures on daughters to live up to mothers today that are similar to the pressures that used to be on sons to live up to their fathers.”
And lastly, these blowups usually occur because mothers and daughters know they will always have each other’s backs. “If the girl has a tough day at school because her best friend ditched her, the easiest and most acceptable person to unload on is mom,” Carr says. “We say things to our parents we would never say to anyone else because we know once the tension passes we will come back into the fold.”
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