Adult Daughters and Their Mothers: Harmony or Hostility? Working Paper No. 209.

This paper addresses the mother-daughter relationship from the perspective of adult daughters. The first section focuses on information and myths about adult daughter-older mother relationships, including popular images and assumptions, misunderstandings, taboos, and mother-bashing. The second section describes initial research into the nature of the adult daughter-older mother relationship and its effects on the daughters' psychological health. It is based on extensive interviews with roughly 70 women that consisted of open-ended questions about the rewarding and problematic aspects of each of the women's major social roles, and specifically their role as daughters. The third section describes more recent research based on early findings, which studied daughters' relationships with both their mothers and fathers as part of a larger study of 400 women, 25 to 55, who were employed as social workers and licensed practical nurses, and who varied in family pattern, as well as in race and social class. Based on findings from this research, both rewarding aspects and problematic concerns in the adult daughter-older mother relationship are identified and discussed. (TE)