REVIEW

Group effort
By Jennifer Brown

The only emotion as overpowering as the incredible awe, joy and love you feel when holding your infant daughter in your arms for the first time, is the fear that you will lose her in time, when she joins the legions of her mom-hating adolescent peers. Despite the plans you may have for bonding with your little girl, despite femininity-embracing, girl-powerful blueprints you’ve drawn for the two of you, a part of you somewhere deep down may be resigned to waiting for the day when your little girl wants nothing to do with you.

SuEllen Hamkins, MD, and Renée Schultz, MA, felt this fear as they watched their baby girls grow into young ladies. They cringed at the idea that someday their girls who so looked up to them and clamored for their attention as toddlers, would one day possibly be seething, “I hate you,” slamming bedroom doors or giving sullen teen silent treatments to their mothers.
For a long time, this pulling away of adolescence was considered to be not only normal, but to be healthy, and definitely to be expected, however grueling it was for a mother to endure. But Hamkins and Schultz dismissed that idea, especially after reading a groundbreaking book, “Mother Daughter Revolution: From Betrayal to Power” by Elizabeth Debold, Marie Wilson, and Idelisse Malavé (1993), that challenged the supposed inevitability and health of stormy teen-parent relationships.

The seed having been planted that adolescence need not be about pulling away, but could in fact, nurture bonding together healthily, the authors realized that mothers could help each other, and collectively help their daughters ease into adolescence in a healthy, dare I say, happy, way. They created a mother-daughter support group designed to create a feminine bond between mothers and daughters, beginning at a preadolescent age of about seven years old and carrying through the entire teen years of the girls. The results they found after 10 years of meeting as a group were so astonishingly positive, they decided to share their insights in their book.

Designed with the mother of a preadolescent or adolescent girl in mind, MWLM’s reviewed book, “The Mother-Daughter Project” thoroughly covers:

*The benefits of starting a group where mothers and daughters can share and grow together.
*The realities our girls must face in today’s world and why a group such as this is necessary.
*Specific ideas which groups can discover together, and what activities most enhance those ideas.

The first half of the book makes it clear that Hamkins and Schultz know their stuff. The research is meticulous and the arguments detailed. Although it reads a little like a medical journal or textbook, the message is clear and the ideas are good. Still, some readers might find its classroom style not their taste. But if you find yourself tempted to give up on the book early because it’s so information heavy, you’ll be missing out on the real meat of the book, which begins on page 93, the beginning of Part II.

The second half of “The Mother-Daughter Project” is not only packed with information, but it is written a little more creatively and with a more hands-on approach. These writers take a daughter’s development year by year and pose real, solid, specific ideas upon which each age group should be concentrating during each year. What is important to your daughter at age seven? 10? 13? How can your mother-daughter group approach those topics to help arm your daughter to best face those challenges in the real world? This section not only gives you ideas to structure a group, but with real-life examples from their own experiences and the experiences of other mothers within their group, it makes you want to create a group; it sounds fun.

“The Mother-Daughter Project” reads like a reference book and, I think, is best utilized when treated as such. It’s a book that would be handy to keep on your shelf, if for no other reason than to gain insight into what is on your daughter’s mind and in her heart, at any given time. It may help you better handle the surge of hormones causing your little angel to rage at you unprovoked; it might even compel you to get up and do something about it. You never know, you might actually be inspired to create a mother-daughter project of your own.

Jennifer Brown writes and moms from her home in Liberty, Missouri. Two-time winner of the Erma Bombeck global humor award, her humor column regularly appears in The Kansas City Star. Catch her humor-writing classes, Funny One and Funny, Too!, at LssWritingSchool.com. You may contact Jennifer at zoise30@gmail.com. And if you don’t mind the smell of maple syrup, she just might write back!

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