(This post was originally published in 2016)

by Siân Pooley and Kaveri Qureshi

On the 2^nd March this year, ahead of Mother’s Day, there was a thoughtful discussion on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour addressing the question: ‘is it inevitable you’ll turn into your mother?’. For counsellor Myira Khan, who was interviewed on the programme, this is a topic that comes up frequently in her therapy sessions. Indeed, for women who have struggled with their relationships with their mothers, it can be a source of great conflict. Khan claims that ‘you’re turning into your father’ is not a jibe for men in the same way that ‘you’re turning into your mother’ so often is for women, and that men do not worry about this to the same extent.  She suggests that because our mothers are our role models for womanhood, this gives mother-daughter relationships a particular charge. A lot of her counselling work with women is about trying to ‘break the cycle’, which she approaches therapeutically by exploring mother-daughter relationships, trying to understand what those relationships mean, and encouraging women to accept the reality of who their mother really was, rather than the awe-inspiring model of her that they have in their minds.

This programme made us pause for thought, as it was broadcast just ahead of the publication of our book Parenthood Between Generations: Transforming Reproductive Cultures. In this edited volume we bring together ten contributions by historians, anthropologists and sociologists addressing precisely the extent to which people replicate the models of parenthood that they encounter from their own parents. Continue reading “‘Is it inevitable you’ll turn into your mother?’” →