“If these challenges [between mother and daughter] are a generational thing, Sil has surely broken the pattern with her own daughter.”
— Jane Fonda
I was determined to break the pattern.
Twenty years ago, when my daughter Eliza was a preteen, she started pulling away from me- pretty much ‘on schedule’- and we were really struggling to connect. The eye rolls, the frosty silence, and the frustrated ‘mommmmmm’ angst began— and I (1) panicked, and then (2) got real about it, and knew I had to do something differently.
I had had a difficult relationship with my own mom when I was a teen: we stopped connecting and stopped talking. It was awful. I was determined to do it differently with my own daughter.
How Mothering & Daughtering was born.
Attachment research shows that conflict and behavior are most effectively addressed by strengthening the mother-daughter bond. Eliza and I healed our relationship and led sold-out Mothering & Daughtering workshops- teaching this attachment approach- at the Omega, Kripalu and Esalen Institutes for over a decade.
Mothering & Daughtering was born out of our need for a new approach that valued heart over discipline. We taught our radical stance from our lived experience: that it’s totally possible for mothers and daughters to be close- even, and especially, during the preteen and teen years.
And our bestselling book Mothering & Daughtering: Keeping Your Bond Strong During the Teen Years is the story of our healing shared from our different perspectives.
Eliza and I created The Mothering Course to give mothers their own private online workshop.
We created The Mothering Course- an online video-based experience for busy moms of preteen and teen daughters. We like to refer to the course as the operating instructions that a mother needs for raising an adolescent daughter in our fast-moving, technological, and peer-oriented culture. In 40 bite-sized videos (15-20 minutes) Eliza and I teach our tried-and-true attachment approach to parenting.