Should mothers and daughters be best friends? It’s one of those perennial questions that comes up whenever a celebrity such as Madonna or Gwyneth Paltrow is photographed with their girl in tow, or when a psychologist or educationalist warns against the dangers of a mum treating her daughter like her bezzie.
So it was this week, when the head of St Albans high school for girls, Jenny Brown, decried what she called the “BFF syndrome” which mothers were embracing with gusto, and which was making their daughters dependent, mollycoddled and spoilt. The problem, said Brown, is that daughters need to develop their independence, and having hovering mums always on hand, smoothing their path at every turn, doesn’t help them one bit.
The truth is that Brown is wrong: this sort of helicopter behaviour isn’t how best friends work at all. Best friends are there for you, but no one is truly there for you like your mum. For a mother, nothing is too much trouble, and nothing will stop her from doing all she can to smooth your path through life. Bezzies are wonderful, but the buck stops way ahead of where it stops for a mum.
Much more dangerous, in my view, is the reverse of the syndrome Brown is pointing out: the acting-out of a relationship where a mother sees her daughter as the kind of best friend in whom she, the mother, can confide. Some mums pour their hearts out to their daughters, sharing their feelings about the child’s father, her siblings, or more general worries and anxieties and who knows, even the minutiae of their sex lives.
What a mistake it is as few things can upset a girl’s balance like knowing too much about their mother’s intimate life. I have four daughters, aged between 13 and 23, and none of my girls particularly want to know about my love life, worries about my job or annoyance with a colleague; call them selfish (sometimes, I’m tempted to do that) but the fact is that a mother’s issues aren’t relevant to a daughter’s life. The older my girls get, the more aware I am that the most important role we mothers of daughters play is simply to be here. We are here to listen to them, to support them, to always be on their side, to fight for them, and to advise them on how to negotiate some maze or tricky situation.
But it’s a one-way street – and that’s exactly how it should be. Our daughters need us to be their rock: it’s one thing to share with our real best friends how choppy the sea is, and how scared we are that life is going to come crashing down, but it’s quite another to share our deepest anxieties and worries with our daughters. They need us to be solid and dependable; their own young lives are in a state of turmoil, and they don’t need our turmoil to be competing with their own.
So: bezzies? No, absolutely not. Our daughters need their best friends, and we mothers of daughters definitely need ours. But the conversations that go on with these trusted confidantes, and the conversations that go on between a mum and her girl, are very different indeed – or at least, they should be.