Customer Reviews

Friends for Life: Enriching the Bond between Mothers and Their Adult Daughters

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I found the title misleading (to say the least). This book is filled with stories about dysfunctional families. If you enjoy watching daytime talk shows you will enjoy this book; but if you want to enrich your mother-daughter bond; this one is not for you.

I found the book to provide useful insights into the mother daughter relationships that apply to my own life with my mother AND with my daughter. Life with daughter (especially teens) is sometimes like a soap opera, but understanding more, gives me the ability to keep it from being so.

What a wonderful job these authors did of weaving the women's stories they interviewed, their own stories and the advice from a therapist or psychologist thru-out this book . I feel this is book is relevant now as it was over a decade ago. Yes, our grown daughters move out, move back in, get married, get divorced, have children we must help raise, get abortions...and a whole host of other very real issues. Some people may not want to face their daughters may deal with these issues, but they do and I find this book gives real accounts and also how they are dealt with in the real world. I can't understand how one reviewer called this a book about dysfunctional families...to many people it is called life! and the women were dealing head on with the issues for the most part and being very real about them...is that dysfunction? Maybe it was because some of the daughters had children out of wedlock or the divorces or even the abortions? I am not sure,but if you are looking for a real guide for very real issues with your adult daughter(minus issues about poverty, drug abuse or serious mental illness, as the authors state in the preface why they did not choose to deal with those issues in this book) then this is a great book for us mothers.

P.s. I have a friend who could never tell her mother anything that was not viewed as "perfect" by society's standards or she would have cried dysfunction also... this mother could have never guessed her"perfect" daughter had an abortion, was hooked on downers and is now having an affair...she cannot go to her mother for any advice and to me that is dysfunction!