Customer Reviews

The Mother-Daughter Project: How Mothers and Daughters Can Band Together, Beat the Odds, and Thrive ThroughAdolescence

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I bought this book earlier today and am over halfway through it. I am the mother of two daughters, age 9 & 12. While I wish I had this book five years ago, it doesn't feel like it's too late. A great resource for years to come, with positive self, daughter and relationship building ideas.

I think "The Mother-Daughter Project" is a terrific book. I have recommended it to parents that I see in my practice as a child psychiatrist, to friends who have daughters, and to anyone whom I meet who has daughters! I believe this book is a rich tool, from the perspective of understanding and, most beneficially, from the perspective of practice: on how to foster strong, nurturing, and enjoyable bonds between mothers and daughters and between mothers and mothers. The common experiences and challenges that different generations of females encounter in our society, and life itself, as well as the resources needed to meet those challenges, are richly explored in this book through the discussion of the evolution of the mother-daughter group.
With detail and humor, the authors share with the reader the journey of this group of mothers and daughters over 10 years, as they start meeting monthly when the daughters are seven years old and continue up to the time of college. We learn about the very rich array of activities that these very thoughtful and intentional mothers used to educate their daughters about the tasks they will encounter in each coming stage in their development. Age specific challenges to mothers and daughters, together and separately, are covered in an overview level and in the very rich detailed activities the mothers and daughters used to prepare for, practice, and develop the skills and abilities to deal with all that is involved in moving from protected childhood into adulthood. This book is a wonderful resource to all parents-whether or not they are in such groups.

The Mother-Daughter Project is a most practical, theoretical, and hopeful guide to dealing with our predator culture -- a culture that expects and even thrives upon mothers and daughters becoming separate during the daughter's adolescence. My mother-daughter group, just begun with help from the book contains 11 & 12 year old girls and their mothers and is a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic group who have various economic backgrounds. We did one of the exercises ("our perfect day") from the book and it elevated us to a surprising new level, created an introduction to community within the group and highlighted some marvelous differences and similarities between the generations. My own 11-year-old daughter said, "I noticed that everyone in our group had something going for mangoes AND liked climbing...also that we all wanted to get up really early so that we could really live large during the day!"

This is an incredible book for anyone interested in women, girls, psychology, spirituality and community. The extremely readable information about our culture's approach to girls and women and the valuable stories about the mother-daughter pairs in the authors' M-D Project make "The Mother-Daughter Project: How Mother and Daughters Can Band Together, Beat the Odds, and Thrive Through Adolescence" truly a book to read, re-read and USE.

This book is so informative and practical and gives help to mothers who want to stay connected to their daughters through the teen years. It is useful to have it when your daughter is 8-10 years old, but just as useful as when she is a teenager. The authors write so personally and with insight that is truly helpful. It is the best book on the subject that I have read, as it comes from a place of understanding and how to be a support for our teenage daughters while teaching them about the challenges they will face. Highly recommended!

My daughters is still an infant, but I plan on using this book as a guide to better communicate with my daughter with hopes of either surpassing the teenage anger years, or at best to make them smoother.

I was a very troubled teen and I know had my mother taken the steps that are outlined in this book, a lot of my issues would have been resolved.

As a mom to two daughters including one who just turned 8, I was intrigued by the idea of "The Mother-Daughter Project". My girls and I have such a wonderful relationship now and I hope to keep the connection going as they grow into womanhood. While I appreciated the authors' basic premise that an adolescent can form her own individual identity while still remaining close to her mother, I was very much turned off by the values promoted in this book.

If you hold traditional Biblical beliefs when it comes to sexual morality, this isn't the book for you. The authors suggest having moms and their twelve year old daughters have a discussion about how to communicate to one's partner (whom the girls are nonchalantly told could be a woman) how she wants to be touched in a sexual situation. And then they follow it up by recommending the girls practice putting a condom on a banana. While there is lip service paid towards the notion of waiting until the teen is 18 and that it's "best to be in love", the authors specifically bash abstinence education. They write on pg. 180: "Abstinence-only sex education primarily teaches girls to say 'no'. As important as it is to have the power to say no to any unwanted sexual activity, it's also important to be able to say 'yes' to one's sexual desires at the appropriate time." These girls are TWELVE. Does anyone seriously think it's a good idea to encourage girls who are barely into adolescence to be thinking about saying "yes" to sex? They already get enough encouragement to give into temptation from their hormones and the sleazy pop culture. They need their moms to be encouraging them to resist temptation and stay chaste until marriage. It'd be one thing to do these types of exercises at age 16 or 17 (though I still think it's a bad idea even at that age) but 12 seems insanely premature.

Aside from the whole issue I had with the authors' overly permissive attitude towards premarital sex, I also found many of the suggested activities on the hokey side. Making a model of the female reproductive system out of fruit? Doing an interpretive dance of the menstrual cycle using a carton of chicken eggs and red & pink scarves? Having a "welcome to womanhood" ceremony where the girls receive a gift of moonflower seeds to plant when the girl gets her first period? I can just hear Enya playing in the background and the scent of lavender incense sticks burning...

I wish I could recommend this book because I do feel the basic premise of it is a good one. It's just too problematic for me to do that, however.

Three years ago, you could not have convinced me that my mother and I would have a functional adult relationship. In addition to a life crisis that brought us back onto speaking terms and into each other's lives, we learned to set aside most of our differences because life is too short to do otherwise. When I heard about The Mother-Daughter Project, a book that promises "a proven model for staying connected through adolescence and beyond," I felt a glimmer of hope that young women would no longer spend their twenties overcoming the verbal scars of youthful wars with our parents. Maybe my expectations were quite high, but this overly self-referential, self-help book in disguise is written in such a fluffy, insulting way that I found it hard to accept any of its legitimate advice.

It should first be noted that the ten-year group experiment on which this book is based took place in greater Massachusetts, where I currently reside. While that doesn't immediately lend itself to a myriad of privileges, two educated, white women wrote this book from their own experience. They do make a cursory acknowledgement that mothering is more than their version of the status quo, but this recognition simply doesn't show through in their analysis or supposedly practical application, and I just can't get down with that kind of written tokenism.

Most helpful for their references to other similar, more groundbreaking works, this is a good book for mothers who literally have no clue about how to start relating to their teenagers. The overly simplistic solutions and embarrassing language do not make it an effective read for teens, however. If my mother had handed me this when I was in middle school, I'd have laughed in her face despite my strong desire to heal our relationship even then. An overly indulgent attempt to debunk myths like the "perfect girl" or the "supermom," this book is mainly a solution for upper class white folks who have a built-in support system ready to consciousness-raise and spend long hours dissecting how to best grow their relationships.