There are more and more women who do the impossible things as they run from their roles just to improve their physical aspects and leave their daughters without a role model. How does it affect a teenager that her mom stops being her parent to become a competitor?
Nowadays, it is common to see mothers with bodies that are more toned and firm than those of their daughters, despite the difference in age. They are women who go to the gym, do aesthetic treatments, take care of themselves at meals and even wear youth-style clothes. They live on their bodies to maintain an impeccable and young figure, whatever the cost, and they engage in competition – implicit or explicit – with their adolescent daughters.
At this stage, the bond with parents is already colored by competition and challenge. But what happens when on the other side we meet these mothers who want to look like their daughters. In the personal process that adolescence inaugurates, the most important issues are identity, place in the world and, in this sense, the body occupies a central place, even more in the case of women: the changes that began in puberty continue to challenge the adolescent in her permanent adaptation, added to the interest placed in the eyes of others.
Among other things, adolescence is that period in which it is about rehearsing the entrance to the adult world, to sexuality and that is where the identifying figure of the mother is fundamental. This is why the teenage clothing selection is very important for mothers!
Mother – Mirror
The mother – daughter relationship often goes through critical periods of love hate, ambivalence characteristic also of this stage of development. It usually happens that in this essay the adolescent looks at herself in the maternal mirror, finding information about this role: the feminine. It’s time to lend teenage clothing and makeup, but also criticism of the look of the mother. According to the characteristics of mother and daughter, competition can take place day by day, exacerbated by the aesthetic demand of the present in which adult women struggle not to age. They achieve a general attitude closer to their daughter than to their peers.
In this time of life, the mother appears as a mirror. But the mother does not show her daughter an identifying option for the adult world, but instead gives her an image of a pair. The adolescent will then have to make more turns until she finds a support in the construction of her identity, competing even more with her mother since both try to occupy a single place.
A risk that grows
A mother who wants to compete with her daughter can translate into different behaviors: permanent conflict or a daughter who takes shelter from her mother. The need to compete with her mother, the fear of not being able to match her, the feeling of rivalry negatively; all such things influence the mind of any adolescent. But in fact, there is no peer competition. Mom has more experience, more journeys. The teenager will compare herself at a disadvantage to a mom, who does not act like a mom but as a little sister. Unfortunately, it will trigger food pathologies especially if there is predisposition. A mother with this behavior, with attachment to his figure, it is also possible that it has some kind of pathology.
Every time there are more and more mothers who want to see themselves as eternal teenagers and it is a cultural issue. In our language is implicit body, food, embellishment, diets. It’s hard to escape all this. It is not illogical, then, to think that certain women are afraid of maturity and fall into the cultural trap of always being adolescent. In each age there is a charm and you can mature being happy even though the selection of your daughter’s clothing is very important for you, as her mother.