Mom Issues

As of late, I’ve had several clients with mom issues. It might be a messy relationship or perhaps grieving the pain of no relationship at all. These experiences and my book club prompted me to read Mother Hunger by Kelly McDaniel and Discovering the Inner Mother by Bethany Webster. Both books emphasize and explore the importance of the maternal-child bond and how it impacts us later in life.

Mother Hunger focuses on the unmet emotional needs of daughters during childhood. She defines “mother hunger” as the “yearning for maternal nurturing and validation that persists into adulthood” when these needs remain unfilled. One area that stood out to me is the consequences of the cry-it-out method for infants. Cry-it-out advocates say that it teaches young infants to soothe themselves, but the research doesn’t support that. In fact, infants who don’t cry aren’t “good babies,” but they’re babies who know their needs won’t be met. McDaniel offers strategies to help reframe past experiences and increase self-awareness to stop the mother hunger and develop healthy relationships with themselves and others.

Discovering the Inner Mother is more introspective focusing on how we can mother ourselves by nurturing the feminine within each of us. Her book is more spiritual and political than Mother Hunger, but still provides some helpful exercises to heal the wound.

I found both books to be somewhat blaming mothers who are often in a no-win situation. The consistent connection between mother and baby is not always available due to return to work policies, post-partum mental health and lack of social support (to name a few). Both books come from a gender binary perspective and don’t acknowledge the important role in attaching to another parent or other family members. While I appreciated their perspective for clients, I think I’ll reserve recommending these books for people who are not parents. Parents should check out books that emphasize “good enough” parenting like The 5 Principles of Parenting or Good Inside.