Of Food, Proximity, and the Need for Choice…

Interactions between mothers and daughters hold many complexities.

Every mother is someone’s daughter. And every daughter has a mother.

The nature or lack of interactions between mothers and their daughter influence and affect a minutia of interpersonal aspects for the daughter and reflect upon the many strands that connect a daughter’s mother with her mother, the grandmother.

Observing a mother and her daughter can reveal a history and lineage of interactions from the line of women connected to and whose lives had descended into the existence of a mother and her daughter.

Weight offers an additional aspect of a woman or girl’s life that sheds light onto the nature of interactions a woman has or has experienced with other mother and how the girl or woman views and feels about herself.

A recent study now states the type of relationship a girl has with her mother can affect the girl’s chances of becoming obese during adolescence.
More specifically the study finds that, “…the less of an emotional bond a mother had with her child, the higher the risk the child will become overweight by age 15…”

Notice that the study speaks of mother and child, but the article opens with, “…Your relationship with your mother could affect your waistline…    .”

The headline even reads, “Mother Daughter Relationship Could Affect Your Weight .

Perhaps the a headline emphasizing interactions between mothers and daughters garners more attention than one reading versus mothers and sons or mothers and their children.

The link was sent to my e-mail for a Google alert search established to notify me of articles focused on mothers and daughters.

While I believe that the kind of relationship men have or don’t experience with their mothers can and does contribute to men being overweight, the nature of interactions that occur between mothers and daughters carries and additional thread of importance absent in the relationship between women and their sons.

Mothers and their daughters are both female. We share the same gender, a fact not lost on another fact, we are much more likely than any man to bear children.

Pregnancy and child rearing play an obvious and huge role in affecting a woman’s weight, the first being that with pregnancy comes necessary weight gain. Should a woman choose to nurse her infant, we must eat more than during our pregnancy.

And any mother will tell you that rearing children brings a myriad of stresses that if not addressed through exercise and bringing awareness to what we eat and making an effort to eat healthily, can lead us down the path to seeking comfort through eating food that while dispensing momentary calm also deliver added pounds to our waists and abdomens, pounds that on reaching our 4th and 5th decades of life almost refuse to leave our bodies despite the hours we spend exercising.

Effective dieting must, and always includes changing our eating habits, eliminating foods that fuel weight gain, while incorporating more fish and those darn vegetables we push urge our children to eat.

Psychology and medicine have stated the roots of anorexia and bulimia lay in the bulimic and anorexic girl’s relationship with her mother.

Jane Ogden and Jo Steward, of the United Medical and Dental Schools of Guys and St. Thomas’ in London, England demonstrated in their examination of the interactions between more than 30 mothers and their daughters a direct correlation between the presence of autonomy and the nature or absence of boundaries within a daughter’s relationship with her mother proved as strong predictors for whether the daughter might develop problems with weight and displeasure with the image of their bodies.

A mother’s ability, or lack thereof to allow her daughter space to develop as a separate person and come to know and understand her identity separate and distinct from her mother significantly contributes to whether the daughter will go on to experience problems with her weight and/or will experience dissatisfaction with the image and shape of her body.

The mothers of anorexic and bulimic young women often present as extremely controlling.
Likewise in Ogden and Steward’s analysis of the relationships with the 30 or more pairs of mothers and their daughters revealed an even more interesting finding.

“…Daughters were more likely to be dissatisfied with their bodies when their mothers reported feeling both less in control of the daughter’s activities and feeling the daughter did not have a right to her own autonomy as well as if the mother saw it as important that their relationship lack boundaries.”
[How Do Mothers Contribute to Their Daughters’ Eating Disorders and Weight Concerns? by Jane Ogden and Jo Steward]

A mother’s need for control, which quality that when displayed in any individual indicates the lack of control, can in interactions with her daughter result in the daughter exerting control in the one area of that the daughter’s life over which the mother has least power–what the daughter eats, the food, of lack there of, that a person ingests.

Mahatma Gandhi went on hunger strikes in protest of the occupation of his home, the sub-continent of India, by the British.

Likewise when a mother seeks to infuse and impose her singular ideas and thoughts on life into and upon her daughter, the daughter can resort to a slow process of death in an effort to not only gain the mother’s attention, but also eliminate her life from the presence of the mother’s existence.

Those who seek to control lose all power and purpose when the lives of those subject to their commands seek to exist.

That the interactions between mothers and daughters can and do take on such dramatic proportions might appear a bit melodramatic. But anyone who has experienced either or both sides of this dynamic, a women who is a daughter, mother, or is now both, if honest will attest to the emotional, and physical authenticity and truth of the characteristics of these dynamics.

As a daughter who is now the mother of two adults, and one adolescent, all daughters, I have experienced the highs and lows that women of both categories undergo.

The emotional proximity and distance, room to breathe, if you will, that exists or stands absent in the relationship between a mother and daughter speaks to and influences many things regarding the daughter, none less important than how a girl or young woman views and perceives herself, her place in the world and all that connect the two.

In this vein it comes as no surprise that daughters connected to their mothers by a dearth or desert of emotional ties are at risk for overeating and gaining and unhealthy amount of weight.

Food, breast milk or formula, serves as the primary physical object connecting a mother and child during an infant’s first hours following birth.

Mealtimes, a mother spooning food into the mouth of her 9-month-old, are center points of socialization wherein the observant mother, while aware of what foods that support her child’s good health and well being, also pays close attention to that child’s preferences within the range of food that encourage the former.

Choice.

The ability to both honor its necessity and cultivate its presence in our interactions with others influences and determines both the quality and endurance of our friendships and family relations, none any more important than that which exists between we mothers and our daughters, they with themselves, and ultimately us with our consciences.