How to Repair a Strained Mother-Daughter Relationship

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The relationship between a mother and her daughter is sacred and unbreakable. The importance of mother-daughter relationships is critical for both mother and daughter’s emotional well-being. But it is complex and diverse as well.

Some mothers and their daughters are each other’s best friends while there is hostility among some.

Some mothers keep an effective communication line with their daughters, while some barely talk once a week.

Some mothers and daughters see each other weekly; some moms or and daughters live in different states or countries.

Some argue and fight regularly while some moms and daughters avoid conflict.

How to fix mother-daughter relationships?

There is no smooth relationship as there will be ups and downs in all relationships. The mother-daughter relationship is troubled with new encounters at every stage of life, and disputes and misunderstandings are inevitable.

But we learn to recognize potential barriers early, communicate openly, and most importantly, makeup with hugs and declarations of love and gratitude over a course of time.

Below are some tips and things to do for repairing mother-daughter relationships.

1. Listen actively

To repair a broken mother-daughter relationship, for that matter any strained relationship, you must have listening ears. You must be able to listen attentively to your mother or daughter. Let her know she can talk to you about virtually anything.

As it is being said, active listening is “reflecting back what the other person is saying”, when you reflect back what your mother or daughter is saying, you’re telling her that she’s being heard and that you understand.

Listening is the key to handling difficult mother-daughter relationships.

Don’t just listen to the words being said by your mother or daughter; you should also try your possible best to listen to the feelings underlying the message. You get to understand more about the message being passed across if you understand the feelings of the other person.

Often the words you say are not what you are really feeling or rather trying to get across. That is why it is so important that you learn to listen carefully. To repair a strained relationship between mother and daughter, active listening is critical.

2. Forgive easily

When your feelings are hurt and your emotions run high, it is quite often hard to forgive — or ask for forgiveness.

Instead of attentively listening to your mom’s or daughter’s emotions and feelings and validating them to potentially apologize, you tend to feel personally attacked and fight back with harsher words.

This style only causes more anger and hurt.

Forgiving someone is not admitting or saying that what happened is OK. It is not condoning, pardoning, or minimizing the impact. Just saying “sorry” after an argument opens the door to a sincere conversation that permits us to understand how our words and actions make the other person feel.

For mending mother-daughter relationships, willingness to forgive is extremely important.

3. Communicate effectively

An ineffective communication system is one of the challenges with mom-daughter relationships. Some mothers have learned the importance of keeping an effective communication line with their daughters while some barely talk once a week.

Troubled mother-daughter relationships stem from a poor communication system.

How to mend mother-daughter relationships with good communication?

Don’t expect the other person to be a mind reader. We need to communicate effectively, carefully, and clearly. Be gentle and careful as you speak from your heart. Words said are like broken eggs, it is quite hard to put them back together.

Saying harsh words pierce deeply into the person’s heart and can leave a painful wound, even if you never meant to hurt the person.

Be clear and calmly state how you’re feeling. Also, speak your mind in a very heartfelt but gentle manner.

4. Find common interests

Common interests are those activities two people enjoy together. A mother-daughter relationship breakdown happens when they don’t do anything together and when they don’t spend time together.

There must be something you love doing with your mom or daughter. List them out and frequently engage yourself in those activities as it will go a long way in strengthening the bond between you and your mom/daughter.

Also, spending some quality relaxed time together while discovering common interests deepens the mother-daughter bond. There is definitely something you and your mom/daughter enjoy doing together.

You might feel you and your mom/daughter are not interested in doing anything together, if this is the case, explore something that is quite new to both of you. For example, take a music class, go on a tour, etc.

Mother and daughter relationships thrive when they spend time together doing something both of them are passionate about.

5. Make time for each other

One of the most common complaints from mothers in strained mother-daughter relationships is that their daughters no longer have quality one on one time with them. However, you need to find a balance between how much time to spend together and apart.

Too much togetherness can cause petty frustrations and arguments to surface. Yet, not enough togetherness leads to isolation and disconnection.

To remedy a strained relationship with a mother or daughter, it is important that you strike the right balance in the time that you spend together.

As daughters tend to grow up and move away, we tend to live separate lives as it is difficult to maintain our relationship when quick phone calls on the run become the norm. Phone calls, texts, emails are the occasional ways to communicate with each other but you still need one-on-one conversations maybe video calls, and so on.