Ways to Build a Strong Mother-Daughter Bond

I recently read somewhere that mother-daughter bonds are stronger than any parent-child relationship.

Now that I am a mother to a daughter, I can honestly see how this could be true.

Being that Moms and Daughters are both women, moms are more likely to understand and put themselves in their daughters shoes.

With life experiences, moms are able to be empathetic and understanding of their daughters problems because they’ve been there!

I think that if a mom is empathetic, loving and builds a friendship with a daughter from a young age, I can definitely see how that can build the strongest bond.

Case in point: my mom is my best friend.

I have a lot to learn from my mom and the way she built a lasting bond with me and my sister.

I’m not saying it was always perfect and happy smiles.

We had our fair share of drama, arguments, disagreements and “teenage tantrums” where “mom just doesn’t understand me.”

But now that I’m also an adult and a mother, my mom is still my closest friend.

She made it through all of the challenges of raising kids and came out of it with lasting mother-daughter friendships.

I’ve been wanting to write on this topic for a while and have been thinking about some of the ways that my bond with my own mom grew so strong.

Here are some ways that my mom built a long lasting bond with her own daughters:

Let Her Talk and You Listen

My mom did a whole lot of listening.

I can remember sitting in the car with her on our shopping dates and talking her ear off.

I don’t remember what I talked about but she always listened and responded.

She wasn’t distracted by her phone or the tv in the background.

She listened.

Her body language and responses showed me that she was present and fully engaged with me.

She made me feel like there was no one else she wanted to be with in that moment but me and it wasn’t forced, she really loved every moment we spent together.

It was real and authentic.

Teach Her What You Know – Life Experiences

My mom has a wealth of life experiences, she’s lived much longer than I have and has been through a lot of experiences that I may just now be facing.

Rather than talk down to me and tell me what to do, she taught me from her own mistakes and experiences.

She didn’t pretend to be perfect.

Rather than talk down to me, she explained that she was just trying to protect me by using her own struggles in life as her reasoning.

“Learn from her trials, errors and successes.”

It was much easier for me to take her advice when I see how she learned from a mistake then it would have been if she would have just said “do it because I said so.”

Know When to be a Friend and When to be a Parent

I think this can be a hard one because we want our kids to like us but we also want to protect them and raise them correctly, and sometimes that means being a parent rather than a friend in certain situations.

My mom knew when to be a friend and when to be a parent for my own good.

There wasn’t one or the other, they worked together in balance.

This helped me respect and trust her as my parent, and love her as my friend who cares deeply for me.

Don’t Force Her to Be Like You

My mom and I are very alike and I feel like my sister is different than my mom.

My mom had a way of helping us be who we were, not who she was.

If we had interests, she told us to pursue them.

If there were things that she wanted for us but we didn’t want them, she learned to let go and let us choose.

I know it wasn’t always easy for her because we argued a time or two about wanting different things, but I can see how over the years, she stopped forcing us to be more like her.

She helped us be our best selves.

It’s funny though, because the older I get, the more I realize I’m soooo much like her!

No “Space” Between Us

The phrase “I need space” was not allowed in our home.

If we had a problem, an argument, or were mad at each other, we hit the nail on the head right away.

My mom forced us to not bottle things up because 90% of the time they were misunderstandings and by keeping it inside, we build resentment towards each other.

Even to this day, if my mom says something that rubs me the wrong way, I just tell her right away that I felt like it was rude, wrong, etc.

The reality is that 90% of the time, she didn’t mean for it to sound the way it came out, and the other way around!

So many times disagreements are based on misunderstandings or words that came out wrong, even a wrong tone.

Not allowing these small things to fester over time is key in maintaining a solid, mother-daughter friendship.

I think this rule applies to any relationship too!

Communicate, don’t leave space between you because over time, the space grows bigger and bigger and it’s hard to close that gap again.