Key Points

A study has shown that mothers feel better when their sons outperform them, but worse when their daughters outperform them.

Excessive jealousy on the part of mothers can lead to belittling or even abuse.

Jealous mothers are often very indirect and unlikely to acknowledge their feelings.

“Even now, it’s hard to use the word ‘jealousy’ from my mother. The idea that a mother might be jealous of her child paints a picture of a monster. I think cruelty and indifference are better than jealousy. It’s very reprehensible.”

These are the words of a woman who is now in her fifties and a mother herself, but they don’t surprise me. Talking about maternal jealousy is perhaps the ultimate taboo, and it goes against everything we cherish about motherhood and want to believe about maternal love, especially the love of a mother for her daughter.

Maternal jealousy is not uncommon

While maternal jealousy is a risky topic, it is not uncommon. Even daughters who have relatively close, if sometimes turbulent, relationships with their mothers report that competition, if not jealousy per se, can liven up their conversations. Here’s what one woman emailed:

“I would hesitate to use the word ‘jealousy.’ But my mom is definitely competitive with me. I think she’s really bothered by the fact that I live in a bigger house than I grew up in and that my kids have opportunities that my siblings and I didn’t have. She may be sarcastic. But is she jealous? Maybe a little.”

The Nature of Maternal Jealousy

We like to think of mothers as being pleased and proud of their daughters’ accomplishments, and thrilled when their children shine, but research shows that’s not the case. For example, a study by Carol Ryff and others found that while mothers reported feeling better about themselves when their sons’ accomplishments outperformed their own, they actually felt worse about themselves when their daughters did better or achieved more. Incidentally, parents did not interact this way with their high-achieving sons or daughters.

The intensity of the mother-daughter relationship is hard to overstate. Is comparison—and therefore contrast, even envy—inevitable when the emotional bond between mother and child is weak or missing? And if I’m honest, is it my deep love for my daughter that prevents the seeds of envy—her behavior and style, her flat stomach, her youth, her whole life ahead of her—from germinating and taking hold? In his study of mothers and their teenage daughters, Lawrence Steinberg has observed that for some mothers, their daughters’ flourishing can trigger a midlife crisis that highlights their disappointments.

Let’s consider for a moment how it was the mother—yes, the one who longed for and gave birth to a beautiful child—who became jealous of her daughter’s beauty and became her mortal enemy. One wonders whether this version they published was judged too harsh or perhaps too uncomfortable, but we know that in the next version, the threatened and threatened mother became a stepmother instead.

Maternal Jealousy and Female Rivalry

Our cultural discomfort with maternal jealousy may be feeding into another current: our discomfort with female rivalry in general. Yes, the phrase “frenemy” has been around since the 1950s, but that doesn’t mean we’re open to discussing how much female jealousy and envy there is.

That’s exactly what Susan Shapiro Barash was surprised to find when she began surveying and interviewing women for her book Tripping the Prom Queen. What did she discover? Few of us could resist pulling out our high heels, sneakers, sandals, or pumps as the prom queen strutted her stuff.

This isn’t exactly new either; after all, Greek mythology attributed the Trojan War to a beauty contest between the gods, where hapless mortals were chosen. Yet, mythology aside, we like to think of ourselves as welcoming and kind, not scheming and jealous. If not, we wouldn’t be talking about it publicly unless we got paid a lot of money to do it on the Housewives show.

The Law of Silence for a Jealous Mother

The law of silence and secrecy makes a mother’s jealousy even more toxic, as she can’t acknowledge her feelings on many levels. For this reason, her jealousy of her daughter will not be expressed directly, but always in roundabout and indirect ways, making it even more toxic and difficult for the daughter to deal with.

Jealousy and anger are very personal in a very specific sense because these feelings reflect the self, not the object of the feelings. And because these feelings refer to the self, the more self-absorbed or narcissistic the mother is, the more likely she is to feel jealous.

As Peter Salovey and Alexander Rothman write: “We do not envy anyone for random qualities that we did not acquire ourselves… But we are more likely to feel envy and jealousy in areas that are particularly important to how we define ourselves—that “hit us where we live.”

Each jealous mother will have her domain, a territory that she believes is hers, and each daughter’s battle—however similar in form—will be fought on different grounds. Incidentally, the word rivalry comes from the Latin for “right to the same stream.” In Laura’s case, her mother’s jealousy was intensified by her daughter’s closeness to her father: “I was an adult before I realized the pattern. Anything positive that happened between my father and me was followed by days of my mother’s disdain, her criticism of my every flaw, and her scolding me. “I didn’t understand what made her angry until I got married and my husband realized it.”

The areas might be beauty or looks (as was the case in my family), academic standing, social grace and popularity, intelligence or humor, money, or whatever else mattered to the jealous mother’s definition of herself. But the attacks—given the burden of jealousy in general and maternal envy in particular—would always be indirect.

“My mother was insecure—my father always belittled her—and she would hound me whenever I succeeded. She said my good grades showed that the school had no standards because I was lazy and that they meant nothing because I was a pathetic person. When I made friends, she accused me of putting them above the family and said I was a traitor. When I proved popular with the boys, she said it was because I was a bitch and easy. It was awful. “I cut her out of my life when she left home.”

Living with the Scars of Maternal Jealousy

The scars left by this kind of maternal abuse run deep. Although a daughter may feel responsible—as if there is something she can do to please her mother—she doesn’t, though she is unlikely to understand that until she is an adult, and even then she may still feel guilty. The kind of belittling and disparagement that a daughter may experience leaves a well of self-doubt and emotional confusion. After all, your mother is supposed to be in your court, right? This experience is isolating, especially given the burden of maternal jealousy: Who can you confide in? Will they believe you? Daughters need their mothers’ love even when it is withheld from them, and especially when it is withheld from them, and accusing their mothers of envy can make them feel betrayed and small. It’s a terrible dilemma.

Even when a daughter reaches adulthood and is out of her mother’s sphere of influence in many ways, maternal jealousy remains difficult, if not impossible, as the mother is unlikely to acknowledge her feelings. Unfortunately, the green-eyed monster in these exchanges does not just diminish the daughter. It is a poison that is equally toxic to all, and it poisons and distorts the mother as well. But, as always, I hope that by bringing these patterns to light and bringing them out of the closet where dirty secrets are kept, we can begin to have an open and productive discussion about the complexity and depth of the mother-daughter relationship. Perhaps then we can begin to talk about jealousy among all women, but especially mothers and daughters, and begin the journey of mutual healing.