Too Close for Comfort?: Questioning the Intimacy of Today's New Mother-Daughter Relationship

A fascinating look at how mothers and their adult daughters have formed a greater friendship than generations past?and whether or not their should be boundaries.

No relationship is more complicated than the one between mothers and daughters? especially today, when a cultural shift can cause a longer period of time of overlapping interests before the traditional adult markers of marriage and family. As a result, these young women are developing deeper bonds with their own mothers, a relationship that sometimes mimics friendship. But are these close bonds healthy? Is it time to cut the umbilical cord?

In this eye-opening book, Linda Perlman Gordon and Susan Morris Shaffer explore the modern mother-daughter relationship in all its glorious complexity. Combining a brilliant sociological analysis with fascinating stories of real- life women, Too Close for Comfort? provides a rich, provocative look at the ways mothers and daughters get it right, how they get it wrong?and how they can happily maintain being friends as well as mothers and daughters.

Linda Perlman Gordon and Susan Morris Shaffer are coauthors of Why Boys Don’t Talk; Why Girls Talk; and Mom, Can I Move Back In with You?, and as a result, they have spoken to parent groups and educators nationally.

Susan Morris Shaffer has been an educator and gender equity specialist for more than thirty-five years and is currently the executive director of the Maryland State Parental Information and Resource Center.