Communication Among Grandmothers, Mothers, and Adult Daughters: A Qualitative Study of Maternal Relationships. Michelle A. Miller‐Day

Communication Among Grandmothers, Mothers, and Adult Daughters: A Qualitative Study of Maternal Relationships. Michelle A. Miller-Day. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 2004. 254 pp. ISBN 0-8058-3979-8. $59.95 (cloth). Michelle A. Miller-Day makes a significant contribution to the understanding of women's intergenerational relationships with her book, Communication Among Grandmothers, Mothers, and Adult Daughters. Based on interviews and observational data for six families (18 women) from a White, suburban community in the Midwestern United States, the author examines women's experiences of maternal relationships across the life course and the role of communication in those relationships. Using a dialectical perspective, Miller-Day illuminates both the source and consequences of relational contradictions in maternal relationships. Most of the relationships in Miller-Day's study were relatively stable. Mothers and daughters and grandmothers and granddaughters managed the contradictions of stability and change and constancy and variation across the lifetime on a daily basis. The women balanced a desire for both connection and separation. Half of the dyads perceived this process of differentiation as normal (referred to as connected relationships), while the other half experienced the separation as threatening to the relationship (referred to as enmeshed relationships). Women in the connected relationships emphasized togetherness. Personal distance, generational boundaries, and differentiation were respected and encouraged. In the enmeshed relationships, however, women sought continuous validation from one another and struggled over control of emotional resources as a result of the threat from separation. It is this second group of women that the author focuses on the latter part of her book. Discursive practices differed substantially across the enmeshed and connected dyads. The enmeshed scripts reflected a relational culture that did not tolerate new meanings, autonomy, or challenges to the status of women higher in the family hierarchy. Miller-Day explains this using a midrange, grounded theory called necessary convergence of meaning. She argues that in enmeshed relationships, there is low tolerance for differentiation. Afraid to challenge the dominant partner's meanings or offer her own interpretation, the lower status woman secures relational acceptance and avoids rejection by developing a script that converges with the higher status partner's construction of meaning. Adult daughters and granddaughters in enmeshed relationships would defer to the higher status woman in the family, overaccommodate her interpretation of events, and ultimately converge to her interpretive framework. …