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It's official: Mothers-in-law cause stress and unhappiness
Interfering mother-in-laws are the age-old joke, but a new study has found that two thirds of women feel their husband's mother has caused them long-term unhappiness and stress.
60% of daughters-in-law accused their hubby's mum of 'unreasonably jealous maternal love.'
Dr Terri Apter, a psychologist at Newnham College, Cambridge, has spent 20 years researching ongoing feuds between female in-laws for her new book What Do You Want From Me?
She quotes an example of a 26-year-old from North London who began receiving peculiar messages from her mother-in-law two months before her wedding.
One message bizarrely said: 'What you don't realise is that my son thinks about me every day, every minute of every day.'
According to the study, a similar amount of mothers-in-law also feel they have been excluded and isolated by their sons' partner.
One 64-year-old mother-in-law, Annie, said: 'She begrudges me any time or attention my son gives to me and takes every opportunity to minimise the importance and depth of the bond he and I have.'
Dr Apter believes the reason for hostility between females is simply an ongoing power struggle.
'As they struggle to achieve the same position in the family as a primary woman,' she says, 'each tries to establish or protect their status, each feels threatened by the other.'
She adds, 'Mother-in-law and daughter-in-law conflict often emerges from an expectation that each is criticising or undermining the other.'
'But this mutual unease may have less to do with actual attitudes and far more to do with persistent female norms that few of us manage to shake off completely.'
Despite it usually being the men who crack mother-in-law jokes, only 15% of them had any cause for complaint, according to the research.
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Tuesday 2 December 2008
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