How to Nurture a Strong Mother-daughter Bond According to Science

Mother and daughter relationships are sweet and unbreakable. From nurturing your daughter inside your womb to teaching her the ABC’s, and guiding her first steps all the way to womanhood, you are your daughter’s rock and role model. How can you strengthen your mother daughter bond even more?

According to a study published by the Journal of Neuroscience, “mother-daughter relationships are the strongest of all parent-child bonds when it comes to the common ways their brains process emotion throughout all the changes of life.”

In short, this means both of your brains have natural chemistry which keeps you in-sync. Beautiful, isn’t it?

Here’s how you can continuously nurture your mother daughter bond. 

4 Ways to Forge a Strong Mother Daughter Bond

By nurturing open communication with your child from a young age, you can ensure that by the time she is a teenager, she will not hesitate to talk to you about anything.

1. Be a good listener

Do your best to have open communication channels with your daughter, always. Your little girl is a woman in the making, so naturally, she can be very talkative. Take advantage of that.

Simply ask some questions about how her day went, and then listen as stories bubble out of her. Try not to give immediate advice. Instead, provide her with your undivided attention, and let her spill the beans first.

The goal here is to let your daughter feel that you are there for her and you understand her as a mum and as a woman.

Tip: Make your mother daughter bond strong by having loads of heart-to-heart talks. Just before bed is a really good time for this, so you can finish with a cuddle and kiss. 

2. Be in the same boat

Learn what she loves and be supportive about it. This can happen naturally since “the part of the brain that regulates emotions is more similar between mothers and daughters than any other intergenerational pairing,” according to a 2016 study on 35 families.

Does she like sports? Music? Arts? Nature? Fashion?

Know her passion and explore it together!

Go to concerts, enjoy camping in the woods, learn how to play the piano, or maybe have the same hairstyle. The list of fun and interesting things that you can do together is endless!

3. Be a good teacher

Your daughter will want to build her own identity and voice. She is a different and unique individual, but what you can do is teach her things that add to her character positively.

Show her the value of cultivating traits such as faithfulness, loyalty, respect, integrity and more. She will need those in the real world, a place where you won’t be with her 24/7.

Equip her with these powerful traits as much as you can.

4. Be best friends!

Undeniably, there is a deep unspoken bond between you and your daughter. As much as possible, make your daughter feel comfortable and secure with communicating her emotions to you, and do your utmost to be there when she needs you mentally, physically and emotionally.

Tip: Share secrets with each other and do more fun things together!

Lead author of the study Fumiko Hoeft, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, hopes to further explore the link between mothers and daughters. She thinks it would be useful to investigate mental health conditions in ways that could benefit all members of the family.

In a press release, she said, “Anxiety, autism, addition, schizophrenia, dyslexia, you name it — brain patterns inherited from both mothers and fathers have an impact on just about all of them.”

Further research shows that “mothers and daughters influence each other — for better or worse — in different ways than other relationships.” Be a role model and see your daughter beautifully grow into a well and sound woman.

Try the steps above, mums, and make your mother daughter bond stronger than ever!

Source: Scientific American

Read also: Fathers and Daughters – How to Build this Precious Bond