When a Toxic Mother Tries to Co-opt or Alienate Her Daughter's Child

When I was pregnant with my only child, I was back in contact with my mother; at 38, I had cycled in and out of estrangement numerous times, still hoping there might be a resolution.

I did not know then, as I do now, that cycling in and out isn’t unusual, as British researcher Lucy Blake discovered, nor did I have words for what I was doing.

Today, I would say that I was “going back to the well” even though intellectually, I knew the well was dry and that I was still in “the core conflict,” the tug-of-war between the knowledge that you are being hurt by someone who is supposed to love you and your hopefulness that things will change.

But when I found out I was carrying a girl, I sprang into action with utter certainty because I absolutely knew how my mother would try to undermine me to my child, make up stories about how dreadful I was, and try to insinuate herself into my daughter’s life.

How did I know this? It was what she did with everyone who cared about me, loved me, or even showed the slightest interest in me all of my life.

And, just like that, I preemptively cut her out of my and my daughter’s life.

What I didn’t know until I interviewed daughters for my book Daughter Detox is that what I feared would come true actually happens to daughters. And not infrequently.

This is all anecdotal because, to my knowledge, there is no psychological research on this particular kind of effort at maternal alienation.

Smear Campaigns, Revenge, and Control

A daughter’s efforts to set boundaries sometimes can result in her mother’s active pushback, which can include trying to co-opt her children. Janine’s story, which I told in my book Daughter Detox, typifies the situation when the grandmother seeks to exploit tension in the mother-child relationship:

My mother started to manipulate my daughter when she was 14 by buying her things I couldn’t afford, but especially the provocative, sexy clothing I didn’t want her wearing.

Grandma told her I was too strict, unreasonable, and became her cheerleader, all of which contributed to growing tension between me and my child.

She moved out of my house when she was 18 and into my mother’s. Luckily for me, once my daughter moved in, my mother began treating her as she did me. She was back home in three months and then went off to college. Our relationship is still a work in progress, and she has limited contact with her grandmother. I have none.

Grandsons as Well as Granddaughters

Josie's story attests that the child in question need not be a daughter; it can equally be a son. Josie was an only child whose relationship with her mother was always fraught, vacillating between “being the source of her boasting and being her ‘problem’ child.”

Her mother had wanted a son, not a daughter, as Josie was often told, and since the pregnancy had been a difficult one, her mother made it clear to Josie “that her one chance to have a child had been a huge disappointment.”

Josie describes how her mother “crafted a very deliberately unstable life for me;” she sent her to private schools and would become displeased with the school, often moving her midyear. Astonishingly enough, she attended 11 different schools before graduating from high school! These moves were presented as her mother “doing what was best for me.”

Then Josie married and had a son, a boy her mother called “her son.” Her mother lavished gifts and affection on her grandson, ignoring Josie, but Josie turned a blind eye; as she put it, “I was happy for my son. He got all the love and affection from that awful woman I never did.”

Unable to set boundaries and unable to stand up to her mother, life went on until things took a turn when her son was in his 20s and had come home to live; her mother was, at that point, an hour away, and he began to spend more and more time with his grandmother.

Josie noticed the change in him—he was angry with her and accusatory—saying things like “you don’t love me” and “you never wanted me,” but she had no idea where this was coming from. It turned out that his grandmother had not only filled his head with lies about his mother but had offered him money and property if he broke with his mother because “he’d be better off without her.”

Her son stopped speaking to her for six months which she dealt with by texting him three words every day: “I love you.” Ultimately, they reconciled, with her son thanking her for “not giving up on him.” They are once again close.

There are many variations on this theme, but most of the daughters understood the mothers' meddling as an effort to continue to control them, particularly if the daughter has sought to put boundaries or distance in place. Bribes and blandishments offered to the grandchild tend to be part of the script.

Meddling in a Divorce (and Hoping for Parental Alienation)

The scenario that comes up most frequently is that of the unloving mother aligning herself with the about-to-be-ex-spouse in a divorce, most usually in an effort to help the spouse get custody of the child or children. This can be highly motivated, as it was for Samantha’s mother, from whom she’d been estranged for five years before initiating her divorce.

When my mother started treating my daughter the way she had me and made her feel like a second-class citizen compared with her brother—a repeat of what happened in my childhood— I put boundaries in place and, ultimately, ended up estranging.

My mother had no contact with the children at all and she leapt at the opportunity to help my ex in whatever way she could. My parents have money and they bankrolled him and discouraged him from settling or negotiating.

She made things up to ‘show’ that I was ‘unfit’ and that the kids were better off with a verbally abusive father who also cheated on me. It was expensive and stressful but I was lucky in that the kids were fourteen and sixteen by the time we got to court—thanks to my mother’s efforts, it all took forever— and perfectly capable of describing what life at home was like and the whole exercise destroyed whatever respect they had for their father.

But my lawyer and I both wondered what might have happened, how far she would have gotten, if the kids had been little and not capable of refuting the lies. It’s a sobering thought.

While Samantha’s story has a relatively happy ending—the “relatively” referring to her children's broken relationship with their father—that doesn’t always happen. It’s also true that, sometimes, the about-to-be-ex spouse actively recruits the estranged or distanced mother-in-law or father-in-law to gain leverage in the divorce, taking advantage of the tension in the relationship.

All of these are power plays and about abusive mothers regaining or maintaining control over adult children; that is what these stories have in common.

Thanks to my readers on Facebook for answering the call-out and telling their stories.

Copyright © 2022 by Peg Streep

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