What <em>Barbie</em> Understands About Mother-Daughter Relationships
When I was a little girl, I played with Barbie for the most basic reason you can imagine: She was so pretty. The cute outfits, the shiny blond hair, and all the fun she would have going around, looking like that. When I went to see the Barbie movie years later, as a grown woman, I had no doubt that the film was going to tackle the obvious issues related to how Barbie is seen: the impact that her sexualized body, created with the male gaze in mind, had on the generations of girls like me that she enthralled. But I was not prepared for how the movie would illuminate a different subject: the tension between mothers and daughters, and their often-frustrated need to see and feel seen by each other.
As a child psychiatrist working in New York City, I deal with mother-daughter issues on a daily basis. I recognized many of my patients in
