Power Moms by Joann S. Lublin

Author:Joann S. Lublin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Business
Published: 2021-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

Moms’ Rocky Ties with Rebellious Teens

Strains almost always arise to a greater degree between mothers and their adolescent girls than between mothers and their teenage sons. A daughter senses “an urge to exaggerate her differences from her mother,” the Apter book states. “. . . Sometimes she fights her mother to clarify her difference to herself, and sometimes her mother experiences this as rejection.”5

Such tensions may worsen when Mom is a powerful business leader who casts a long shadow over her daughter. That was true for Alison Harvey during her adolescence. Her mother, Cathie Black, was then the president of Hearst Magazines, a major publisher of popular publications such as Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, and Esquire.

Black came to Hearst after stints as the publisher of New York magazine and the president and publisher of USA Today. She helped grow USA Today into the nation’s largest-circulation daily paper. Black and her husband had adopted their newborn daughter in 1991.

Harvey loved writing short stories and poetry during girlhood. But at times, having a big-business boss for a mother intimidated her. “She always was in the spotlight,” Black’s daughter told me. “I wanted a spotlight of my own.”

Further complicating matters, Harvey said, she had suffered from anxiety and a panic disorder during high school. Nor could she easily embrace her mother’s philosophy that you should “stop worrying about what other people are thinking and go do what you want.”

When Harvey was fifteen years old, Black arranged a monthlong internship at Seventeen magazine and helped her assemble a professional look for her first day of work. “As we were completing my outfit, I spotted a pair of black flats with rhinestones . . . in her closet,” Harvey remembered. “My mom watched me squish my feet into them. [She] gently warned that they looked small and I would end up miserable if I wore them all day.”

Harvey insisted that her mother’s flats fit just fine. “I already knew what would and wouldn’t work in life.” She spent numerous hours that day taking pictures at five different Manhattan locations for potential Seventeen photo shoots. She returned home with blistered and bloody, swollen feet.

“You poor baby!” Black exclaimed upon seeing her injured daughter, flats in hand. Rushing over to comfort her, the Hearst executive kept mum about her warning that morning. The too-tight shoes fiasco demonstrated that “she was still there to help me when I chose to not take her advice,” Harvey commented.

The adolescent intern worked forty floors below her mom’s skyscraper office alongside fellow interns in their twenties. Her supervisor gave her excessively easy assignments, reflecting “an overactive awareness of who my mother was,” Harvey noted. Nor did she like writing quizzes about celebrities for Seventeen.

With Black in charge of Hearst Magazines, “I wasn’t able to fully experience what it was really like to work there,” Harvey went on. “I took a step back and decided I didn’t want to be in publishing.” Black insists that she never pressured her daughter to become a high-powered publishing executive like her.

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