Mother-daughter physicians: A qualitative study of maternal influence on daughters' family, career, and leisure choices

Research indicates that there is a significant amount of potential for mothers to be influential in their daughters' family, career, and leisure choices. Focusing on these three domains, this study examined physician mothers' perceptions of their influence on their physician daughters and the daughters' perceptions of their mothers' influence, and compared both experiences during medical training and into their careers. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews from seventeen pairs of mothers and daughters, who were living independently without elderly care assistance/obligations. The findings revealed that mothers perceived their influence in terms of their roles as mentors, role models, referential guides, and supporters of daughters, and daughters perceived their mothers' influence as coming from observing their mothers and their own interpretations of those observations. Daughters tended to reproduce their mothers' family, career, and leisure behaviors and patterns, holding onto traditional family attitudes and roles and nontraditional work attitudes and roles. There were variations in their values and behaviors, including an understanding of the meaning of balance among the three domains, based on their active evaluation of messages from their mothers and their changing social context. The findings also included how the shared and diverging experiences of the pairs were affected by sociocultural changes in American society ongoing from one generation to the next. The social changes in medicine were noted: Gender discrimination and sexual harassment occurred far less in severity and frequency in the daughters' generation than the mothers' generation, while insurance companies continue to pose a challenge for both. This study suggests quantifying gender discrimination and sexual harassment by comparing women who attended medical school in the 50s and 60s as opposed to the 80s and 90s. It further suggests examining mother-daughter pairs in other professions/capacities, the value of leisure in adulthood, the influence of others in the lives of daughters, daughters' influence on mothers, cross-cultural issues in the mother-adult daughters' relationships, and the impact of societal changes on the practice of medicine.