Does Supermom Inspire Greatness or Anxiety Attacks?

A successful working woman in Los Angeles, hoping to serve as a role model, took her 6-year-old daughter to an awards ceremony where she was being honored. Afterward, she was surprised that the daughter looked downcast.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

To the mother’s dismay, the girl replied, “I’m never going to be as famous as you.”

For years, working mothers have tried to counter the culture’s limiting messages about women’s roles. We read our daughters books about Harriet Tubman. We buy only Barbies who have careers. We drag young girls to Take Our Daughters to Work Day.

But, experts say, some strategies can backfire when the role model is Mom.

“When a daughter sees Mom as that wonderful woman, it doesn’t just convey, ‘Look what’s possible. Look, you can do whatever you want.’ There’s also an unspoken expectation,” said Barbara Mackoff, a Seattle psychologist and mother. “A daughter wonders, ‘Does Mom expect that for me? Is this where the bar is now?’ ”

Some grown daughters of women executives perceive the bar as impossibly high, said Mackoff, author of “Growing a Girl: 7 Strategies for Raising a Strong and Spirited Daughter” (Dell Books, 1996). “Their daughters in their 20s are saying they absolutely do not want to work as hard and as long as their mothers did. They have no intention of making those choices.”

Citing piles of academic studies, Mackoff concludes that no one knows exactly how, or even whether, role models actually work. Some studies show that children of working mothers are more independent and academically successful while others suggest that such kids are more anxious and depressed.

Even so, experience has shown her that role models suggest possibilities and motivate girls--if they do more than simply exemplify accomplishment in the workplace.

“All moms have to model their choices as a woman in terms of their qualities and their values,” she said. “How does she express her caring? How does she express her independent thoughts and feelings? How does she accept her own foibles and flaws? How does she embrace her own beauty as opposed to standing up to some ideal?”

More important, working mothers, while justifiably proud of their own accomplishments, need to focus on the girls, not themselves.

To daughters who wonder if they’ll ever measure up, they can say, “I’m excited about what I’ve learned about myself and my strengths, but let’s find work that you’re going to love. I want to take this journey with you and find out what you love,” Mackoff said. “It removes the expectation, ‘You’re going to be like me.’ ”

For her own daughter she looks for role models in books and movies as well as everyday life and points out the qualities of potential heroines--noting what is brave, inventive, tender or wise about them.

She also includes brave and tender men in hopes of avoiding an all-girl “ghetto,” she said.

The Los Angeles mom of the 6-year-old invited her daughter a year later to hear her give an important speech at an all-girls’ school. “I thought it was important for her to be exposed to this school and see that everybody achieving there was a woman and to hear her mother be honored.

“She never seemed enthused about going. She wanted to go to some event with her Brownie troop.”

This time, Mom relented, but her ego was bruised.

She learned later, though, that she had actually succeeded--without even trying. A niece who had been quietly observing her confided that the woman had been a major role model for her all her life. “I never even knew it,” she said.

* Lynn Smith’s column appears on Sundays. Readers may write to her at the Los Angeles Times, Life & Style, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053 or via e-mail at lynn.smith@latimes.com. Please include a telephone number.