This is why, in a good many cases, a perfect mother makes a detestable wife. Unable to dominate her husband she craves children whom she can dominate with a minimum of bodily strength and mental effort, and she devotes all her time and care to them. When the children grow up and develop independent personalities, the neurotic mother often loses her interest in them. How many times have we heard women (and men) remark that children should remain "babies," that young children are far more lovable than adolescents, etc. =Mother and Father Love= differ in several respects. Fathers look upon their children, especially their sons, as a visible proof of their virile power. In their sons they see their own image, the more attractive to them as they are more egotistical. The weak, infirm or unsuccessful son, however, receives little love at the hands of his father. He is not a credit to his progenitor. No mother, on the other hand, seems to neglect a cripple or idiotic child. Be it male or female, it is a human being which she can dominate easily. The more neurotic she is, the more she will idolise the ill-favored child. =Mothers Always Adore Their Sons=, young and old, for they behold in them males whom they can easily dominate. And fathers love their daughters, young or old, for similar reasons. The relations of aging mothers and growing daughters, however, are almost invariably tinged with a certain hostility, overt or concealed, according to the women's habits, training, manners, etc. =Girls at the Flapper Stage= who resent the attraction which their mothers still wield over younger men, constantly remind them of their age and bid them to behave in a way more in keeping with their mature years. The flapper's mother on the other hand, who sees her daughter gradually monopolising the attention of men callers, reminds the girl with monotonous regularity that she is only a child and bids her to behave as befits her tender years. The mother resents her daughter's fresh beauty, the daughter, her mother's experience in dealing with males. Both watch each other closely, protecting each other's modesty and virtue and trying to make each other's life as uninteresting and uneventful as possible. The girl becomes an ethical critic on her mother's smoking or gowns. The mother blossoms into a puritan who allows her daughter no freedom and seems to have entirely forgotten her own girlhood years. The strife lasts until the daughter is old enough to have her own circle of friends and no longer needs a chaperone. After which mother and daughter, if matched intellectually, may once more become friends. =Repressed Hatred.= I have treated a number of neurotic mothers who seemed to be obsessed by their adoration of their children. That exaggerated tenderness was, as I mentioned in another chapter, a cover for death wishes directed toward those children.