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 Sasha, the movie’s tween-girl character, who is given the honor of enumerating Barbie’s flaws. Addressing Margot Robbie’s Barbie, she says, “You set the feminist movement back 50 years. You destroyed girls’ innate sense of self-worth.” For someone who sees Barbie’s defects with such stark clarity, Sasha grows surprisingly emotional as she delivers this righteous takedown.  Sure, she’s a tween rejecting her childlike self and her toys. Sure, she’s showing off for her friends. But this rant is so intense because the anger is real—because, as we learn, it’s personal: It’s about her mother.

[Read: The surprising key to understanding the Barbie film]

Sasha’s mother, Gloria, says later in the movie’s central—if somewhat predictable—monologue that “it is literally impossible to be a woman.” But like so many modern mothers, Gloria has done an impressive job of mastering the paradoxes she bemoans. She is kind, pretty, but still part of the “sisterhood.” She works hard while her husband sits at home on Duolingo, and yet she gracefully absorbs all the flack from her daughter. Having a “perfect mom”—a mom who aspired to Bardiedom herself—is the fuel for Sasha’s rage at Barbie.  

Girls develop self-esteem by identifying with the grown-ups in their lives, most centrally, for many of them, with their mother. They need to idealize their mom as a role model, but they also need to relate to her, to recognize themselves in her. When a mom is too perfect, her daughter can feel alone—or, worse, defective. It’s not unusual for a girl with these feelings to lean into the identity, as Sasha does, of “weird and dark and crazy,” which is how many of my patients get to my office.

First I’ll meet a beautiful, successful mom of a teenage girl, who comes in to provide history for me about her daughter. The mom will seem to have it all together, mystified about why her daughter struggles and, in particular, why she seems so angry at her. And there’s often some concern about how the daughter presents herself to the world. “Why does she need to show that much of her stomach in that skimpy crop top?” Or, conversely: “How come she doesn’t care about looking pretty?”

Then I’ll meet the daughter. I’ve seen teenage girls who hide cookies in their room so that their skinny mom won’t judge them. I know young women who are grateful to TikTok for exposing the “Almond Mom,” who tells you if you’re hungry to just eat a couple of almonds. I’ve heard: “Even if she doesn’t say anything, I know she’s judging me.” I’ve seen moms who are overtly critical of their daughter’s eating habits, bodies, and physical appearances. I’ve also seen those who never say anything, but still their daughters feel judged. Whether the daughters are projecting or picking up on something real—spoken or unspoken, from the mom or from our culture—I’ve found that it’s hard for girls to escape adolescence without feeling like their mother is judging them in some way.

My mother always tells the same story about her mother, who prized beauty in all of its forms, whether an antique dresser or a garden tomato: “She’d tell me, ‘Take off your glasses! Put on your lipstick!’” My mother hated it. She rebelled by “forgetting” to wear makeup, but her (effortless, infuriating) beauty was proof that she still got the message. When I was growing up, she may never have told me to wear mascara, but she never failed to remind me to not eat bread. Regardless of whether I rebelled—whether I ordered pizza or made myself a “girl dinner”—I, too, got the message. And so it is for many of us who harbor an inner teenager: A simple “You look great” from your mom implies the insult that there was perhaps another time when you didn’t.

One young woman recently cried in my office, describing how her mother has grown less supportive and more resentful the more successful my patient becomes. It’s difficult for her to take any pleasure in her own success, having been cast out of the incubator of mother’s encouragement. Envy between mothers and daughters can permeate even the most loving relationships, and it cuts in both directions. Some psychoanalysts believe that the envy daughters feel for their “perfect” moms begins in infancy, when the baby perceives the mother as having everything the baby needs, having all the answers—being one of the “haves” when the baby, unable to solve its own problems, is a “have-not.”

Mothers, for their part, can feel obligated to sacrifice their own identity and desires as they care for their daughters, and often feel like they deteriorate as their daughters blossom. As Barbie’s Gloria, who loves her daughter and loves being a mom, says: “I never have any fun!” Maternal envy is ordinary, but when it goes unchecked, a mother’s attention can feel less like a warm glow and more like a harsh spotlight.

The tragedy I often witness is that mothers and daughters want to love each other and to get along, to be recognized from a place of deep concern but no judgment. In my office, a mother will often say that she is just trying to be helpful; her critiques arise from an abundance of care. A daughter will respond that she does not need this kind of help; she wants love that does not hurt so much. Their hearts are in the right place, but the right place seems eternally uninhabitable.

What these girls want is what Barbie has with her mother figure in the movie. We ultimately meet her creator, Ruth Handler—sitting in a peachy haze in a quaint kitchen, a vision of domestic comfort. And we get to see what happens to Barbie—healing, glowing restoration—in Ruth’s gaze:

“I don’t usually look like this. I normally look perfect,” Barbie says.

“I think you’re just right,” Ruth says sweetly and wisely, love shining forth from her eyes.

Ultimately, Barbie needs her mother’s approval, just like the teenage girls in my office do. It is Ruth’s tender regard for Barbie that helps her find the courage to separate from her past and become her own person—to reject remaining an object in favor of becoming a subject.

But Barbie is not an actual daughter, and Ruth is not actually her mother.  Ruth is a fantasy mother who sits in her kitchen, frozen in time, with a perpetually hot cup of tea and no needs of her own.  She never had to nag Barbie to take a shower or eat a healthy snack, and she certainly does not have to pull this off while responding to work emails and trying to make dinner. In fact, Ruth voices one of the movie’s most troubling messages: “Mothers stand still so our daughters can look back to see how far they have come.” (Seriously, Ruth?) Likewise, Barbie did not grow up with Ruth, did not spend her life being cared for and scrutinized by her. The Ruth in this movie has little to do but accept and adore Barbie, and Barbie has no reason to search for the hidden judgment in Ruth’s loving eyes—she is more fairy godmother than actual mother. In a sense, Ruth is the Barbie of mothers: equally unreal.

[Meghan O’Rourke: American girlhood culture is really strange]

Thankfully, the movie offers another, more accessible way for mothers and daughters to see each other clearly. When not striving to “have it all,” Gloria (the only real mother in the film) makes drawings of curious Barbies—“Irrepressible Thoughts of Death Barbie” and “Cellulite Barbie” and “Crippling Shame Barbie.” At first, Gloria seems embarrassed by these artistic efforts, but they ultimately break the tension with her daughter: “They’re weird and dark and crazy—everything you pretend not to be,” Sasha says. The drawings play a magical role in the plot, disrupting Barbie’s perfect Barbieland life and setting her on her quest. And it is in this quiet moment of honesty that Sasha finally sees her mother as a person she can relate to.

Mother-daughter relationships are inevitably tainted by family history, cultural history, and a prism of mothers’ and daughters’ projected insecurities. We can’t all be Ruth. And a real teenage girl who feels dark and weird inside wants a dark and weird role model, not a Ruth. What matters, above all, is the endless desire for connection. Although it’s impossible to get the balance right at all times, fortunately, Barbie realizes at the end of the movie that she must reject what is impossible in favor of what is real.