Andrew Han
The film Lady Bird follows the titular character whose real name is Christine McPherson, but insists on being called “Lady Bird,” as she navigates the trials and tribulations of her senior year of high school in 2002 Sacramento. Between the tensions with her best friend Julie, romantic relationships, and the pressures of high school social hierarchies, Lady Bird is left to balance the typical challenges of adolescence. However, despite these issues appearing throughout the movie, the main relationship that the film explores is that of Lady Bird and her mother, Marion. Although Lady Bird detests her mother’s opinionated and strong-willed personality, the audience comes to find out that Lady Bird embodies more of her mother’s characteristics than she realizes.
During one of many mother-daughter arguments throughout the film, Marion scolds Lady Bird for getting suspended from school, highlighting her daughter’s inability to appreciate the financial sacrifices her parents made to get her into a private high school. This is one of many strained interactions between Lady Bird and Marion that demonstrates the ways in which parent-child conflicts increase when children become adolescents and strive for emotional autonomy, or the ability to have control over one’s life and make decisions (Silverberg & Steinberg, 1987; Steinberg, 2001). However, as Lady Bird concludes, the audience and Lady Bird realize that familial discord, although aggravating, is often a result of love. The film reminds the audience of the conflicting and powerful feelings that families invoke; while many adolescents are desperate to leave home, they are often not developmentally ready to fully let go. In order to better understand the depiction of familial relationships in Lady Bird, this paper explores the attachment behaviors that shape who children become, while also examining how ecological factors (such as socioeconomic status, or SES) can impact them.
Attachment Theories and Lady Bird and Marion’s Relationship
Often, adolescents’ physical and mental health can partly be explained by their parents, who act as role models for socialization (i.e., the process of learning how to behave in an appropriate manner), help to mitigate their risky behaviors, and are the primary supporters of their financial resources (Repetti, Robles, & Reynolds, 2011; Repetti, Taylor, & Seeman, 2002). In the case of Lady Bird, many have argued that Marion acts as a negative role model for Lady Bird’s socialization, as there are multiple examples of her seeming unengaged with and unresponsive to Lady Bird’s needs (Liza, 2018). Although Marion’s comments can come off as harsh and often unprovoked, viewing their relationship through the lens of attachment theory clarifies that the true reason for her behavior is Marion’s fear of Lady Bird’s impending independence.
John Bolby’s attachment theory (1969, 1980) posits that children’s social and personal development are often a result of how readily they have their needs met by their caregivers. Thus, attachment theory explains not only how child-caregiver relationships are formed, but also how early childhood attachment can provide the underlying basis for future relationship styles and communication patterns (Allen, Hauser, & Borman-Spurrell, 1996). In Lady Bird’s case, her often inconsistent social behaviors are influenced by her upbringing, in that Lady Bird’s needs weren’t always sensitively or consistently met, potentially impacting the way she expects others to love and care for her as a result. An example of this is evident in Lady Bird’s attachment style, which can be identified as insecure-ambivalent. In a well-known test of attachment known as the Strange Situation, Mary Ainsworth (1978) found that securely-attached infants use their responsive and sensitive caregivers as safe bases to explore the world from, thus creating the foundation of a child’s ability to maintain adult relationships. However, insecure-ambivalent infants tend to be clingy when exploring with their caregivers, extremely upset by the caregiver’s departure, and ambivalent upon their return (Ainsworth, 1978). Even though attachment theory was originally postulated for infants, it has been thoroughly explored in adolescence as insecure-ambivalent attachment in adolescence has implications for subsequent psychosocial development, where formation of peer relationships is considered a crucial to development (Allen, Moore, Kuperminc, & Bell, 2008). Mothers of insecure-ambivalent children are often described as inconsistently responsive, which parallels Marion’s responsiveness to her daughter’s needs through her vacillation between attentiveness to Lady Bird to then becoming completely emotionally unavailable. For example, Marion supports a tearful Lady Bird when she loses her virginity to a boy she liked who lied about the status of his sexual history, but when Lady Bird struggles to fit in her prom dress, Marion crudely responds, “Well, I suggested you not have that second helping of pasta” (Rudin, Bush, & O’Neill, 2017). Marion’s inconsistent support for her daughter may result in Lady Bird lacking the security to appropriately understand and handle relationships with others. For example, Lady Bird begins to hang out with a popular girl at her school and date a bad boy, ultimately ignoring her best friend, Julie, even though she is the only one who gives Lady Bird the social and emotional support she needs. Thus, one can see how Lady Bird’s relationship with her mother influences her inability to form appropriate relationships throughout the film (Davies, Woitach, Winter, & Cummings, 2009; Eisenberg & Eggum, 2009).
Those with insecure-ambivalent attachment styles also report more self-doubt, feelings of being underappreciated, and feeling as though others are less willing to commit to them, all of which can be seen in Lady Bird’s character (Hazan & Shaver, 1987). Lady Bird often doubts herself and feels misunderstood, as she romanticizes a future where she can live on the East Coast and escape Sacramento, where she has poor grades and few friends. She also finds herself more willing to commit to relationships than her exes are, such as Danny, who was caught kissing another boy, and Kyle, whose overly lax demeanor clashes with Lady Bird’s impassioned personality. Insecure-ambivalent attachment in infants can be reflected during adolescence as the inability to get one’s needs met by others sets negative expectations of oneself, possibly leading to less self-worth that is closely linked with depression and other internalizing problems (Allen et al., 2008). Those with insecure-ambivalent attachments report more self-conscious anxiety and low social self-esteem, which is apparent in Lady Bird’s fears of being perceived as poor and living on the “wrong side of the tracks” (Hazan & Shaver, 1987; Feeney & Noller, 1990; Rudin et al., 2017). Furthermore, having an insecure-ambivalent attachment style in adolescence is a considerable predictor of depression and behavior problems, which are evident in Lady Bird’s disruptive behaviors (e.g., when she vandalizes a school nun’s car and gets suspended from school; Kobak, Sudler & Gamble, 1991). Thus, Lady Bird ends up depicting much of Bowlby’s (1969, 1980) attachment theory, which can contextualize the central characters’ temperamental mother-daughter relationship for the audience, as well as explain how many of Lady Bird’s behaviors and insecurities are rooted in her mother’s inconsistent support for her throughout the film.
Impact of SES on Family Relationships
Although Marion’s parenting style can explain part of Lady Bird’s behaviors throughout the film, additional ecological factors also influence the dynamic between Lady Bird and her mother. Longitudinal studies have identified several factors that impact styles of attachment, the most central of which includes SES (Lyons-Ruth, 1996). Even though Marion may be harsh on Lady Bird, the film’s protagonist tends to be naive when it comes to understanding the financial and mental burdens that her family is undergoing as a result of financing her private school education. For example, when Lady Bird discovers that her father has been struggling with depression for years without her knowing, it is apparent to the audience that Lady Bird was so invested in her own issues that she inadvertently ignored the needs of those around her.
Research has also found that the amount of time a parent spends working results in less time with their children, less academic support, and less time for relationship development (Vernon-Feagans, Willoughby, & Garrett-Peters, 2016)). Additionally, parents with inconsistent working hours and financial restraints often have less time to spend with their children (Vernon-Feagans et al., 2016). While many parents are forced to work long hours, being working-class and often having inconsistent hours (as Marion does through her job as a nurse) hinders the mother-daughter dynamic in Lady Bird as well. Since Marion has to work overtime to provide for her family, she cannot always be there for her daughter’s biggest moments, such as Lady Bird’s school dance. Unlike her peers, Lady Bird does not have her own car or cell phone, and as an adolescent whose identity is based largely on social comparison (Ryan, 2001), she resents her socioeconomic status greatly. This leads Lady Bird to lie about her residential status when she tells the popular girl at her school that she lives in a big blue house in the more affluent part of the community.
Furthermore, research shows that, due to the stress levels that lower-SES families experience, some parents from low-SES households are more likely to utilize direct control parenting practices to ensure order and obedience (e.g., setting a strict rules; Borstein, 2002; Steinberg, 2001). In the film, Marion places high and often unrealistic demands on Lady Bird, and is inconsistently responsive to her emotional needs, such as when Marion turns off the radio when Lady Bird wants to listen to music. It is behaviors like these that may lead some audiences to view Marion as overly-critical and unengaged, but it is important to highlight that Lady Bird’s father was recently laid off, forcing Marion to become the primary breadwinner of the household. It has also been found that financial distress presents more stressors for low-SES caregivers than high-SES caregivers, and low-SES caregivers are less likely to employ inductive discipline strategies, such as providing explanations for inappropriate behaviors, and thus resort to more punitive parenting practices (McLoyd, 1990).
While Marion attempts to practice “tough love” with Lady Bird to impress on Lady Bird the financial investment of her education, Lady Bird believes that her mother is continuously attacking her. The stakes of their relationship are inevitably high, as those in lower-SES households are often subjected to circumstances that more privileged families do not have to consider. Marion is all too aware that her family is not rich, given that she tells Lady Bird that she needs to hang her clothes and avoid wrinkles so the kids at school do not think she’s poor. While this is perceived by Lady Bird as a moment where her mother fails to ask her about her personal life, it showcases Marion’s awareness of her family’s financial circumstance and her attempts to guard Lady Bird from ridicule and embarrassment. This also demonstrates how low-SES caregivers are more concerned with their child’s ability to conform to societal expectations of socioeconomic status, likely because they are aware of the social stigma it carries (Bornstein, 2002). However, it is important to note that although many low-SES caregivers face these obstacles, not all do and parenting practices in households, regardless of SES, have many individual differences. Taken together, these ecological factors provide contextualization for Marion’s stringent parenting, as she is presented with financial stressors that strain her relationship with Lady Bird in a way that higher-SES parents do not endure.
Conclusion
Lady Bird was lauded because of the complexity with which it explored the relationship between a mother and her daughter. With deeper analysis, it becomes clear that this film analyzes how several factors, both within and outside of the family, can complicate how love is expressed. After all, the nuances of familial relationships cannot be reduced to clear cut categories, and reducing Marion to labels such as “harsh” or “cold” minimizes the ways in which she, like Lady Bird, is growing as a person and experiencing financial and emotional hardship. If anything, this film highlights how parental love can be expressed in unconventional and implicit ways, especially in families experiencing external ecological pressures. For example, after a period in which Marion refuses to speak to Lady Bird before she leaves for college, Lady Bird’s father reveals to her that Marion has written letter after letter to her, which he then collects and places in her suitcase. While Marion was unable to physically express her feelings to her daughter, it is clear that her affection is present.
In one of the early scenes of the film, when reading Lady Bird’s college application essay, her principal notes how her love for Sacramento and her family is clear in her writing even though she spends most of the film complaining about it. Her principal even tells her, “Don’t you think maybe that they’re the same thing? Love and attention?” opening audiences to the thesis statement of the film: attention is a form of love (Rudin et al). After all, Marion, despite being what many would call inconsistent and harsh, does constantly pay attention, even if it might be perceived as unkind or overbearing. At the end of the film, Lady Bird tearfully calls her mother at school in New York, after leaving home as she wanted to do for so much of the film. She warmly says, “Hey, Mom, did you feel emotional the first time that you drove in Sacramento? I did and I wanted to tell you, but we weren’t really talking… All those bends I’ve known my whole life, and stores, and the whole thing… But I wanted to tell you that I love you. Thank you, I’m… thank you” (Rudin et al). Although the film documents an adolescent girl growing up in Sacramento during the early 2000s, it is truly a coming-of-age story for both daughters and mothers as they learn to communicate and understand each other to the best of their capabilities – even when life gives them reasons not to.
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