A lot of women who are active on FDS have toxic mothers (myself included).

This isn't a post for bashing all moms. Mothers are already disproportionately blamed for all the problems in society.

That being said, we cannot ignore the importance of a mother's role in socializing their children to perpetuate patriarchal norms.

For example, a lot of mothers treat their sons like princes, while treating their daughters like servants.

There are plenty of women who become full-on MRAs once they give birth to a son. They wait on their sons hand and foot, teaching them to be simultaneously dependent on and entitled to female servitude. The sons grow up to expect unconditional love and attention from women even (and especially) if he has done nothing to earn it. Whenever he does something wrong, his mommy swoops in to shield him from suffering the consequences of his own actions. A lot of mother-son relationships are emotionally incestuous, and when these sons get married she becomes the "mother in law from hell" and treats her daughter-in-law like garbage because she sees her as "competition" for the son's affection.

Meanwhile, patriarchal norms put an immense strain on mother-daughter relationships. Mothers teach their daughters to be submissive, to have low standards/expectations for men, to neglect their own wants and needs as women, to be quiet and not speak up against misogyny, to be people-pleasing, to pander to men, to value male attention, to value getting "picked", to serve men to "earn" his "love", to be insecure about her appearance, etc. A lot of mothers try to control their daughters appearance, either by making her "ugly" so that mom looks good in comparison, or by instilling patriarchal beauty ideals which cause daughters to grow up insecure and obsessed with their weight and appearance.

When mothers teach their daughters to be submissive to men, and those daughters grow up and decide they want to think for themselves, it causes a huge strain in the mother-daughter relationship. Often the mother will get angry at the daughter for not following the script, or for "embarrassing" the mom for refusing to conform to patriarchal expectations of femininity. Some mothers might feel like her daughter's independence is a personal attack on her own life choices. She might feel like "I had to suffer therefore you should too", for example the mother-in-law who treats her daughter-in-law like a scullery maid because they were treated like that when they got married, so they think "I've waited my whole life to be able to treat someone else as badly as I was treated"

Pickme moms will always choose her "man" (husband, son, or new boyfriend) over the daughter even if that man molests or abuses the daughter. For example, I have a cousin who was repeatedly molested by my aunt's second husband, and when CPS got involved my aunt chose to let all 5 of her kids go to foster care because she refused to kick out her child molester husband. She started spreading rumors around the town that my cousin was a "slut" who tried to seduce her husband (even though she was like, 12) because she'd rather throw her daughter under the bus than admit she married a sexual predator. There are a lot of stories like this in my family. My grandfather and great-grandfather were abusive alcoholics who mentally fucked up everyone in my family for generations including the women.

Women who are narcissistic/cluster B seem especially drawn to motherhood because they see their children as a captive audience to provide them with endless narcissistic supply. (Note: I am NOT saying there is anything inherently narcissistic or wrong about wanting to be a mother, just that women who also happen to be narcissists are especially drawn to motherhood).

In a world where powerful women are demonized, becoming a mother (or mother in law) is the one socially acceptable way for women to wield power over others. This has so much potential to do harm because there is no other power dynamic that is more asymmetrical than a mother and a young child, because young children are completely reliant on their mothers for survival. Narcissistic mothers are especially hazardous to children in a patriarchal world where most/all off the childrearing falls on the mother (as opposed to a more equal society where parenting is shared, and a non-narcissist father might step up as a parent).

The difference in how mothers treat their sons vs. their daughters shows that patriarchy affects every aspect of human relationships, including parental ones. We like to think of misogyny as something that is only perpetrated by men, but the reality is that women with internalized misogyny can be just as harmful to women, especially to the children in her care.

Edit: Just want to drive home the point of how this relates to FDS. We encourage all women to level up and seek out HVM. This is especially important for women who want kids, so that they will have the best possible parents. We say all the time on FDS that you shouldn't reproduce with LVM: Equally important is the decision not to reproduce at all if it's for the wrong reasons or if you're low value yourself. Go to therapy, unpack your trauma, untangle the knots of patriarchal conditioning before having kids so that you don't inadvertently mistreat your daughters and edify your sons. Make sure you're having kids for the right reasons, not just to fill some other need within yourself.