ABSTRACT
IN THIS chapter we shall again consider the influence of the mother, this time not directly upon her daughter and son-in-law but upon their relationships with her other children and their other kin. To do this we have to depart from the approach we have adopted so far. Up to now we have been fixing our gaze on the present circumstances of people quite deliberately chosen at roughly the same stage of their lives. They were all married, they were all fairly young, they all had dependent children. This was all very well when we were talking about the couples themselves, even about the couples and their parents. But such a simplified, indeed static, approach will not do any longer.
