“Darling, why do you always wear black?” It sounds innocent enough, but if it comes from your mother it’s almost guaranteed to set your teeth on edge.

Relationships between mothers and daughters have always been a regular source of tension, yet it is often hard for outsiders to comprehend what all the fuss is about. Even women who get on well with their mothers have trouble shaking off antagonistic relexes.

Marianne MacGregor, a lecturer whose mother lives abroad, says: “My mother is quite serious and, even though I’m 45 with three children, she still makes me feel frivolous. Sometimes when we’re together I feel about 14.”

Two new books are attempting to navigate the maternal minefield and make the relationship easier for a new generation of parents.

Raising Girls, by Gisela Preuschoff, a German psychologist, stresses the biological and developmental differences between girls and boys and lays down firm guidelines on how parents should respond to these.

Meanwhile, in You Don’t Really Know Me, Terri Apter, a Cambridge psychologist, focuses on the turbulent teenage years. She concludes that conflict, if it’s understood and handled in the right way, can set the tone for a strong and satisfying relationship between the adult daughter and her mother.

Apter says: “The unhappiness of having a difficult relationship with your mother when you are an independently functioning woman should not be underestimated. Mothers continue to have a powerful effect on us, so that what might be a little thing to them seems a big thing to us. It’s difficult to hear a suggestion from a mother and not hear a criticism.

“Mothers of grown-up women continue to have ideas about how a daughter should behave, who her partner should be, how clean her house should be, what kind of job she should have. And, when she makes her views known, because there is still that motherdaughter relationship, it’s not just a small annoyance, it’s a huge annoyance.”

Apter’s conclusions are based on two studies of a total of 59 mother-and-teenage-daughter pairs and overthrow two notions that have coloured our thinking since the 1950s: that to be mature and well-adjusted, a daughter has to separate from her mother, and that interfering, clingy mothers are to blame for not letting go. She found that it’s not just mothers who want to stay connected; daughters do, too. She sees the rebelliousness of adolescence as a daughter’s way of forcing her mother to recognise that she’s changing, and that she wants the relationship to continue, but on a different footing. Mothers who back off, feeling rejected, are making a mistake.

Anna Buckhurst, a graphic designer with two teenage daughters, alternates between periods of profound disagreement with her mother and comparative harmony. She says: “When we are getting on well it’s a very stimulating and comfortable relationship because we have lots in common, but she can also be poisonous. She writes horrible letters listing all my faults. But she never admits that she’s in the wrong.

“It’s the way she says things rather than what she actually says that is so upsetting. Or it’s what she doesn’t say that lets you know she’s being critical. Last year I was really worried about a presentation at work, so I went through it with her. I’ve always respected her opinion, probably rather too much. But, afterwards, she never asked how it went. I was really hurt.”

And that’s just between two grown-ups: research indicates that more tension arises between a teenage daughter and her mother than between any other parent/child pair.

One study that Apter refers to, published in the journal Child Develoment in 1982, found that, on average, their arguments last for 15 minutes and occur every two and a half days, while rows between mothers and sons last six minutes and occur every four days.