MUM OR DAUGHTER - Can you tell them apart?

Remember when mums were deemed frumpy? Not any more - now they seem forever youthful. Helena Frith Powell explains

- HELENA FRITH POWELL, SADIE NICHOLAS

Four years ago, I posted a picture of my daughter Bea on Facebook, doing yoga on a beach. The comments flowed in telling me how marvellous I looked.

‘You don’t look a day over 18,’ said one kind friend, who’d mistaken her for me – which was ironic, as Bea was only 17 at the time. I was 52.

I was half-tempted to let them think I had, in fact, got younger-looking since most of them last saw me at university in 1989. But my embarrassment that anyone would think I was vain enough to post a picture of myself in a bathing costume was enough to make me confess.

It did get me thinking, though, about the similarities nowadays between mothers and daughters, how different it was in my day and how we really are living through an era of age-defying mums.

When I was growing up, our mothers were a different country. We would no sooner borrow their clothes or copy their haircut than we would our grandmothers’. We moved along parallel lines, always a respectful and large generational gap away.

Now I can’t buy a pair of jeans without having them seconded by one or both daughters, aged 21 and 22 respectively. All three of us have long, straight hair, and people often comment that we could be sisters. We walk at the same pace; we talk at the same pace, and we all listen to Justin Bieber (I know, I know).

A couple of months ago, I visited an old school friend of my husband’s with my 22-year-old daughter. He kept looking from one of us to the other in disbelief. ‘It’s like I’m seeing double,’ he said.