The authors discuss two aspects of an experimental study of mother-daughter relationships in two cities: Los Angeles and Vienna, reported in Wodak & Schulz 1986 (`The language of love and guilt'). In this experiment, 12-year old school children wrote anessay on the subject `my mother and I'. The two aspects of the study discussed in this paper deal with (a) the impact of culture and sex-specific educational styles on the choice of essay type, and (b) the impact of cultural ideologies on motherhood andparent-child relationships, as manifested by the use of cliches and stereotypes.