I was thinking about Donna Noble today, apropos of nothing, and it occurred to me – right at the end of Journey’s End, this exchange–
DOCTOR:And for one
moment, one shining moment, she was the most important woman in the
whole wide universe.
SYLVIA: She still is. She’s my daughter.
DOCTOR: Then maybe you should tell her that once in a while.
– that’s supposed to be the resolution to one of the biggest things about Donna, how much her unsupportive mother messed up her self-confidence, messed her up. And it’s so little. Sylvia doesn’t say that Donna’s important because she’s clever or brave or fundamentally kind or because she saved the world or because she’s Donna, she’s important because she’s Sylvia’s daughter. What Donna herself is and has done is irrelevant.
(And it’s not even Donna herself who gets to tell her mother to treat her better; it’s the Doctor. She never gets to significantly stand up for herself against the person whom she most needed to.)