Brooke Shields has long had a semi-strained relationship with her infamous stage mom Teri, but the two are still very much in each other’s lives, according to Brooke’s friends. Brooke recently had to move Teri, 75, into an assisted living community because she is suffering from dementia. Teri’s received a lot of criticism over the years for the way she’s handled Brooke’s career, and Brooke fired her as her manager in 1995. Teri’s also had a relationship with the National Enquirer for at least 10 years. As Celebitchy pointed out in that article, there are lots of issues between the two (Teri is an alcoholic; Brooke can come across as overprotective), and it’s hard to tell who’s right and who’s wrong. But regardless of all that, Brooke’s friends say she’s still a devoted daughter and very good to her mother.

As a child star, Brooke Shields was always watched over by Teri Shields, a stage mom known for her tenacity. And now that her mother has been diagnosed with dementia and is living in an assisted living facility, it’s Brooke who watches over Teri, say friends of the star. “Her devotion is very apparent,” says longtime pal Anna Strasberg. “Brooke takes care of Teri. There’s a bond there. It’s not a public thing for show. It’s very deeply personal.”

… Shields has described Teri – who was widely criticized for allowing her then-12-year-old daughter to play a child prostitute and appear nude in the 1978 film Pretty Baby – as an alcoholic. In 1995, Brooke fired her mother as her manager. (Teri divorced Brooke’s father, Frank Shields, when Brooke was an infant.)

But the bond between mother and daughter, at times strained, was never broken. “It was us against everybody,” Brooke recently told More magazine. Shields’s friend Anna Strasberg, who has hosted Brooke and her mother for Thanksgiving and other holidays, notes how Brooke dotes on Teri. “When Brooke has her mother at gatherings, she knows that her friends know the situation and Teri’s not pushed aside – she is part of her life and that is so beautiful to watch,” she says. “It is painful and it’s beautiful.”

“They watch the floats and the [Thanksgiving] parade go by,” adds Strasberg. “Brooke is very tender and keeps watch over her to make sure she is okay, and that someone is talking to her. Teri may not be able to always have lucid moments, and she may not always be able to voice her feelings, but some moments are beautiful.”

Another of Brooke’s friends, Broadway director Kathleen Marshall, says of Teri’s deteriorating health, “[Brooke]’s very direct and honest but doesn’t dwell on it.”

[From People]

Familial relationships can be incredibly difficult and challenging. There are some that are lucky to have supportive, relatively trouble-free family lives. But most of us have some degree of complexity with our families. It’s impossible for someone outside that relationship to understand all that goes into it, good and bad. Brooke doesn’t strike me as the sort to have simply abandoned her mother or treated her badly, as some articles have suggested. She seems to have made a decision to take the best care of her mother as she possibly can, without letting Teri’s issues affect her life any longer. And that’s completely fair.

Her mother lives in New Jersey, and Brooke and her family live in L.A. for the most part, though they spend a good deal of time in New York City. Teri needs to remain in one place, and it sounds like an assisted living facility is the best situation for her. It doesn’t seem like they’re the closest mother and daughter there ever was, but that happens. It doesn’t mean Brooke’s a bad daughter.

Here’s Brooke spending the day with her family in Soho on December 14th. Images thanks to Pacific Coast News.