working Mothers
وعليكم السلام ورحمة الله وبركاته
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Differences Between Children of Employed and Nonemployed Mothers
Many of the studies that have compared the children of employed and nonemployed mothers on child outcome measures such as indices of cognitive and
socioemotional development have failed to find significant differences. The research that has shown reasonably consistent differences has examined the relationships within subgroups based on social class and gender. Patterns that have been revealed over the years include the following:
Daughters of employed mothers have been found to have higher academic achievement, greater career success, more nontraditional career choices, and greater occupational commitment.
Studies of children in poverty, in both two-parent and single-mother families, found higher cognitive scores for children with employed mothers as well as higher scores on socioemotional indices.
A few earlier studies found that sons of employed mothers in the middle class showed lower school performance and lower I.Q. scores during the grade school years than full-time homemakers. About ten years ago, there were three separate studies that looked at that relationship; two of them found no difference, but the third also found lower scores for sons of employed mothers in the middle-class.
We found no indication of this in the Michigan study. In fact, we found the opposite. In our study, the children of employed mothers obtained higher scores on the three achievement tests, for language, reading, and math, across gender, socioeconomic status, and marital status, middle-class boys included. It was our most robust findings for the child outcome differences. And yes, we controlled on the mother's education.
Previous research has also found some social adjustment differences between children with employed and nonemployed mothers, but with less consistency. Daughters of employed mothers have been found to be more independent, particularly in interaction with their peers in a school setting, and to score higher on socioemotional adjustment measures. Results for sons have been quite mixed and vary with social class and with how old the children were when they were tested. One finding from the 1970's was that in the blue-collar class, sons of employed mothers did well academically but there was a strain in the father-son relationship. This was interpreted as reflecting the more traditional gender-role attitudes in the blue collar class. The mother's employment was seen as a sign that the father was an inadequate bread-winner, and if the fathers helped out with housework and child care, they resented it. We did not find this at all and it may reflect the change over the years in gender-role attitudes in the working-class -- the less stereotype views becoming more pervasive across class.
The other social adjustment findings from the recent Michigan study were generally consistent with previous results but extended them. Daughters with employed mothers, across the different groups, showed more positive assertiveness as rated by the teacher (that is, they participated in class discussions, they asked questions when instructions were unclear, they were comfortable in leadership positions), and they showed less acting-out behavior. They were less shy, more independent and had a higher sense of efficacy. Working-class boys also showed more positive social adjustment when their mothers were employed, and this was true for both one-parent and two-parent families. For the middle-class boys, although their academic scores were higher, there was little evidence of social adjustment benefits from their mothers' employment. In fact, there was some evidence that those with employed mothers showed more acting-out behavior than the sons of full-time homemakers.
There is one more result from previous research which was also found in our study: Sons and daughters of employed mothers have less traditional gender-role attitudes. However, in our research, we used two different measures of gender-role attitudes: one tapped the child's views about whether or not men could do things that were traditionally considered part of women's domain (e.g, take care of children, use a sewing machine, teach school); the other tapped the child's view about whether or not women were capable of doing activities that were traditionally considered part of the male domain (e.g., fix a car, climb a mountain, fly a plane). [The measure consisted of a long list of activities and occupations some of which were male-typed, some female typed, and some neutral. For each, they were asked "Who can--?" They had to choose as their answer women, men, or both. We then constructed two scales, one tapping whether they thought only men could do the male-typed things and the other measuring whether they thought only women could do the female-typed things.]
Girls with employed mothers were more likely than girls whose mothers were full-time homemakers to indicate that women as well as men could do the activities that are usually associated with men; that is, employed mothers' daughters saw women as more competent in the traditionally male domain than the homemakers' daughters did. This result held for girls in two-parent homes and girls in one-parent homes. For boys, however, employment status was not related to the measure of women's competence to do male activities. On the other hand, in two-parent families, both sons and daughters of employed mothers felt that men could do the female activities, while those with full-time homemakers did not, but this was true only in two-parent families. Subsequent analysis showed that the reason it was only found in two parent families is that, it was carried by the fact that, in the two parent families, fathers' with employed wives were more active in traditionally female tasks and in child care. Thus, maternal employment was linked to the less stereotyped view of what men can do because of the effect of maternal employment on the father's role and, in the absence of a father, the effect did not occur
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