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Work and Family Chapter

Working Mothers and Their Families

Why do Mothers work?

-- primarily because the family needs the money and secondarily for their won personal self-actualization

-- 56% of full-time homemakers say that they would choose to have a career if they had it to do all over again,

-- only 21% of working mothers would leave their current jobs to stay at home with the children

-- these women are quite committed to their jobs

-- satisfied with their diverse roles

-- would not leave the labor force even if they didn=t need the money

-- the social psychology of the workplace, with its social support, adult companionship, and contacts with the larger world, may explain the phenomenon

Working Mothers= Marital Relationships

-- mothers vary in their career ambitions, their sex-role expectations, and the degree to which they receive spousal support for their employment

-- crucial to interpreting any effects of maternal employment on family relationships

-- spousal support -- is a key to the success of dual-career families

-- husband cooperation includes positive attitudes toward maternal employment and cooperation with household and child care tasks

-- mothers who receive little or now spouse support, in either attitudes toward their employment or in participation in child care and household tasks, are indeed stressed by their multiple roles (we saw this to be the case in The Second Shift)

-- Costs of Maternal employment --

-- decreased leisure time, increased time spent on household tasks, and decreased sexual activity due to fatigue and lack of time (these are for men)

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-- that men do not share family responsibilities has a negative effect on wives= perceptions of the marital relationship, but not evidently on theirs

-- For mothers, satisfactions also depend on spouse support for their household and maternal roles and on their work commitment prior to becoming mothers

-- mothers with previously high work commitments who stay home for five or more months after a birth report greater irritability, greater depression, decreased marital intimacy, and lower self-esteem than mothers with previously low work commitments

-- For men, satisfactions depend primarily on the degree to which they are inconvenienced by maternal employment in exchange for larger family income.

Maternal Employment and child development

-- research concludes, there are no consistent effects of maternal employment on child development

-- rather, maternal employment cannot have a single set of consistent effects on children because mothers work for various reasons and begin or interrupt work when their children are at various ages; furthermore, employment contexts of various families and communities that support or do not support mothers= multiple roles

-- young sons were slightly disadvantaged by the loss of maternal attention in the early years

-- daughters of employed mothers were often reported to be more self-confident to achieve better grades in school, and to more frequently pursue careers themselves than were the daughters of non-employed mothers

-- maternal employment can also benefit children by higher family income, higher self-esteem for mothers, a less sharp distinction between male and female roles, and a more positive role model for both sons and daughters for later in their own lives

-- when both parents of preschool children are employed, both fathers and mothers spend about the same total amount of time in direct interaction with their children as do parents in families in which only fathers are employed

-- working moms doing less housework to spend more time with kids, dads in dual-earner couple not doing anymore than dads in single earner household

-- both parents in one-earner families have more leisure time for themselves.

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Working Families and Child Care

-- child care is not a women=s issue; it is a family issue

-- not only is there a critical shortage of high-quality child care in this country, but there also is such ambivalence about providing child care that we have a shameful national dilemma:

--> More than 50% of American mothers of infants and preschool children are now in the labor force and require child care services, but there is no coherent national policy on parental leaves or on child care services for working parents.

-- high rates of employment are now common to mothers of all races and marital statuses

-- working mothers have become an everyday part of children=s lives, of family life, and of our economic structure

-- direct federal funding for child care programs actually decreased by 18% in real dollars between 1980 and 1986

How Does the United States Compare?

-- not very well

-- Sweden -- mothers and fathers have the right to a leave following childbirth that is paid at 90% of one parent=s wages for 9 months, followed by a fixed minimum benefit for 3 additional months

-- parents may also take an unpaid, but job-protected, leave until their child is 18 months old and may work a six-hour day until their child is 8 years old.

-- men are not taking these

-- Italy -- women are entitled to a 6-month job-protected leave, paid at a flat rate equal to the average wage for women workers.

-- also have a job-protected unpaid leave for a year

-- France -- job protected maternity leave of 6 weeks before childbirth, and 10 weeks after is provided

-- child care

- Sweden -- placed 38% of preschoolers with working mothers in subsidized child care programs

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-- France, Italy, Spain, and all of the Easter European countries have more than half of their infants, toddlers, and preschool children in subsidized child care because their mothers are in the labor force

Why the Policy Gap?

-- cherished beliefs about maternal care have lead us historically as a nation to favor marginal support for mothers to stay home with their babies, through paternal employment and through Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) rather than support for women=s attainment of economic independence.

-- many mothers cannot afford to take months off from their jobs, especially without pay; unpaid leaves for divorced and single mothers and for women married to men who earn the minimum wage are not very useful

-- some mothers consider themselves better mothers when they work or taking a lot of time off would be detrimental to their career.

-- these women do not want extended maternal leaves; they want high-quality child care and some want fulfilling, well-compensated, part-time work opportunities

-- how long should a maternal leave be for either the mother= s or the infant=s benefit?

-- What we need are equally attractive options so that families can choose how best either to take advantage of quality child care while parents work or to arrange an extended leave for parents, usually the mother, to care for the baby.

Effects of child Care on children

-- child care settings vary, quality of these settings vary, families also vary from abusive and neglectful to supportive and nurturing

-- experts agree that high quality child care has no detrimental effects on intellectual or language development

-- high-quality day care settings have been shown to compensate for poor family environments and to promote better intellectual and social development than children would have experienced in their own homes.

-- attachment -- was not adversely affected by enrollment in the university-based child care centers that provided the early child care samples.

-- bonds formed btw children and their caregivers did not replace the mother-child attachment relationship

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-- there is near consensus among developmental psychologists and early childhood experts that child care per se does not constitute a risk factor in children=s lives;

-- rather poor quality care and poor family environments can conspire to produce poor developmental outcomes.

-- social behavior -- mixed results

-- some find no difference in social behavior btw children with and without child care experience

-- others show that children who had non-maternal child care are more socially competent

-- and others suggest lower levels of social competence

-- Positive outcomes of child care --

-- teacher and parent ratings of considerateness and sociability

-- observations of compliance and self-regulation

-- observations of involvement and positive interactions

What is Quality Child Care?

--small child-caregiver ratio, small group size, care-giver training in child development, and stability of the child=s care experience