Parental Adaptations to Maternal Employment

Abstract

Research on maternal employment has been undertaken primarily from the vantage point of its more or less immediate impact on child behavior and socialization. In many studies, social class and family stability variables were found more intimately related to facets of child development than maternal employment per se. Maternal employment, however, has been positively correlated with school achievement and intellectual attainment, with increased dependency, and with problems of sexual identity (Poznanski et al., 1970). Little has yet been done to explicate the processes and mechanisms which account for these findings. This deficiency is, in part, attributable to the kind of questions which have been asked about maternal employment and to the methods by which investigators have attempted to answer them. Most studies of maternal employment have used techniques of data gathering (e.g., questionnaires) that facilitate the inclusion of large numbers of subjects. These methods have the virtue of producing results that are measurably reliable, broadly descriptive, and normative in nature, but they are not well adapted to exploring issues of mechanism and process. While the search for correlations between maternal employment and aspects of the child's personality development is important, it is, by itself, a narrow and incomplete approach. After all, one cannot be certain that any of the relations mentioned above reflect simple causal factors unless one has also considered more complex relationships. One possible indirect relationship between maternal