A working mother helps her child get ready for school. When children are of school age, working families still have to deal with issues of
control and supervision when work hours and school hours do not overlap. (Reflections Photolibrary/Corbis)
with reasons and explanations and allow some input
from the child. It is a more common pattern in the
middle class generally, but there it was not related to
the mother’s employment status. Thus, differences
between employed and nonemployed mothers in the
quality of parenting were more pronounced in the
blue-collar and poverty groups, and these differences
were linked to child outcomes.
An important reason maternal employment
made such a difference in mothers’ parenting styles
in the lower-class families has to do with the mothers’
sense of well-being. Although previous research has
often shown that employed mothers have a higher
sense of well-being than full-time homemakers, this
result is most consistently found for mothers in the
blue-collar and poverty groups. This was also true in
the Hoffman and Youngblade study. In these lower-
income families, the employed mothers scored lower
on a measure of depressive mood and higher on a
measure of positive morale. Further, for this group,
the mothers’ sense of well-being was shown to be the
link between employment and more positive parent-
ing styles. Employment status was not related to ei-
ther measure in the middle class.
It may seem strange that employment has a more
positive effect on mothers whose work may not be as
interesting as the work available to more educated
mothers. What these mothers value, however, is not
the job itself, but the increased social support and
stimulation provided by coworkers, the marked ad-
vantages that their wages bring to their families, and
the greater sense of control that they feel over their
lives. This is particularly true for poor single mothers
who are often lonely and depressed, and for whom
wages can make a major economic difference.Infants and Toddlers
The research on infants and toddlers with work-
ing mothers has taken a different approach. At these
early ages, it is very difficult to measure child out-
comes that have long-term predictability, so studies
have focused more on mother-child interaction or re-
sorted to long-term designs. Studies of infants have
examined the quantity and quality of mother-child in-
teractions, and particular attention has been given to
the security of the mother-infant attachment. The
studies looking at quantity and quality suggest that al-
though employed mothers spend less time with theWORKING FAMILIES 439