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Effects of Maternal Employment in the
Two-Parent Family
Lois Wladis Hoffman
IIII Illl III
ABSTRACT: Recent research is reviewed to consider the
effects of the mother's employment on the child in the two-
parent family. This work deals mainly with maternal em-
ployment during the child's preschool years. Because of
the difficulties in measuring enduring traits in young chil-
dren, and because neither previous nor current research
has revealed clear differences between children in dual.
wage and single-wage families, attention is also given to
the effects on the family processes that mediate child out-
comes: the psychological well-being of the parents, their
marital relationship, the father's role, and parent-child
interaction. The influence of maternal employment on
these variables, as well as on child outcomes, is found to
be dependent on the attitudes of the parents, the number
of hours the mother is employed, social support, and the
child's gender.
The dual-wage family is the modal family style in the
United States. In families with school-aged children, this
has been the case for over 20 years. The current rate of
maternal employment for two-parent families with
school-aged children is 71%. This rate rises modestly each
year. The most impressive recent change in maternal em-
ployment rates, however, has been among mothers of pre-
school children and infants. For example, in 1987, 53%
of the married mothers with children age one and under
were in the labor force, more than double the rate of 24%
in 1970 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1987). This shift
has stimulated new public concern and increased research
activity focused on the effects of maternal employment
on the young child, and particularly the infant.
The previous research on the effects of maternal em-
ployment on children, conducted in the 1960s and 1970s,
involved comparisons between school-aged children with
mothers who were currently employed and those with
mothers who were full-time homemakers. Because ma-
ternal employment rates were low for preschool children,
most of these investigations involved school-aged children
whose mothers had not worked during the child's early
years. It became clear from this research that the mother's
employment status was not so robust a variable that a
simple comparison of the characteristics of the children
would yield reliable differences. Two important points
were apparent: The research had to also examine the re-
lationships between the mother's employment status and
the intervening steps that mediated the effects on the child.
It had to consider how maternal employment affected the
child's experience in the family and in the nonfamily
The University of Michigan
Illll I Ill II Ill
environment. In addition, relationships had to be ex-
amined with attention to other variables that moderated
effects; particularly important were social class, whether
the employment was full- or part-time, the parents"
at l
titudes, and the child's gender.
Even the analyses that were conducted within
subgroups based on social class and gender more often
than not failed to find significant differences between the
children of employed and nonemployed mothers on child
outcome measures such as indexes of cognitive and so-
cioemotional development (Heyns, 1982; Heyns & Cat-
sambis, 1985; Zaslow, 1987). Where differences were
found, however, they tended to show positive effects for
daughters, whereas for sons the data indicated a mixed
picture. In blue-collar families, sons of employed mothers
have generally obtained higher scores on measures of
cognitive development and socioemotional adjustment,
although they have sometimes shown less closeness with
their fathers. Studies of middle-class families have typi-
cally found higher scores on adjustment measures for sons
as well as daughters in the employed-mother families,
but some of these studies also found lower scores on grade-
school achievement and I.Q. tests (Hoffman, 1979).
One finding that has occurred with considerable fre-
quency is that children of employed mothers, from kin-
dergarten age through adulthood, have less restricted
views of sex roles. Although the finding is more consistent
for daughters than for sons, children with employed
mothers indicate less stereotyped views of males and fe-
males (Zaslow, 1987). An additional finding from the
earlier research is that employed mothers seem to em-
phasize independence training more than nonemployed
mothers, a pattern that seems consonant with the needs
of each family style.
The results of this previous work have been reviewed
in considerable detail in several recent publications
(Bronfenbrenner & Crouter, 1982; Heyns, 1982; Heyns
& Catsambis, 1985; Hoffman, 1979; 1980; 1984a; 19841);
1986; Zaslow, 1987). Therefore, in this article, I will con-
centrate mainly on the research of the past 10 years. This
work has continued to find the pattern of less sex-role
traditionalism among the children of employed mothers
and the greater stress on independence training (Wein-
raub, Jaeger, & Hoffman, 1988; Zaslow, 1987). However,
except when the mother is employed for more than 40
hours a week, it has not confirmed the finding of lower
cognitive performance by middle-class sons (Gottfried,
Gottfried, & Bathurst, 1988; Stevenson, 1982).
What most distinguishes the recent research from
February 1989 • American Psychologist
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Vol, 44, No. 2. 283-292
283
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