Maternal employment and parent-infant interaction at one year

Linking Employment to Attachment: The Mediating Effects of Maternal Separation Anxiety and Interactive Behavior

“…When examining the main effects of employment on interactive behavior, our findings were consistent with those of others (Easterbrooks & Goldberg, 1985;Zaslow et al, 1989). Employed and nonemployed mothers in the present sample looked very similar when interacting with their infants.…”

“…On the contrary, employed mothers directed more attention and vocalizations (Schubert et al, 1980) and displayed more positive emotional behaviors toward their infants (Schwartz, 1983). In a series of studies, Zaslow (Zaslow, Pedersen, Suwalsky, Cain, fie Favel, 1985;Zaslow, Pedersen, Suwalsky, & Rabinovich, 1989) found no differences in interaction behaviors between employed and nonemployed mothers during motherinfant play sessions; however, differences emerged during mother-father-infant interactions, where families with an employed mother displayed less interactive behavior than families with a nonemployed mother. Interestingly, within-family differences revealed that mothers employed outside the home were more interactive with their infants than their husbands, while the opposite was found for mothers at home full-time and their husbands, prompting many researchers to conclude that working mothers are trying to compensate for the time spent away from their infants.…”

Personal and environmental factors contributing to parenting stress among employed and nonemployed women

“…A difficulty in this research area is that the typical index of parenting stress has focused on the child, measuring, for example, the degree of attachment of the child, or the type of parent-child interaction patterns. Findings indicate that maternal employment is not predictive of insecure attachment in toddlers or less appropriate parent-child interactions (Chase-Lansdale and Ower, 1987;Easterbrooks and Goldberg, 1985;McCartney and Phillips, 1988;Zaslow, Pederson, Suwalsky and Rabinovich, 1989). Rather, individual differences in the mothers, including child-rearing attitudes, number of hours worked, job satisfaction, and perceived spousal acceptance of the wife's employment, better predicted qualitative dimensions of the parentxhild relationship.…”

Emanuel Miller Lecture Developmental Risks (Still) Associated with Early Child Care

“…This is because data linking quality of fathering with maternal employment and\or child care is by no means consistent. Even though observations of fatherinfant interaction in one of the three relevant investigations did indicate that fathers were less affectionate with their sons when mothers were employed than when they were not (Braungart-Reiker et al, 1999), and others find that men from dual-earner households relative to men from single-earner ones interact less with their infants (Pedersen, Cain, Zaslow, & Anderson, 1982) and toddlers (Zaslow et al, 1989) or are less sensitive when interacting with their infants (Easterbrooks & Goldberg, 1984) and toddlers (Belsky, 1999), these results have not always been replicated (Clarke-Stewart, Gruber, & Fitzgerald, 1994 ;Zaslow et al, 1989). In fact, when the NICHD-SECC examined the determinants of fathering after implementing extensive controls for selection effects, there was no direct relation between amount of maternal employment (and thus nonmaternal care) and paternal sensitivity at 6 or 36 months of age, nor did interaction effects involving child gender emerge (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2000b).…”

“…Despite theory suggesting that extensive time away from the infant may undermine the employed mother's ability to get to know her infant well and thus to behave in a sensitive, development-facilitating manner when with the child (Brazelton, 1986 ;Sroufe, 1988 ;Vaughn et al, 1980), most research fails to confirm this hypothesis. In fact, much research on mother-child interaction reported subsequent to the emergence of the child-care debate does not detect any differences between employed and nonemployed mothers, or mothers working part-time or fulltime, or mothers of children spending much or little time in routine nonmaternal care arrangements (Braungart-Reiker et al, 1999 ;Burchinal, Bryant, Lee, & Ramey, 1992 ;Goldberg & Easterbrooks, 1988 ;Gottfried, Gottfried, & Bathurst, 1988 ;Stifter et al, 1993 ;Stuckey, McGhee, & Bell, 1982 ;Zaslow, Pedersen, Suwalsky, & Rabinovich, 1989). With the exception of Belsky's (1999) recent research showing more time in care across the first 3 years of life to be associated with more negative mother-child interaction during the second and third years of life, and Black's (1990) investigation linking less synchronised mother-child communication patterns during the toddler and preschool years with centre-based care initiated in the first year, the handful of other reports documenting negative effects of amount of care in infancy on mother-infant interaction studied dyads in the first half of the first year (Campbell, Cohn, & Meyers, 1995 ;Owen & Cox, 1988 ;Schirtzinger, Lutz, & Hock, 1993).…”