Mothers' Part-Time Employment

描述(申请人提供)：拟议研究的目标是研究母亲的工作时间、母亲的心理健康和父母从婴儿期到儿童期中期的角色运作之间的关系。先前的研究和理论以两种相互矛盾的方式描述了兼职就业：一种是作为加强工作与家庭平衡的战略，另一种是维持性别角色不平等的机制。这项拟议的研究将使用NICHD关于早期儿童护理和青年发展(婴儿期到五年级)的10波数据，这是一项针对来自美国十个地点的1000多名儿童和家庭的长期纵向研究。拟议研究的三个目标是：(A)确定母亲的工作时间、她们的心理健康状况(就业母亲的抑郁症状和工作-家庭压力)和她们在父母角色中发挥作用的质量(敏感性、反应性、缺乏严苛、参与孩子的学校)之间的纵向关系；(B)测试母亲就业时间的过程模型，该模型假设随着时间的推移，通过心理健康的变化对养育子女和参与子女学校活动的影响；(C)审查家庭和工作特征对母亲就业时间、心理健康和育儿结果之间联系的调节作用。拟议的分析结果将提供有关母亲从事非全日制工作时家庭功能的宝贵信息，并将查明在何种条件下非全日制就业是促进个人和家庭目标的积极战略。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of the proposed study is to examine the relations among maternal employment hours, mothers' psychological well-being, and parental role functioning from infancy through middle childhood. Prior research and theorizing has characterized part-time employment in two conflicting ways: either as a strategy for enhancing work-family balance or as a mechanism for maintaining gender role inequity. The proposed study will use 10 waves of data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (infancy through grade 5), a long-term longitudinal study of more than 1,000 children and families drawn from ten sites across the U.S. The three aims of the proposed study are to: (a) identify the longitudinal relations among maternal work hours, their psychological well-being (depressive symptoms and work-family stress for employed mothers), and the quality of their functioning in the parental role (sensitivity, responsiveness, lack of harshness, involvement with the child's school); (b) test a process model of maternal employment hours that hypothesizes effects on parenting and involvement in children's school activities over time through changes in psychological well-being; and (c) examine the moderating effects of familial and work characteristics on the links among mothers' employment hours, their psychological well-being, and parenting outcomes. The results of the proposed analyses will provide valuable information about family functioning when mothers work part-time and will identify the conditions under which part-time employment is a positive strategy to promote individual and family goals.