Mothers' Part-Time Employment

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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.