Comparing its structure and function as it was in 1960 with what it had becomein 1990 can highlight the dramatic changes in the American family. Until 1960most Americans shared a common set of beliefs about family life; family shouldconsist of a husband and wife living together with their children. The fathershould be the head of the family, earn the family’s income, and give his name tohis wife and children. The mother’s main tasks were to support and enable herhusband’s goals, guide her children’s development, look after the home, and seta moral tone for the family.
Marriage was an enduring obligation for better orworse and this was due much to a conscious effort to maintain strong ties withchildren. The husband and wife jointly coped with stresses. As parents, they hadan overriding responsibility for the well being of their children during theearly years-until their children entered school, they were almost solelyresponsible. Even later, it was the parents who had the primary duty of guidingtheir children’s education and discipline.
Of course, even in 1960, familiesrecognized the difficulty of converting these ideals into reality. Still, theydevoted immense effort to approximating them in practice. As it turned out, themother, who worked only minimally–was the parent most frequently successful inspending the most time with her children. Consequently, youngsters were almostalways around a parental figure — they were well-disciplined and often veryclose with the maternal parent who cooked for them, played with them, and sawthem off to and home from school each day. Over the past three decades theseideals, although they are still recognizable, have been drastically modifiedacross all social classes.
Women have joined the paid labor force in greatnumbers stimulated both by economic need and a new belief in their capabilitiesand right to pursue opportunities. Americans in 1992 are far more likely than inearlier times to postpone marriage. Single parent families–typically consistingof a mother with no adult male and very often no other adult person present-havebecome common. Today at least half of all marriages end in divorce (Gembrowski3). Most adults no longer believe that couples should stay married becausedivorce might harm their children. Of course, these contemporary realities havegreat consequential impact on mother-child relationships and child development;even from an early age.
Survey research shows a great decrease in the proportionof women favoring large families, an upsurge in their assertiveness aboutmeeting personal needs, and an attempt by women to balance their needs withthose of their children and the men in their lives (Burgess & Conger 1164). A clear and increasing majority of women believe that both husband and wifeshould be able to work, should have roughly similar opportunities, and shouldshare household responsibilities and the tasks of child rearing. A majority ofmothers of preschool children now work outside the home. A growing minority ofyoung married women, often highly educated and career oriented, are choosing notto have any children and have little interest in children’s issues-yet one moreindication of the dramatic transformation of American families that has beentaking place in recent decades (Bousha & Twentyman 106).
It is unavoidablethat those mothers who work simply are not there as much for their children. Infact, in many cases the relationship between the contemporary mother and herchildren is similar to the age-old traditional role of the father and hischildren. Often, the mother is indeed a strong-minded disciplinarian in theevening after work?but she is very frequently not much more than that. Tovery children, care is a nursery or some school of others with caregivers.
Tothe pre-adolescent youth, care is either a baby-sitter, nanny, or just phonecall to ‘mom’ after work–if even that much. In some of the more positive cases,this creates an early sense of responsibility and independence for the child. But more commonly, it is known to invite poor behavior, recklessness, and evenaccidents at home when the mother is not there. Some children become despondent;others grow adamantly rebellious. But regardless of patternistic character, theyall reportedly exhibit a diminished sense of relationship with their mother. With regard to interpersonal signals, today’s working mothers are unlikely torespond to child signals and more likely to initiate spontaneously nonreciprocaltypes of interaction, such as requests and demands (Aragona & Eyeberg 599).
I infer that this comes in part from the pressures and stresses of their ownbusy work schedules (plus they are still usually left with a plethora oftime-consuming “mothering” responsibilities) as well as from their owndiminished relationship with the child(ren). My readings strongly indicate thatmothers who work all day often become almost unavoidably neglectful in that theyfail to perceive, and attend to, child signals and information about childneeds. Evidently, the underlying process in such cases is often one ofprematurely ending the processing of information about feelings. That is, incases where mothers are consistently withdrawn, psychologically unavailable,and/or stressed over work, it is proposed that parental style of processinginformation is typified by preconscious exclusion from perception of informationthat elicits affect (Giovannoni 14). Such information is of crucial importanceto human functioning as it provides the earliest (both developmentally andsituationally) interpretation and prescription for response (Zajonc, 1998).
Later developing cognitively generated information and processing interactionwith affect to produce increasingly differentiated, sophisticated, and adaptiveresponses (Egeland & Erickson 114-15). When, however, affect is distorted,either by inhibition or exaggeration, it reportedly reduces the flexibility ofindividuals’ response to their environment. The rearing of children is, ofcourse, an affectively arousing experience. Indeed, children, especially youngchildren, communicate largely through affective signals, for example, cries,smiles, eye contact, touch.
When mothers are not around much and fail to respondto these signals, children first become very upset and, if no parental responseis forthcoming, ultimately cease to signal. In either case, they both fail tolearn to modify signals in ways that lead to the development of maturecommunicative skills and also learn to behave in increasingly aversive ways. Indeed, the more upset they become, the longer it takes them to recover, thatis, the longer they remain distressed. Consequently, if working mothers wereinitially ambivalent about responding to child signals, they could be expectedto become more reluctant after their children became upset.
At that point,interactions are likely to take on the negative quality noted by manyresearchers (Burgess & Conger, 1998). Thus early neglect of infant signalscan have a progressive and deteriorating effect on the development of theparent-child relationship. And such neglect is indeed common among workingmothers. In addition, children’s signals are often tied to their need for helpin managing their emotions. Thus children turn to their parents when they arehurt, angry, sad, frightened, and so on. If their mothers are too preoccupied torespond to these feelings, they may ignore precisely those signals that implythe greatest need for maternal involvement.
Indeed, “simple” requestsfor food, clothing, shelter, and medical attention can be fulfilled by otheradults such as nannies, caregivers etc; But this seriously alters themother-child relationship and places many aspects of that traditional role onthe career-child relationship instead. Because the desire for affection andcomfort can only be satisfied by attachment figures (i. e. , parents), it is moresubject to defensive biases. This suggests both the importance of psychologicalneglect (Egeland & Erickson, 1997) and the basis for such neglect inparents’ own developmental history. Previous to the age of the working mother,it might have been said that children were often a bit spoiled by their mother’sconstant presence.
All of the attention that they needed was there beforeschool, after school, on the weekends and so forth. This created a strongdependency upon the maternal parent; relationships were overtly familiar and thebond between mother and child was more often a strong one than today. An oldclichÈ of that time was the expression from mother to child “justwait ’till your father gets home. ” In many cases today, just waiting formother to come home may carry with it the same intimidation.
And without aparental balance between disciplinarian and caregiver–much of the relationshipbetween mother and child so amiable in the 1950’s and before–is gone. Conclusively, it is difficult to blame mothers for their inability to developand maintain relationships with their children as strongly as in previousdecades. The pressures of a full-time career coupled with full-time motheringmay be too much for anyone to handle wholly and effectively. It is for thisreason that responsible parents seek the assistance of day care centers,professional baby-sitters, and so forth. But it is also for this reason that therelationship that exists between mother and child today has changed sodrastically.
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