The Psychosocial Interior of the Family by Gerald Handel

Author:Gerald Handel [Handel, Gerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Family & Relationships, Dysfunctional Families, Psychology, General
ISBN: 9780202304946
Google: 7gIBwQEACAAJ
Publisher: Aldine De Gruyter
Published: 1994-01-15T04:43:08+00:00

Figure 3. Deviations from the mean depression level for employed wives, depending on the presence of children, difficulty of arranging child care, and the husband’s participation in child care. Note: From “Child care and emotional adjustment to wives’ employment,” by Catherine E. Ross and John Mirowsky, 1988, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 29. Copyright 1988 by the American Sociological Association. Reprinted by permission.

Child care is the overwhelming concern for employed mothers. We began with the finding that children are bad for mothers’ psychological well-being. We end with the finding that it is not children per se that create stress for employed mothers but the absence of supportive arrangements. We find that employed mothers whose husbands share the child care responsibilities and who have no difficulty in arranging child care have depression levels that are as low as employed women with no children and as low as husbands.

Children are much less stressful for employed mothers than for housewives who are not employed, as long as the employed mothers have easily available child care and their husbands share the responsibility of child care with them. Nothing offsets the stress of young children for housewives who are not employed. The women who are home all day with the children may feel, as Gove and his colleagues described, that the children are making constant demands on them, that they have no privacy, that they are isolated from other adults, and that they are “stuck” in the house.

When husbands’ and wives’ social roles are similar, their depression levels are similar. The gender gap in psychological well-being closes due to lower depression among wives and not due to greater depression among husbands. Some have argued that employment among wives puts a strain on husbands because of added responsibility for child care. We find no evidence that this is the case. If the wife’s employment increases her husband’s depression at all when he helps with the child care, the increase in his depression is very small compared to the decrease in hers.

What we now think of as a “traditional” family pattern, in which the husband is employed and the wife stays home and cares for the household and children, is actually a consequence of the Industrial Revolution (Tilly, 1983). Parsons (1949) claimed it is functionally imperative that the husband is the provider and his wife is the homemaker and child rearer. Becker (1976) claimed that, from the perspective of maximizing household utilities, it was economically rational for the wife to stay home caring for children because her market wages were typically lower than her husband’s. Par-sons’s and Becker’s theories of marital roles seem time bound. The massive labor force entry of married women with children has reduced the credibility of both theories. A pattern that appeared with industrial society may disappear in a postindustrial period.

It is understandable, however, that scholars writing in a transitional period should see a shift away from the complementary marriage pattern in which the husband is employed and the wife stays home as stressful, disturbing, and threatening to the marriage.

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