ABSTRACT
Research on maternal employment has proliferated over the past 50 years. Interest in the role of maternal employment and parenting has been coincident with the consistent increase in families with employed mothers over this period of time (Gottfried, Bathurst, and Gottfried, 1994). Cohen and Bianchi (1999) reported that women’s labor force participation gave evidence of a steady, linear upward trend from 1971 to 1997. The U.S. Government Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 1999, for families with children under the age of 18 years, in 64.1% of the families both mothers and fathers were employed, whereas in 29.1% only fathers were employed, indicating that traditional family employment roles are in the minority. Even in families with children under the age of 6 years, the percentage of traditional families is in the minority, comprising only 36.9%, and when the youngest child is between 6 and 17 years of age the percent declines to 22.6% (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2000). Whereas maternal employment was a minority phenomenon of 43% in 1975 (Hayghe, 1990), it is now the norm for mothers to be employed. These demographic trends correspond to other reports of maternal and dual-earner employment (Bond, Galinsky, and Swanberg, 1998). In the Fullerton Longitudinal Study the percentage of employed mothers increased from 36.2% when children were 1 year of age to 83% by the time children were 17 years old. Interestingly, although dualearner families constitute the norm demographically, they continue to be nontraditional in that they deviate from the single-(male) earner, two-parent family that has dominated cultural expectations and developmental theory (Gottfried, Gottfried, Bathurst, and Killian, 1999).
