ABSTRACT
Although families with nonemployed mothers and working fathers may be considered to be traditional, and maternal employment within dual-earner families is considered to be nontraditional, demographic data indicate that maternal employment is presently the norm. Statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor (1991) indicate that the majority of U.S. mothers were in the labor force in 1990. Rates of labor force participation by mothers vary with the age of the child, from 52% of mothers with children under age 2 through 75% of mothers with school-age children (ages 6–17). The Bureau also reported that whereas through the mid-1980s married mothers with children under age 2 were less likely than single mothers to be in the labor force, the trend is now reversed, and married mothers are more likely than single mothers of children under age 2 to be in the labor force (U.S. Department of Labor, 1991). Concomitantly, the proportion of traditional families (single-earner families with the husband in the labor force) declined from 61% to 25% from 1960 through 1990, as the proportion of children in two-parent families with both parents in the work force increased from 36% to 61% from 1970 through 1990 (U.S. Department of Labor, 1991). In this document, child care was described as the area of family life especially affected by mothers’ employment (U.S. Department of Labor, 1991). Maternal employment not only has become the norm in the United States, but also is a growing phenomenon in Western and Third World countries (e.g., Engle, 1991; Lewis, Izraeli, & Hootsmans, 1992; Peng, 1993).
