Working Mothers Working Out as Parents Too, Study Finds : Children’s Development Does Not Suffer, Researchers Say After Look at 100 Families

Until Marilyn Bunton married 10 years ago, the Anaheim kindergarten teacher believed that marriage and children would result in giving up her career and becoming a homemaker.

“I’d always assumed that after I had children I’d stop working; that’s what my mom did,” Bunton, 39, said. “I was brought up to believe that a mother was someone who stayed home and took care of her children.”

But Bunton broke with family tradition. After the birth of her two children, a daughter, 7, and son, 2, she continued to work, except for the three months’ maternity leave she took after the birth of each.

Joyce Givens, 38, of Anaheim believes that being a mother requires being a full-time homemaker. When her son Matthew was born seven years ago, Givens cast aside her 9-year-old teaching career and immersed herself in volunteer activities and taking care of Matthew.

The different paths taken by Givens and Bunton are part of an ongoing study on how the work practices of mothers have influenced the social, psychological and intellectual development of the children of more than 100 Orange County families.

The study of these children--all 7 years old now--and their mothers began six years ago under the direction of the husband-wife research team of Allen Gottfried, 39, a professor of psychology at Cal State Fullerton and professor of pediatrics at USC Medical School, and Adele Gottfried, 38, a professor of educational psychology at Cal State Northridge.

In what the Gottfrieds view as their most important finding to date, they say their results show that the children of working mothers develop just as well as those of non-working mothers.

“Our study tells us a lot about the resiliency of children and the flexibility of the family unit to change,” said Allen Gottfried, who hopes to study the children through adulthood.

Contrary to the fears expressed by many mothers and child development experts, the Gottfrieds found that in all cases of working mothers in their study, there was no evidence that work outside the home had negatively affected the social, intellectual or psychological development of their children.

Far more important factors in forming an infant’s character along healthy lines are family stability and exposure of infants to stimulating experiences, the Gottfrieds said during an interview in their office.

‘Choice Without Guilt’

“Intellectual stimulus the infant receives in the home has an especially positive effect on the child’s later academic achievements,” Adele said. “We’re not talking about starting out reading Shakespeare to an infant or trying to get your preschooler to read at the fifth-grade level.

“That is inappropriate and not the kind of enrichment parents should be giving their young children. Rather . . . a child benefits most if at an early age he is exposed by his mother to concepts of color, shape, numbers and placement of the letters of the alphabet.”

For women confronting the dilemma of working or not working, Adele said, “Women can now make a choice without guilt.”

The Gottfrieds, who are the parents of two children, Michael, 5, and Jeffrey, 1 1/2, say their findings will be detailed in a book scheduled to be published later this year.

The Gottfrieds’ findings come at a time when more than half of all women with children under age 6 work, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (When the Gottfrieds began their study on children who were then a year old, only 36% of the mothers in the study worked, but during last year’s complete survey of the children, who were 6, that figure had gone up to 60%.)

In the past quarter-century there has been a tremendous surge in the number of women working outside the home. Between 1960 and 1984, the percentage of married women who were in the labor force and had children under 6 rose from 18.6% to 51.8%, with even higher percentages for those with older children and for divorced and separated women, according to Health and Human Services Department figures.

Most mothers have responded very favorably to their new roles as both breadwinners and homemakers, the Gottfrieds’ study found. Four out of five mothers in the study reported that their working had had a positive effect on their children’s development and family relationships.

However, the study also found that working mothers feel greater stress than do non-working mothers. Initially the Gottfrieds were puzzled why such stress did not negatively affect the development of the children.

But through more sophisticated testing, the Gottfrieds found that the reasons working mothers felt greater stress was not because of the pressure of being both homemakers and breadwinners. Rather, many of them experienced heightened anxiety because financial necessity forced them to take jobs they didn’t like.

Seen as Safe Haven

Such women had good relationships with their children because the bonds with their children was seen by these mothers as a safe haven from job pressures, the Gottfrieds found. In fact, the Gottfrieds say, women who enjoy their jobs, especially those who work more out of personal fulfillment than from economic necessity, show no greater signs of stress than do homemakers.

When the Gottfrieds launched their study in 1979, it consisted of 130 children born in Orange County to middle-class families. The Gottfrieds said 105 of the children and their mothers, or 86%, are still participating in this study.

The families initially lived within one hour of the Cal State Fullerton campus, which facilitated frequent testing in a campus laboratory and visits to the children’s homes, Allen said.

The Gottfrieds’ findings are supported by some researchers and conflict with others. At least six major books have been published within the past two years on what infants need in order to thrive, and their divergent advice underscores the ambivalence felt by both parents and experts over working and parenting:

- “Babies thrive with good day care, just as they do at home with an attentive mother,” concludes University of Virginia psychology Prof. Sandra Scarr in “Mother Care/Other Care,” which won the 1985 National Psychology Award for Excellence in the Media. “In fact, children are usually better off with satisfied substitute care givers and a happy part-time mother than with an angry, frustrated full-time mother.”

- “When both parents work, especially in non-routine, professional positions, it’s too often the case that the mother and the father have to cut corners with their children every day,” writes Deborah Fallows in her just-released semi-autobiographical book, “A Mother’s Work.” A Radcliffe-educated linguist who left a promising career to stay at home and raise her sons, Fallows details the claimed “chilling benign neglect” in day care centers. “Children are, in large part, bearing the brunt of benign accommodating in all these arrangements,” she contends.

- “Can a woman decide to take on and competently carry out two roles at once?” T. Berry Brazelton, a Boston pediatrician and professor, asks in his book “Working and Caring.” He argues, “I certainly think so, and it seems time for us to face this fact as a national trend.”

- “Full-time substitute care for babies under 3 years of age, and especially for those only a few months of age, does not seem to be in the best interest of babies,” writes early education specialist Burton White in the 1985 revised edition of “The First Three Years of Life.” White maintains: “After more than 25 years of research on how children develop well, I would not think of putting a child of my own in any substitute care program on a full-time basis during the first few years of life.”

- And the guru of of millions of parents because of his classic book “Baby and Child Care,” Dr. Benjamin Spock has weighed into the debate with the ambivalent observation that the different theories about the impact of maternal employment on children can be right or wrong “depending on the individual and the circumstances.”

Previous Research ‘Flawed’

The Gottfrieds attempt to distance themselves from this chorus of conflicting conclusions by arguing that previous research has been flawed because it has been restricted to studying just one feature of an infant’s development--and usually in a one-shot survey.

The Gottfrieds say their study overcomes these failings because it has examined not only whether a mother was working but also other factors such as cognitive and social development, home environment and family structure that affect the formation of a child’s character over a period of years.

Moreover, Allen said, most other studies have failed to take the complete history of the American family into account. He contends that the traditional image of the family, of the father as the breadwinner and the mother as the homemaker, only reflected reality during the 20 years of this country’s unparalleled prosperity immediately after World War II, if at all; this so-called “traditional” family, Allen said, took on mythic proportions because of television programs about family life aired during that era.

“This traditional nuclear family with the father working, the mother staying at home with the children and their living by themselves in a single-family home reached its heyday in the ‘50s, especially in such shows as ‘Father Knows Best’ or ‘Leave It to Beaver,’ ” Allen continued.

“These shows were idealized versions of what Americans wished family life would be like; they did not reflect what family life actually was like. Even in those families that modeled themselves after these idealized television families, subsequent studies have shown that the mothers spent much less time with their children than one would have thought at first glance.”

“One of the interesting things we found out in our study is that homemakers do not necessarily spend more time with their children than do working mothers,” Adele interjected. “We’ve also found that working mothers do not necessarily spend less time with their children than they would like to.

“Actually, most mothers spend about as much time with their children as they would like; many mothers . . . can spend only a certain amount of time with their children before it becomes an unpleasant experience.”

Extended Families

Allen continued: “The truth of the matter is that prior to this country’s post-World War II affluence, most people lived in extended families that included parents, children, grandparents and sundry other relatives. Mother and father typically worked, either in the fields in rural areas or in factories in urban areas. There was a person in the family who took care of the children during the mother’s absence from the household during the day, whether it was an aunt or grandparent.

“What we are seeing today is a return to a form of that extended family, which has existed throughout the history of this country, with the exception of that generation that came of age during the 20 years after World War II.

“The only difference now is that the care givers for the mothers in the work force usually aren’t members of the extended family but are day care providers, nursery school operators and baby sitters.”

There has been heated controversy over whether a working mother is undermining the traditional foundations and role models of family life. However, when husbands of working wives were asked whether they approved of their spouses’ working, the Gottfrieds found that on a scale of 1 through 5, fathers registered an average 4.5, just shy of the highest approval rating.

(A national poll conducted by The Times and released last month found that 52% of the respondents felt “that it is not best for a man to be the sole family breadwinner.”)

Become More Involved

“Dads like their wives to work for three major reasons,” Allen said. “They like the fact that wives are still pursuing a career. They don’t feel as burdened when the wife is bringing in family income. And dads become more involved with their own children and develop the confidence to take care of the children on their own.”

Explaining why the study emphasized the role of mothers to the near exclusion of fathers, Allen said: “Most research has been done on the role of mothers in children’s development because traditionally mothers have been considered the principal care givers for children. . . . In designing how we would conduct our study in the late ‘70s, we needed a body of data like this that would allow us to compare our research findings (with previous findings).

“I don’t want to give you the impression that in our research we did not look at the role of the father. Particularly in our home studies, when we had researchers observe the families for several hours in their homes and it was obvious that the father played a role as a care giver, such as playing with the child, we included that information.

“Dads are playing with their young children more, and they are playing a larger role as the care giver, such as taking and picking up the child from day care,” Allen said. “But even with the rise of the dual-career family, we’ve found that the mother, by and large, remains the primary care giver.”