Working Mothers Get Words of Comfort

Six years ago, a newspaper notice for a novel child-development study caught Pearl Taylor’s eye. Fascinated by the prospect of predicting an infant’s intellect, the former teacher volunteered her son, Benjamin.

Relaxing recently in her comfortable Sherman Oaks home, she said, “I had a hunch early on that Ben was special. He seemed to be really bright.” Through the project, her hunch was confirmed, she added with a smile.

San Fernando Valley husband-wife researchers Allen Gottfried, 39, professor of psychology at California State University, Fullerton, and professor of pediatrics at USC Medical Center, and Adele Gottfried, 38, professor of educational psychology at California State University, Northridge, are directing the study of 105 7-year-olds and their families.

Besides predicting intellect in infants, the Gottfrieds’ studies have measured how work practices of mothers have influenced the social, psychological and intellectual development of children.

Good News for Working Mothers

The study’s principal finding is one that will no doubt make a lot of women happy: The children of working mothers have developed 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, who hopes to study the 105 children through adulthood.

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

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

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

Intellectual Stimulation

“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.

“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.”

In the Taylor household, where the mother, Pearl, 44, is a former elementary schoolteacher, and father, Sol, 54, a real estate broker with a doctorate in education and a former college professor, there are abundant books and several musical instruments such as a piano, guitar and violin. From an early age, Ben and his sister, Elana, 6, were exposed to literature and music, especially through Pearl’s piano and guitar playing and her performing in vocal groups.

“I’ve always taken them to concerts and museums also. We’ve always provided stimulation,” Pearl said.

The Gottfrieds, who themselves are the parents of two children, Michael, 5, and Jeffrey, 1 1/2, said their findings will be detailed in a book scheduled for publication 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 couple 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 56%.)

Women’s Employment Upsurge

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.

After 13 years of teaching at elementary schools and training teachers at UCLA, Pearl left the field. “Teaching was a closed world,” she said. She later worked as an executive recruiter for a personnel-search firm before meeting and marrying Sol.

When she had Ben nearly one year later, she was content to devote her time to him. “I waited until I was 37 and 38 to have these children and, if it was economically possible, I wanted to be home with them.” After her children entered preschool, however, she held a few part-time jobs and did substitute teaching.

In November, business cutbacks forced Pearl’s layoff from a 25-hour-a-week personnel-manager job. She now volunteers at the library of the school her children attend, Adat Ari El Day School, where she also acts as a room mother and helps with field trips. Meanwhile, she seeks another part-time job.

When Pearl was laid off from the personnel position that she had held a year, she recalled, it was devastating. “I don’t consider myself a burning career woman, but it was nice after several years at home to have a conversation with someone about something other than baby food.”

She added that, although Sol likes her being home with the children in the afternoons, he also “thinks I’m more fulfilled when I’m working part time because then I bring something of my own to talk about.” Both believe, however, that a full-time job would leave her “frazzled” and lacking energy for family demands.

When the Gottfrieds launched their study in 1979, it consisted of 130 children born of middle-class families in Orange County. The families lived at first within one hour of the Cal State Fullerton campus, which allowed frequent testing in a campus laboratory and visits to the children’s homes, Allen said.

Since then, 14% of the families have moved to other areas of California or out of state, dropping out of the study.

The Gottfrieds’ findings are supported by some researchers and are in conflict with others.

At least six major books have been published by educators and pediatricians within the last two years on what infants need to thrive, and their divergent advice underscores the ambivalence felt by both parents and experts regarding working and parenting.

The Gottfrieds attempt to distance themselves from such authors’ 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 said 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.

Sol and Pearl think that Ben’s participation in the twice-yearly lab tests has heightened their awareness of his intelligence and imagination, although Sol noted that the tests “really don’t measure social skills. They couldn’t tell you whether a child were really shy or if a child bullies himself in situations.”

High Achiever

Because of their academic training, “we pretty much know what progress he’s making. We see that even from the games he plays,” Sol said. But the tests have confirmed that, “compared to children his own age, he is a very high achiever” and linguistically advanced, he added.

“I think I was able to understand what specific verbal skills he has or what areas of math or computational thinking he is not as strong in,” Pearl said.

“In spelling and reading, he amazes me with his prowess. On the other hand, he is weaker in math than in other areas of his development.”

Explanations of test results have “enhanced what I have tried to make available to him,” she added. “When he was little, for example, I would work with him on math concepts.”

Regarding the study’s original objective, Allen said extensive educational testing is under way on the second-graders to determine “whether those earlier measures were able to predict later educational achievement and learning abilities.” Data collection and coding will not be completed until the end of the summer.

Adele added that, among the study’s “interesting” results, is that homemakers “do not necessarily spend more time with their children than do working mothers. 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.”

‘Benign Neglect’

In his 10-year teaching experience, Sol found that some at-home mothers’ approach to their children was “attendance, but benign neglect.

“If the mother is home with the children and plays the guitar for the children and reads stories and helps them with construction games . . .,” his voice trailed off as he glanced approvingly at Pearl.

“I’m crazy with my kids,” Pearl said. “I like to laugh and be nuts with them. I’m very demonstrative and affectionate, and nobody is going to convince me that they will get that from somebody in day care.

“Other people will argue, so they don’t get that from you at 4 in the afternoon, they will get it at 6. But I feel like I get two more hours a day to hug and kiss them. I like to think that, emotionally, it matters, but how do you know? A lot of it is intuitive.”

She conceded that, “When they’re babies, they need loving and nurturing, and I’m not sure it has to be totally from the mother.”

Allen likened today’s child-care providers to the extended-family members who aided families in pre-World War II years when parents typically worked in fields in rural areas or in factories in urban areas.

“The only difference now is that the care givers for the mothers in the work force usually aren’t members of the extended family,” he said.

There has been controversy over whether working mothers are undermining the traditional fabric 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.

“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.”

Matter of Perception

Sol said he supports his wife’s decision to not work full time. But he is not surprised by the Gottfrieds’ findings regarding maternal employment’s effect on children because he has read other studies confirming them.

“We also know of families where the mothers have very little interaction because they have housekeepers or day-care centers. It’s how they perceive the role of the parent,” he said. “A mother giving eight hours a day to her children versus two hours, I don’t think quantitatively makes the difference. I think it’s what happens in those two hours.

“I know of one family where the father works 16 hours and comes home and sleeps, and the devotion of the children to the father is admirable.”

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.

The Father’s Role

The Gottfrieds’ research did look at the role of the father, “particularly in our home studies,” said Allen, “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.

“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.”

Being a real estate agent, Sol often works long weekday hours and some weekend hours, but makes time for family activities such as nature walks with Ben.

“He can recognize most of the flowering plants in the area simply because he’ll pay attention,” Sol said. “He’s probably the only kid who knows what plant doesn’t have a midrib in the leaf.” (It’s a ginkgo.)

Sol drives the children to school in North Hollywood before heading for work in Studio City. After school, Pearl picks up their children and a neighbor’s children and takes them to their homes. After giving her own kids a snack, she often drives them to friends’ homes or music lessons.

Pearl mused, “Every now and then, I get a twinge of, ‘Am I doing enough?’ ” She paused before answering her own question: “I am.”