Relations Among Maternal Employment Indices and Developmental Characteristics of Children.

It is frequently asserted that maternal employment has a deleterious effect upon the development of children. The more sophisticated basis of this generalization rests upon the simple and deceptive generalization of results of studies of extreme maternal deprivation to situations involving the employment of mothers who have preschool and early school-age children. Inferences based on the anthropological data and the comparisons of the infants who had multiple-mothering experiences during infancy with a control group of children suggest that maternal employment per se should not be conceptualized as maternal deprivation and, hence, should not necessarily be a detrimental influence on the personality development of children. The five indices of maternal employment used in the present study included the number of months the mothers were employed during the time the children were: less than four years of age, four through six years of age, less than seven years of age, the 30 months preceding the time of data collection, and the lives of the children included in the sample. The conclusion of this study is that maternal employment per se is not the overwhelming influential factor in children's lives that some have thought it to be.