Saturday, January 28, 2012

Being a stay at home mom is bad for your daughter!!!

(I’m so sick and tired of arguing about this.  I’m just going to quote the $300 Master’s program Educational Psychologytextbook designed to help teachers figure out why your kid isn’t achieving up to par and give you links for the pertinent reference material.  Go take it up with them.)

"Parental Employment

In today’s economy, both parents typically, are employed outside the household, making parental workplaces a common element of a student’s exosystem- that is, an indirect influence on development.  Thirty years ago, as more mothers were rejoining the workforce, researchers examined the effects on child and adolescent outcomes and did not find negative results.  Instead, a number of positive outcomes were found, particularly for girls (Hoffman, 1974):

·         Girls with working mothers tended to have higher achievement aspirations or greater desire to excel academically, as well as higher achievement in school, compared to girls with nonworking mothers.
·         Girls with working mothers tended to have higher intelligence schores (IQ scores) compared to girls with nonworking mothers.
·         Children of working mothers were not more likely to be involved in delinquent acts than were children of nonworking mothers.
·         Children of working mothers had ore household responsibilities than did children of nonworking mothers, a situation related to positive, rather than negative, outcomes, such as advanced social development.

More recent research on parental employment suggests that having both parents employed outside the home does not generally affect children in either a negative or a positive manner (Crouter & McHale, 2005).  For example, working mothers spend slightly less time with their children than do nonworking mothers; however, fathers whose wives are employed become more involved in child rearing than do fathers whose wives are not employed outside the home.  In short parental employment appears to have little impact on children and may even be related to positive academic achievement, aspirations, and intelligence among girls."

(The above material is quoted from my Foundations in Educational Psychology textbook.  I do not claim to have written the above material.  I reproduce them here strictly for educational purposes.) 

Links to the research:

Hoffman

Crouter & McHale

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