Mothers in the work force has long been a subject of debate especially when it comes to having young children. Should women with young children work outside the home? Will working and being a new mom be good for the family/individual or Is it too stressful?
A study reported on by Time Healthland, suggests that working moms with young children are happier than stay at home moms.
Cheryl Buehler, a professor of human development and family studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNC-G) and led author of the study affirms, “Employment helps women and their families.” Her study is new in that unlike other studies on working mothers it focuses on how working affects the mom not the child.
It also delves into the impacts of working full -time vs part-time. Interesting enough mothers with young children who work only part-time fair the best. Buehler reported that there was not a lot of emotional difference between part-time and full-time participants but there was less work-family conflict.
The biggest differences were between the stay at home moms and the part-time moms. The part timers were less depressed, more sensitive to their children and provided more learning opportunities for them.
“Maybe that [work environment] translates to the experience they bring to their children, comments Buehler. Employment is an exercise in social skills and can increase a person’s awareness of what is going on in the community.
The Sunday Times has reported that overall women are better judges of men when assessing emotion. This comes from top management guru and accountant Chandra Jayaratne.
David Brooks, a New York best selling author was quoted by Jayaratne, “Everyone of us have emotions as emotions are more important than pure decisions and if you cannot resolve any crisis by your accountancy profession resolve it my emotion and that is why ladies are better intuitive judges than men”.
Jayaratne went on to note that when making decisions everyone forgets about emotions and sometimes sentiments are more effective and important than mere logical conclusions.
The message of his overall speech:
“Emotions are more important than pure decisions when value judgments are made. Women are better intuitive judges than men as men tend to follow the book.”
As the so-called “weaker sex”, I think it makes sense that women would be the better intuitive judges– they stand to lose more if they’re wrong about their judgments. For example, if a woman is wrong about who she partners up with, 9 months of pregnancy and a lifetime of child-rearing on her own is quite an expensive cost. If a man is wrong about that same judgment, it’s likely he loses nothing, or maybe some child support payments in our very recent modern world.
As far as working vs. non-working moms, it stands to reason to me that part-time workers would be the happiest. They would still get to spend the majority of their time watching their children grow and nurturing them, but without the isolation of being stuck at home and in more limited company (overall, certainly there are exceptions in all this) all the time. Isolation, especially extended isolation, is almost never mentally or emotionally healthy.
I bet if this study had been conducted 100 years or more ago, the differences would have been more marginal since in pre-modern times a working vs. non-working mom would have been essentially the same thing.