Comparing its structure and function as it was in 1960 with what it had become
in 1990 can highlight the dramatic changes in the American family. Until 1960
most Americans shared a common set of beliefs about family life; family should
consist of a husband and wife living together with their children. The father
should be the head of the family, earn the family's income, and give his name to
his wife and children. The mother's main tasks were to support and enable her
husband's goals, guide her children's development, look after the home, and set
a moral tone for the family. Marriage was an enduring obligation for better or
worse and this was due much to a conscious effort to maintain strong ties with
children. The husband and wife jointly coped with stresses. As parents, they had
an overriding responsibility for the well being of their children during the
early years-until their children entered school, they were almost solely
responsible. Even later, it was the parents who had the primary duty of guiding
their children's education and discipline. Of course, even in 1960, families
recognized the difficulty of converting these ideals into reality. Still, they
devoted immense effort to approximating them in practice. As it turned out, the
mother, who worked only minimally--was the parent most frequently successful in
spending the most time with her children. Consequently, youngsters were almost
always around a parental figure -- they were well-disciplined and often very
close with the maternal parent who cooked for them, played with them, and saw
them off to and home from school each day. Over the past three decades these
ideals, although they are still recognizable, have been drastically modified
across all social classes. Women have joined the paid labor force in great
numbers stimulated both by economic need and a new belief in their capabilities
and right to pursue opportunities. Americans in 1992 are far more likely than in
earlier times to postpone marriage. Single parent families--typically consisting
of a mother with no adult male and very often no other adult person present-have
become common. Today at least half of all marriages end in divorce (Gembrowski
3). Most adults no longer believe that couples should stay married because
divorce might harm their children. Of course, these contemporary realities have
great consequential impact on mother-child relationships and child development;
even from an early age. Survey research shows a great decrease in the proportion
of women favoring large families, an upsurge in their assertiveness about
meeting personal needs, and an attempt by women to balance their needs with
those of their children and the men in their lives (Burgess & Conger 1164).
A clear and increasing majority of women believe that both husband and wife
should be able to work, should have roughly similar opportunities, and should
share household responsibilities and the tasks of child rearing. A majority of
mothers of preschool children now work outside the home. A growing minority of
young married women, often highly educated and career oriented, are choosing not
to have any children and have little interest in children's issues-yet one more
indication of the dramatic transformation of American families that has been
taking place in recent decades (Bousha & Twentyman 106). It is unavoidable
that those mothers who work simply are not there as much for their children. In
fact, in many cases the relationship between the contemporary mother and her
children is similar to the age-old traditional role of the father and his
children. Often, the mother is indeed a strong-minded disciplinarian in the
evening after work≈but she is very frequently not much more than that. To
very children, care is a nursery or some school of others with caregivers. To
the pre-adolescent youth, care is either a baby-sitter, nanny, or just phone
call to 'mom' after work--if even that much. In some of the more positive cases,
this creates an early sense of responsibility and independence for the child.
But more commonly, it is known to invite poor behavior, recklessness, and even
accidents at home when the mother is not there. Some children become despondent;
others grow adamantly rebellious. But regardless of patternistic character, they
all reportedly exhibit a diminished sense of relationship with their mother.
With regard to interpersonal signals, today's working mothers are unlikely to
respond to child signals and more likely to initiate spontaneously nonreciprocal
types of interaction, such as requests and demands (Aragona & Eyeberg 599).
I infer that this comes in part from the pressures and stresses of their own
busy work schedules (plus they are still usually left with a plethora of
time-consuming "mothering" responsibilities) as well as from their own
diminished relationship with the child(ren). My readings strongly indicate that
mothers who work all day often become almost unavoidably neglectful in that they
fail to perceive, and attend to, child signals and information about child
needs. Evidently, the underlying process in such cases is often one of
prematurely ending the processing of information about feelings. That is, in
cases where mothers are consistently withdrawn, psychologically unavailable,
and/or stressed over work, it is proposed that parental style of processing
information is typified by preconscious exclusion from perception of information
that elicits affect (Giovannoni 14). Such information is of crucial importance
to human functioning as it provides the earliest (both developmentally and
situationally) interpretation and prescription for response (Zajonc, 1998).
Later developing cognitively generated information and processing interaction
with affect to produce increasingly differentiated, sophisticated, and adaptive
responses (Egeland & Erickson 114-15). When, however, affect is distorted,
either by inhibition or exaggeration, it reportedly reduces the flexibility of
individuals' response to their environment. The rearing of children is, of
course, an affectively arousing experience. Indeed, children, especially young
children, communicate largely through affective signals, for example, cries,
smiles, eye contact, touch. When mothers are not around much and fail to respond
to these signals, children first become very upset and, if no parental response
is forthcoming, ultimately cease to signal. In either case, they both fail to
learn to modify signals in ways that lead to the development of mature
communicative skills and also learn to behave in increasingly aversive ways.
Indeed, the more upset they become, the longer it takes them to recover, that
is, the longer they remain distressed. Consequently, if working mothers were
initially ambivalent about responding to child signals, they could be expected
to become more reluctant after their children became upset. At that point,
interactions are likely to take on the negative quality noted by many
researchers (Burgess & Conger, 1998). Thus early neglect of infant signals
can have a progressive and deteriorating effect on the development of the
parent-child relationship. And such neglect is indeed common among working
mothers. In addition, children's signals are often tied to their need for help
in managing their emotions. Thus children turn to their parents when they are
hurt, angry, sad, frightened, and so on. If their mothers are too preoccupied to
respond to these feelings, they may ignore precisely those signals that imply
the greatest need for maternal involvement. Indeed, "simple" requests
for food, clothing, shelter, and medical attention can be fulfilled by other
adults such as nannies, caregivers etc; But this seriously alters the
mother-child relationship and places many aspects of that traditional role on
the career-child relationship instead. Because the desire for affection and
comfort can only be satisfied by attachment figures (i.e., parents), it is more
subject to defensive biases. This suggests both the importance of psychological
neglect (Egeland & Erickson, 1997) and the basis for such neglect in
parents' own developmental history. Previous to the age of the working mother,
it might have been said that children were often a bit spoiled by their mother's
constant presence. All of the attention that they needed was there before
school, after school, on the weekends and so forth. This created a strong
dependency upon the maternal parent; relationships were overtly familiar and the
bond between mother and child was more often a strong one than today. An old
clichИ of that time was the expression from mother to child "just
wait 'till your father gets home." In many cases today, just waiting for
mother to come home may carry with it the same intimidation. And without a
parental balance between disciplinarian and caregiver--much of the relationship
between mother and child so amiable in the 1950's and before--is gone.
Conclusively, it is difficult to blame mothers for their inability to develop
and maintain relationships with their children as strongly as in previous
decades. The pressures of a full-time career coupled with full-time mothering
may be too much for anyone to handle wholly and effectively. It is for this
reason that responsible parents seek the assistance of day care centers,
professional baby-sitters, and so forth. But it is also for this reason that the
relationship that exists between mother and child today has changed so
drastically.

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