THE INFLUENCE OF MOTHER-DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIPS ON WOMEN'S SENSE OF SELF AND CURRENT ROLE CHOICES

This study investigates the relationship of women's current role choices, role satisfaction, and self-esteem to their perceptions of the earlier relationship with their mothers and to their perceptions of their mothers' role choices and role satisfaction. Sixty-seven married women with preschool children were interviewed and completed self-report inventories. Results indicated that the women's primary role decisions of career, non-career work, or homemaking did not parallel those of their mothers but was related to their mothers' messages to them. In addition, career women and women at home reported having more choice in their decisions than did non-career working women. Women's self-esteem and role satisfaction were significantly enhanced ( p <.05) when the relationship with the mother was perceived as loving and accepting, with low hostility and low psychological control. In contrast, women's self-esteem and role satisfaction were generally unrelated to the retrospective reports of the mothers' roles and role satisfaction.     

Multiple Roles and Well-Being: A Study of Mothers of Preschool Age Children

The relation of well-being to involvement in multiple roles was examined in a study of 134 Caucasian women. All subjects were married and mothers of at least one preschool child; 50 were also paid workers. Two indices of well-being were used: (a) self-esteem; and (b) satisfaction with one's current role pattern. No differences in level of well-being were found between the employed and nonemployed groups. Findings were discussed in relation to theoretical perspectives on multiple role involvement.     

Women in the Middle Years: A Critique of Research and Theory

Research and theory on women in the middle years reflect assumptions and biases that limit our understanding and impair our ability to resolve conflicting findings about women's well-being. Such theorists as Erikson and Levinson focus on chronological age and assume an inappropriate sequence of stages and events. In most research, the centrality of women's reproductive role is assumed and the importance of their work role pattern is ignored. Thus menopause and the "empty nest" receive disproportionate attention. Too little attention is given to stage of the family life cycle and the conditions and status of work. Two active research areas that appear promising for understanding adult women are also discussed: locus of control and attributions; and social networks and support systems.     

Training Young Children to Acknowledge Mixed Emotions

Abstract

The failure of children to acknowledge mixed, contradictory emotions is equally of developmental and clinical interest. Developmentally, children do not ordinarily acknowledge the existence of mixed emotions until late in middle childhood. Clinically, the failure to recognise mixed feelings toward others or self is a common presenting problem. The question addressed here is, how readily can such limitations be corrected in children of different ages. Two studies are reported showing that children as young as 6 and 7 years, who initially revealed little understanding of mixed feelings, showed more insight after a short training session. In Experiment 1. two groups of children were equated for their inability to diagnose the mixed feelings of a story character. Subsequently, both groups were presented with a second story containing a similar conflictual event, but only one group was prompted to consider the character's emotional reaction to each component of the conflict. Children in the prompted group were more accurate in diagnosing the character's emotional reaction at the end of the story than the control group, and they maintained their superiority on a post-test story where no prompts were given. Experiment 2 included a similar training procedure. but with a more stringent measure of post-test generalisation: Children were asked to describe or invent their own examples of emotionally charged conflictual situations. Four- and five-year-olds showed little benefit from the training session, but six- and seven-year-olds again showed considerable benefit. Taken together, the two experiments suggest that young school age children often fail to acknowledge mixed feelings because they engage in a cursory appraisal of the elements of an emotionally charged situation; highlighting the elements is sufficient to improve performance. Preschool children, however, appear to suffer from more basic limitations in their ability to integrate the relevant information.