Mothers' Work and Family Roles, Gender Ideologies, Distress, and Parenting: Consequences for Juvenile Delinquency

Abstract

This article develops a theoretical model that links the gendered ideologies and work and family roles of mothers to juvenile delinquency. I test the model using the National Survey of Children and covariance structure analysis. The results demonstrate that adolescents of mothers who are employed and hold nontraditional ideologies, as well as those whose mothers are homemakers and hold traditional ideologies, are less likely than others to be delinquent. This is because their mothers are not susceptible to distress, enabling them to foster emotional bonds with their children. Emotional bonds ultimately protect youths from delinquent peer associations and delinquency.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was supported by a Research Grant from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at North Carolina State University. The data were made available by the International Consortium for Political and Social Research. Neither the funding sources nor the consortium bears any responsibility for the analyses and interpretations drawn here. I thank Karen Heimer, Toby Parcel, Feinian Chen, Martha Crowley, Troy Case, Rodney Engen, and Steve McDonald for comments on earlier drafts of the article. I also thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their careful comments.

NOTES

Notes

¹ Morash and Chesney-Lind (1991) criticize power-control theory for linking maternal employment to increased delinquency among daughters, positing it is a variant on the liberation hypothesis. This unsupported hypothesis posits that women's crime increases with labor force participation (see Heimer 2000). McCarthy, Hagan, and Woodward (1999) provide a discussion of this critique.

² When the variables are centered to reduce the potential for multicollinearity (Aiken and West 1991), the substantive results are the same as those reported.

³ Age, sex, race, and behavioral histories are measured at wave 1; all other variables are measured at wave 2. When delinquency is measured at wave 3 (to better assess the temporal arguments), the substantive findings are the same as those reported. Delinquency at wave 2 is better suited for this study, given the advanced age of the youths at wave 3 and that delinquency peaked during the second wave (see Hay et al. 2006).

⁴ I conducted sensitivity analyses controlling for job characteristics by including controls for Edwards's (1979) job fractions, which capture authority, skill levels, and job unionization. These controls do not alter the substantive results and do not exert independent influences in the model, consistent with Vander Ven et al.'s (2001) finding that mothers' job characteristics do not impact delinquency when structural positions are controlled.

⁵ Consistent with other research, differentiating between part- and full-time work does not alter the reported results (Hoffman and Youngblade 1998; Vander Ven and Cullen 2004).

⁶ The majority of mothers did not move from employment to homemaking or vice versa from their children's preschool to final high school years, with 67 percent reporting stability in work status. Stability from preschool to middle school was 83 percent; from middle school to final high school years, 77 percent.

⁷ Use of mother reports raises the issue of whether distressed mothers overreport problems in their children. While some studies find that mothers' reports are not influenced by her distress, others find that distressed mothers report more problems in their children than other informants, such as teachers (Breslau, Davis, and Prabucki 1988; Johnston and Krech 1991). Despite mixed evidence, surveys of mental health professionals show that they view mothers as the best informants of childhood problems (Loeber, Green, and Lahey 1990). Thus, research has relied on parents for reports of childhood problems (McLeod et al. 1994; Cooksey et al. 1997). An analysis of the relationship between teacher and mother reports of youths' problems in the current data shows they are highly correlated and that both reports are related to maternal distress. Substitution of the teacher reports of behavioral problems in the model does not alter the reported substantive results.

⁸ Although there are additional parenting measures available in the NSC—including measures of positive reinforcement—inclusion of multiple parenting measures in the model results in multicollinearity. A series of reduced models with various parenting measures considered individually confirm the theoretically derived decision to emphasize emotional attachments and power-assertive discipline as positive and negative parenting practices. That is, these parenting variables are the only ones that exert significant impacts on delinquent peers and delinquency. Hay et al. (2006) created a summary scale of the parenting variables and assessed the impact of this scale on delinquency. The present research demonstrates, however, that these items do not factor together and that, indeed, combining measures masks important differences in, for instance, how maternal distress impacts emotional attachments versus power-assertive discipline.

⁹ I focus on mothers' parenting for several reasons. First, studies reveal that although fathers' participation in parenting increases when mothers work, mothers continue to be primarily responsible for the discipline and control of youths (Berk 1985; Aldous, Mulligan, and Biarnason 1998). Second, Vander Ven et al.'s (2001) study focuses on mothers' parenting, power-control theory emphasize mothers as the instruments of control (Hagan 1988), and some research indicates that maternal attachments are more important predictors of delinquency than are paternal attachments (see Krohn and Massey 1980). Finally, there are much more missing data on the father variables than on other variables in the analyses. Nonetheless, I conducted additional analyses to assess father parenting. Because strong correlations between the parenting variables for mothers and fathers do not permit assessment of father and mother discipline as separate factors, I first assessed a model with latent constructs for mother/father power-assertive discipline and mother/father emotional attachments. In a second model, I omitted mothers' parenting and included only fathers' parenting. The substantive results from both models mirror the reported results.

¹⁰ To assess potential selection effects, I estimated a reduced model of reciprocal effects between maternal employment and maternal distress, which provides primary support to the causation hypothesis. In addition, the control for changes in maternal work status from the child's preschool to high school years allows for some control of selection in and out of the labor market.