Moms' Self-Esteem Drops When Dads Help Out

Over the past few decades, women with children have created a trend in which they place less emphasis on child-rearing, and more importance on their careers. This has led to many of them leaving their children at home with their dads, which also changed the traditional role that fathers have inside families. But an unexpected consequence of this shift was the fact that women tend to suffer from lower self-esteem these days, due to the fact that they no longer excel at the thing they pride themselves most with, which is being a mom.

If their husbands are savvy caregivers, then women tend to experience a reduced level of trust in their own competences, even if they are unwilling to admit it openly. But childrearing is beginning to be an area of life where men are beginning to excel as well even if they have yet to reach the level mothers are at naturally. One of the main reasons for why this shift occurred is that women's careers tend to keep them away from their babies for long hours, and their role needs to be compensated by someone. In the past, this void was filled by grandparents, but now increasing numbers of men stay at home to look after the youngsters, while their mothers work.

“While mothers are encouraged to join the workforce, socially constructed ideals of motherhood requires mothers to be primary caregivers. Thus, employed mothers may feel pressured to do more care-giving to ensure the survival of their feelings of self-competence, even though they may wish for fathers' increased participation to lessen their burden,” says Takayuki Sasa, a researcher for the new study based in Japan, at the Osaka University of Commerce. The same holds true when men take on other household duties that are traditionally attributed to women.

Some of the luckiest couples managed to work out solutions to this problem, and the results is an approach to childrearing that includes both parents equally. But most still struggle to find this point of balance, to little success. “We by no means assert that women should take the blame for the inequality in division of child care. Some fathers vigorously resist collaborative effort in child care in favor of beliefs in traditional fathers' roles,” the expert explains. Details of the investigation appear in the latest issue of the respected publication Personal Relationships, LiveScience reports.