Mommy Wars: A New Chapter

Dec. 13, 2006 — -- Working women might be gaining acceptance from both their colleagues and their children, but the same kids who say it's OK for Mommy to work full-time away from home might think it's not OK for Daddy to take on a stay-at-home role, says new research.

University of Maryland researchers Melanie Killen and Stefanie Sinno asked 121 children -- boys and girls, ages 7 and 10 -- if they thought it was all right for dads to stay home and take care of kids, while moms work full-time outside of the home. While few children had negative stereotypes about moms working, many more children had negative stereotypes about dads taking care of them.

Even though children thought it would be good for a mother to stay at home, the majority of kids also thought it was good for moms to work. "She likes working and she's probably good at it," said one child.

There were no gender differences among the children's responses -- boys and girls evaluated the situations in a similar way.

In contrast to recent debates about the mommy wars (which pits working moms against stay-at-home moms), researchers found that kids think moms can do both -- work outside the home and be good parents. While women have established a place at the office, however, men haven't established themselves in the house quite as successfully.

For many children, it seems like dads don't know much about how to take care of kids, and this appears to influence children's decisions about what dads should do.

Most kids said that dads should go back to work and not stay at home because "they would probably sit on the couch with potato chips and not much around the house would get done."