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The supermom trap: Do involved dads erode moms' self‐competence?
Author(s) -
SASAKI TAKAYUKI,
HAZEN NANCY L.,
SWANN JR. WILLIAM B.
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
personal relationships
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.81
H-Index - 83
eISSN - 1475-6811
pISSN - 1350-4126
DOI - 10.1111/j.1475-6811.2010.01253.x
Subject(s) - psychology , competence (human resources) , developmental psychology , social psychology , social competence , social change , political science , law
Increasingly, husbands have been expected to share equally in the task of childrearing, especially when their wives are employed. This study examined reactions to these changes in a sample of 78 dual‐earner couples with 8‐month‐old infants. When wives felt that their husbands were skillful caregivers, greater husbands' contribution to caregiving was associated with lower self‐competence among wives. In contrast, wives' caregiving behavior was unrelated to their husbands' self‐competence. None of these effects emerged for the self‐liking component of self‐esteem. Thus, despite increasingly egalitarian sex roles, employed mothers (but not their husbands) seem to be trapped between their desire for help with childrearing and the threat to their personal competence posed by failure to meet socially constructed ideals of motherhood.