STRESS AND COPING IN THE TRANSITION TO PARENTHOOD OF FIRST-TIME MOTHERS WITH CAREER COMMITMENTS: AN INTERPRETIVE STUDY.
Contributors: University of California, San Francisco.
Published: 1993
Number of pages: 285
Subjects: Sociology, Individual and Family Studies.; Health Sciences, Nursing.; Health Sciences, Obstetrics and Gynecology.
Description: Investigations of working mothers of infants generally treat work and family roles as additive, and stress as inhering in the additive effects of multiple role commitments. In this longitudinal, phenomenological study on stress and coping in the transition to parenthood of first-time mothers with career commitments, stress is understood as the disruption in meanings and smooth functioning engendered by the arrival of a new baby. The study examined how personal, familial and cultural meanings of motherhood and career shaped the study participants' experience of stress during the transition to parenthood. Using an interpretive strategy based on Heideggerian phenomenology and elaborated by Benner (1984a; 1984b), and drawing on the stress and coping theory of Lazarus and Folkman (1984) and Benner and Wrubel (1989), narrative accounts in transcribed interviews were treated as texts for interpretive analysis.

The study sample included 18 women with career commitments and their families. Participants were interviewed antepartally, and at six weeks, four months, and 10-15 months postpartum. Fathers were interviewed once. Two in-home family observations were done on each family. Interviews focused on narrative accounts of transitions such as the early postpartum, finding child care and returning to work; and on particularly stressful incidents.

The meaning and content of work, and of motherhood, and the timing of return to work were found to powerfully shape a career woman's experience of the transition to motherhood. While much research has addressed the effects on infants of mothers' early return to work, little research has examined the effects on mothers, particularly on their "self-trust" (Brazelton, 1985) as caregivers, of the timing of return to work. This study found that returning to work prior to four months postpartum was almost universally stressful. Participants expected that having a baby would add a role to their repertoire, when, in fact, they experienced motherhood as world-transforming. Returning to work was stressful for the mothers who worked in a setting which did not recognize the needs and responsibilities which they now had as mothers. Meaningful work mitigated the stress of returning to work as did the economic importance of a woman's income to the family.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-08, Section: A, page: 3221.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO, 1993.

School code: 0034.