Working Mothers Raise More Successful Daughters and Empathetic Sons

A mother's guilt never ends.

You can never quite do enough, try juggle enough, be enough in an age where the demands of family, work and (hopefully) a personal life keep you hopping morning, noon and night.

Huffington Post titles tell mothers how to "Be a Working Mom Without Hating Your Life," "End the Mommy Guilt for Good!" and "Conquer Mommy Guilt Once and for All."

But what if you needn't feel so guilty in the first place?

What if the very fact that you're a working mom actually has substantial and meaningful benefits for your children?

A new working paper by Kathleen McGinn and her colleagues for Harvard Business School purports that working mothers are more likely to raise successful daughters and caring, empathetic sons. It's true!

McGinn, the Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration at HBS, conducted the study alongside Mayra Ruiz Castro, HBS researcher, and Elizabeth Long Lingo, an embedded practitioner at Mt. Holyoke College. In their study of the International Social Survey Programme and the results of two surveys called "Family and Changing Gender Roles," conducted in 2002 and 2012, the group found that working mothers may be doing a far better job than they thought.

Among their surprising findings:

Men with mothers who worked outside the home are just as likely to hold supervisory positions in their adult life as those with stay-at-home moms. Women with mothers who worked outside the home, however, are more likely to supervise others at work.
Being raised by a mother who worked outside the home had no effect on a man's adult income, but women raised by working mothers had a higher income than their peers whose mothers stayed home full-time.
Men whose mothers had worked outside the home at any point were more likely to contribute to household chores and the care of family members.
Women raised by a working mother spent more time, on average, with their children than those raised by stay-at-home mothers.
Their definition of a working mother was based on this one question: "Did your mother ever work for pay, after you were born and before you were 14?"

This means working mothers, for the purposes of this study, don't have to be career professionals. Mothers who work part-time, or temporarily, still benefit their children in these ways.

McGinn reassures working mothers that they're doing the family as a whole a lot of good as she notes, "There's a lot of potential guilt about having both parents working outside the home. But what this research says to us is that not only are you helping your family economically -- and helping yourself professionally and emotionally if you have a job you love -- but you're also helping your kids."

And there you have it. Spouses of working moms, grab her some flowers on the way home and be sure to say thank you. She deserves it!

And Moms -- stop being so hard on yourselves.


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Happiness Should Be a Verb

Flourishing should be the new happiness. What most pursue now ignores old wisdom and the logic of our biology. A verb capturing the required recurring effort is better than a noun describing the desired static state--by nature, not a thing we can be or get but that we do. It is perhaps better harvested than pursued. Many see their main goal as maximizing pleasure. But even the ancient hedonists took pains to distinguish between types of pleasure and happiness. They typically thought pleasure was necessary but not sufficient.

Enlightenment thinkers believed that humans were "intended by nature to achieve happiness," as Darrin McMahon notes, requiring only knowledge to overcome ignorance. But Jeremy Bentham increased ignorance by blurring once useful distinctions. In probably the Enlightenment's saddest sin of synonymy, he equated happiness with pleasure for the sake of easier calculations. Many psychologists today remain confused.

Daniel Kahneman writes: "it is logical to describe...life... as a series of moments, each with a value" of positive or negative feeling, and to evaluate an experience by the "sum of the values for its moments." He complains that our brains are illogical in not working that way. But it's futile to wish our physiology was different. We'd be better served by adapting our reason to fit how our biology works.

The field of positive psychology is less confused. Mihly Cskszentmihlyi says "we do not understand what happiness is any better than Aristotle did." His studies of "optimal experience" led to the idea of "an active state of flow," in which a challenging skilled activity, with clear goals and unambiguous feedback, enables concentration to the point of loss of consciousness of self and time.

Such autotelic (done for their own sake) activities are common in sports, music and the arts, but rare when we're passive. Similarly, Martin Seligman distinguishes the raw feelings of easy pleasures from earned "gratifications," which are the longer-lasting rewards of flow-like activities.

This emphasis on effort and skill is more logically consistent with our biology than Bentham and Kahneman's focus on felt pleasure. Our survival has long depended on using second-nature skills. Yeats rightly claimed, "all skill is joyful." Many such joys are adaptive.

As Aristotle knew, life's goals required exercising natural virtues, which now would be better called life skills. Nouns like "happiness" and "well-being" seem too static. Verbs reflecting the required cyclical activity would fit better. Sadly the verb "happies," used in Shakespeare's sixth sonnet, is obsolete. "Well-doing" is more precise than "well-being". And "flourishing" is fitter than "being happy." Victor Frankel believed "happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue."

However difficult to pursue, effective happiness can be harvested. By skilled activity, we can be flourishing.

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