Study: Helpful Dads Damage Mother's Self-Esteem at Home

Article here. Excerpt:

'The competence of diligent dads helping out at home is damaging the self-esteem of "super-moms" who feel caught between work and traditional child-rearing roles, according to a new study revealed by LiveScience.

The University of Texas at Austin interviewed 78 dual-earner couples who had eight-month-old infants, measuring them on two types of self-esteem — self-liking and self-competence.

Researchers asked the parents to talk about their partner's strengths and weaknesses and rated their responses.

They found that among mothers who thought their partners were competent caregivers, the more time those fathers spent alone with their children, the lower the mother's self-competence rating was.

"In American society, women are expected to take a main role in parenting despite increasingly egalitarian sex roles," said study researcher Takayuki Sasaki of the Osaka University of Commerce in Japan.

"Thus, we believe that employed mothers suffer from self-competence losses when their husbands are involved and skilful because those mothers may consider that it is a failure to fulfil cultural expectations," Sasaki said.'