New Research: Stay-at-Home + Supermoms More Depressed

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Maggie Lange, GoLocalProv Contributor

Working moms, who expect that they “can’t do it all” have lower rates of depression than their stay-at-home counterparts. However women with a “supermom” attitude, who expect they can do everything and do it perfectly, are at greater risk for depression, according to new research presented at the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, by the University of Washington.

This study looked at 1,600 women across the US. These women were all 40 years old, married and represented a sample of both stay-at-home and working mothers. Each of these women had participated in a National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, administered in the Department of Labor as young adults, when they were asked questions like: “A woman who fulfills her family responsibilities doesn’t have time for a job outside the home” or “A woman is happiest if she can stay at home with her children.”

Then, when they were 40, the University of Washington measured their level of depression and discovered that stay-at-home moms and mothers with a "supermom attitude" had more symptoms of depression than working moms who didn’t expect they could have it all.

Accepting not having it all

Dr. Rendueles Villalba, the medical director of the partial hospitalization program in the department of psychiatry at Rhode Island Hospital, said that these findings were consistent with his observations. Villalba leads a recently launched parent partial wellness program that addresses the variety of needs and strains felt by parents who struggle with their children’s physical or mental health or transition periods in general.

Extrapolating from his own experience with patients in the partial program, Dr. Villalba says, “You can err on either side of the spectrum.”

“My experience is that when a person is a stay-at-home mom, a negative consequence is that a person can feel isolated," he says. "A mom may feel intimately connected with their children but disconnected from larger community. This isolation can lead to depression, not just loneliness, but a feeling that you’re not relevant.”

On the other side of a spectrum, he says that there can be equal, but different, levels of strain. “When a person is stretching themselves too far, not accepting the limits of what is possible for a person to accomplish, they set themselves up for a failure."

The study discovered that moms who were more comfortable making tradeoffs, like leaving work early to retrieve kids or hiring some help, had the fewest depression symptoms. Women who expected that work and family would be easily combined without tradeoffs, were more likely to feel they had failed and a sense of guilt they could not manage the work-family balance.

Villalba made reference to a study of airline attendants who had to fake happy during their jobs; the study coined a concept called ‘face-work,’ where the outward appearance consistently did not match with internal feelings. This study concluded that over time, enough superficial niceties would increase blood pressure and stress hormones, despite the appearance of happiness.

“This is relevant to supermom ideal,” says Villabla. “They may be in a type of denial by not accepting that they can’t do it all… When they are not taking care of those limitations they are sort of suppressing their awareness and that they are actually under a lot of stress, which can eventually can lead to a type of depression.”

Love and work

Villabla says that while reading this study, he remembered a maxim from Freud. “One of his famous lines stated that a measure of health is a personal capacity to love and work,” he says, noting that this current study is a modern examination of this axiom.

“Motherhood is about love, raising and loving a child,” he says. “Careers are often about our need to feel industrious and have a sense of agency… This theme of trying to balance love and work has been an enduring dilemma.”