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Early mothering experience and personality change

Ruth Paris1, Ravenna Helson

  • 1School of Social Work, Boston University, 264 Bay State Road, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA. rparis@bu.edu

Journal of Family Psychology : JFP : Journal of the Division of Family Psychology of the American Psychological Association (Division 43)
|June 28, 2002
PubMed

This study examined the context of the early mothering experience and how that experience was related to personality change in 48 members of a longitudinal sample of women from age 21 (in 1958 or 1960), before any of them were married, to age 27 (in 1963 or 1964). Early motherhood was analyzed in terms of (a) how positively the woman described her experience and (b) how willing and able she was to maintain the full-time commitment considered necessary in the early 1960s. Path analyses showed that these two dimensions had somewhat different interrelations with mother's personality, the marriage, and husband's personality and participation as a father. However, both dimensions were related to relative increase in ego-resiliency and to relative decrease in feelings of vulnerability between ages 21 and 27, even when family and work variables were taken into account.

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