is doing. Parents who are invested in controlling the behavior of the young person manage to gain knowledge without their child even confiding in them, by other means. Some effects, however, are indirect, through what their child is willing to tell them about what he or she is doing; this is true for both mothers and fathers.
Thus, we see the interplay between control and connection: sensitivity promotes the young person’s confidence, intrusiveness inhibits it. The warmth of the relationship and the absence of intrusive strategies provide the relational basis for the adolescent’s trust and confidence, which then enhance parents’ knowledge of what their child is really doing. This is what protects against affiliation with deviant peers and the development of externalized problems.
As for the prevention implications of these phenomena, we know that addressing this relational dimension is most important in family environments that are not too “at risk”. In contrast, in very disadvantaged environments, the direct effects of behavioral control are more important.
Other works (Assailly 2007) highlight a more complex modeling of sources and their influences, distinguishing between paternal and maternal functioning. Fathers have more indirect ways of gathering information than mothers, and the strategies are dependent on various factors, such as the number of hours at work. When fathers get information from mothers, this seems to be linked to a lesser involvement of the young person in risky behaviors. This is a system not only of communication between the child and the parents but also of how parents communicate with each other.
On the other hand, adolescents feel more compelled to disclose safety issues than more personal issues. Adolescent boys and girls confide more in their mothers than in their fathers, especially about personal matters: overall, 60% of adolescents confide in their mothers, 20% in their fathers and 20% in neither (Choquet and Com-Ruelle 2003). Girls confide in their mothers more than boys, but mothers overestimate the extent to which their daughters confide in them, which they do not do about their sons.
As for addiction, the paradox is that parents whose children actually use illicit drugs underestimate the phenomenon more than parents whose children do not use them. The former also overestimate the control they have over the phenomenon. The underestimation is even greater for alcohol.
We can see that awareness-raising activities should be carried out, because it is the parents who are most concerned who paradoxically feel the least concerned. When there is a discrepancy between what parents and adolescents report about risky behavior (sexuality, psychoactive substances, violence), there is a link between parents’ overestimation of their child’s real involvement in risky behavior at a given time and the child’s greater involvement in such behavior later on. It is as if overestimation also acts as a risk factor.
Is it because young people, confronted with their parents’ overestimation, see it as a lack of confidence, a factor that will push them into risk and make their parent’s judgment “prophetic” (“since you think I am going to do it so much, then I am going to do it”)? Or is it because parents have good intuition and “guess” in advance what their children will do later? Or even, do the characteristics of the family’s social environment lead both to parents overestimating and young people engaging in risky behaviors later on?
Similarly, accurate parental knowledge is sometimes more harmful than underestimation if parents become more authoritarian and the relationship with their child suffers. We must work not only on this issue of the concordance between what the parents and the adolescent know but also on the parents’ reaction modes to the disclosure of their children’s dangerous behaviors.
For example, when their child does well in school, parents tend to underestimate his or her risky behaviors. Is it because of the “reassurance” of schooling that parents relax their control, which ends up being harmful? We know that teenagers who do well in school are not the ones who confide in others most.
We see how this issue of disclosure and secrecy is complex: parental knowledge can be a protective factor, but parents believe they know more than they actually do. Their knowledge depends on aspects of life, the age and sex of the child and differences between generations.
Thus, parental knowledge of various behaviors will determine their reactions. For example, there may be a lot of conflict about smoking, because smoking is not considered serious on either side, so it will be less hidden, whereas the young person will make much more of an effort to hide other behaviors related to illicit drugs or sex.
Conversely, parents, no doubt overly focused on the dangers of illicit drugs, will communicate much more about these and forget to communicate about the dangers of tobacco. These communication patterns are passed from generation to generation.
In conclusion, and contrary to the old maxim, “children should be seen but not heard”, we note that parental supervision must not be too rigid, fussy or intrusive, because, in this case, the child will no longer confide in them, and it is this absence of confidence that will become the causal factor of risky behavior. This is an environmental transaction and parents must be careful, in their words and actions, so as not to block their child’s communication with them.
1.11. Maternal employment in early childhood
Employment rates of mothers have increased substantially in recent decades, with this increase being particularly noticeable among mothers of young children under the age of five. Much of this growth occurred in the 1970s. However, the mid-1990s saw an increase in the employment rate of low-income single mothers.
The issue of mothers returning to work or entering the workforce shortly after childbirth has been a source of great concern to parents, policymakers and researchers and has prompted numerous analyses of the impact of early maternal employment on child development.
Developmental psychologists first voiced their concerns in the 1980s in a series of highly discussed and debated papers by Belsky (1988, 1990). In these papers, he highlighted that more than 20 hours per week of out-of-home day care poses risks to the infant–mother relationship and to psychological and behavioral adjustment during infancy, preschool and early elementary school.
It was against this backdrop of such dramatic changes in motherhood, employment, child care and a heated debate about its effects on child development and on society in general that a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and an Early Child Care Research Network were established in the United States.. This network centered its work on the question of whether early child care before the age of five was associated with risks or benefits to child development.
At the same time, economists were focusing on how children are impacted by choices about employment, in particular on two resources important to children’s well-being: parents’ time and money. Economists suggested that parents may invest more in their child’s development, because more income from working is available to purchase material resources (such as books, toys or healthy food) and non-monetary goods (such as access to leisure activities). However, working longer hours may limit the time available for children (and thus the bond). This view therefore suggests that there will be trade-offs when mothers work, between increased income and reduced time with their children.
Together, these views suggest that mothers’ entry into the workforce when their children are young poses particular challenges to their development. Consequently, the trade-off between maternal employment, particularly in the first year of a child’s life, and the effects on children are important empirical questions.
Literature on the subject (Im 2018) suggests that young children in low-income settings are affected by maternal employment and that these effects differ according to paternal involvement; maternal employment in the early years is associated with adverse effects on aggressive behavior and internalized problems in young
