Common sense -- and a full body of sociological research -- suggest
that comparing yourself to a more accomplished person will deflate your
self-esteem. But when Deborah Carr, Ph.D., an assistant professor of
sociology at the University of Michigan, examined 611 middle-aged women
who considered themselves less successful than their daughters, she found
that those appraisals had a "negligible" effect on their psychological
well-being. How did they do it? Artistic license.
The study, "My Daughter Has a Career; I Just Raised Babies," used
data gathered when the women were ages 18, 36 and 53, plus interviews
with 16 mothers at age 59. Carr found that they developed
"self-protective" strategies to rationalize the generation gap.
The mothers attributed their daughters' success to education and
career planning as well as talent and motivation. They also emphasized
the downside: In pursuing careers, their daughters had created lives that
were more stressful and unhappy than their own.
But Carr's study, presented to the Gerontological Society of
America, revealed some contradictions. Almost half the women were
encouraged to attend college when they graduated from high school in
1957, and they had an average of 13 years of education, only one year
less than their daughters. Seventy percent were employed at age
35.
"They were telling stories as if they were the quintessential June
Cleaver," explains Carr. "But they weren't." She expected the women to
ascribe their daughters' success to social changes in the 1960s and
1970s.
"But none of the mother's talked about the women's movement," says
Carr. "They focused on aspects of their own lives that made them feel
good."
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