Motherhood & Mental Health Through the Occupational Lens: A Study on the Mediating Effects of Occupation on Maternal Depression

Abstract

Although motherhood is an incomparably beautiful and meaningful experience, it does not come without repercussions on the mental health of mothers. Such adverse effects are most apparent when observing two particular aspects of motherhood: the event of childbirth and the concept of family size. Given the growing prevalence of working mothers today, however, it is crucial that we discuss these realities of motherhood in conversation with the professional dimension of women’s lives. There has been a plethora of studies that have already entertained this discussion, particularly examining the mental health of working mothers in response to general aspects of their careers, such as exploring how maternal depression can be mediated by maternity leave duration, coworker support, and workplace safety, for example. However, there has yet to be any study that extends those scholarly discussions to examine in detail how working within different occupations could affect the mental health of women as they navigate through motherhood. This is the gap that I wish to fill with this paper. More specifically, this paper aims to explore whether occupational differences have any mediating effects on the relationship between motherhood and maternal depression. Using the NLS Mature and Young Women sample from 1982-1993, I explore this question through a series of OLS and Fixed Effects regressions, explicitly analyzing the relationship between the rate of maternal depression and the two factors of motherhood (i.e., the event of childbirth and the number of children per mother). Although a statistically significant correlation between the event of childbirth and the rate of maternal depression cannot be detected for this particular dataset, it has been found that there is a significant positive and causal relationship between the number of children per mother and the likelihood of depression. When considering this causal relationship through the lens of occupational differences, it has been found that while the results are not quite statistically significant, it can still be observed that the magnitude of the adverse consequences of motherhood on mental health is greatest for those in Service and Labor occupations than it is for those in Professional and Clerical occupations. All of this suggests that there is a potential for occupation to have a mediating role in the relationship between motherhood and mental health. Furthermore, these results suggest that mothers working in Service and Labor occupations may be relatively worse off than their counterparts in other professions. These results align with the fact that workers in Service and Labor occupations face the most inferior working conditions and have the lowest rate of access to employee benefits, such as paid family leave, which may be an explanation for why women in those careers are more susceptible to maternal depression. From such findings, it is my hope that this paper will justify the importance of achieving universal paid family leave benefits for all working mothers, regardless of their occupational differences.