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Mothers` labor market participation has increased significantly in Korea. This article explores how working mothers in Korea with children under the age of six allocate their time in order to spend time with children, and what substitutes they rely on when they are unable to provide childcare. Mothers who participate in the labor market have begun to narrow the gap in child-care time between themselves and mothers who are full-time homemakers; they often compensate for insufficient care time during the week by increasing care time on weekends and increasing the quality of time spent with their children. Substitute caregivers include grandparents and, to a much lesser extent, fathers, but the burden of childcare has not been effectively shared within the family, and working mothers continue to face significant time pressure.

Kingship (chieftaincy) is an institution that has existed since ancient times in Africa (Kludze, 2000). It is an institution that has played a major role in many Ghanaian ethnic groups as the governor of customary law. Important to traditional authority is the Queen Mother. She is the biological mother or close relation to the chief and offers advice and counsel to him. Today they have many roles in their communities including being diplomats and mediators as well as overseeing the welfare of women and children in the community. Western style social work has been present in West Africa since the 1940's encouraged by the United Nations and the Association of Social Work Educators in Africa. Social workers have been trained in Ghana since 1946 and work in government and non-government organizations. The development of communities and the social welfare of women and children are of concern to social workers as well as to Queen Mothers. In 2002, a group of social work researchers met for ten months to look at the indigenisation of social work curriculum in Ghana with a Queen Mother as part of this group. This article describes the important dialogue between social workers and the Queen Mother concerning their roles in the community with potential future collaboration with each other that would enhance community development. ; Research was funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC)and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

This article explores whether mothers' perceived control over their own workplace flexibility options has any relationship to their satisfaction with their husbands' contributions to household labor in the United States. We hypothesize that flexibility enhances their ability to more adeptly engage in role management in multiple life areas, thus enabling them to be more satisfied with their partners' domestic input as well. We use a unique data set of 1,078 randomly sampled women involved in mothers' organizations that generally attract members based on their current level of participation in the paid labor market. We then link nine distinct workplace flexibility policies with mothers' satisfaction related to their husbands' participation in all household tasks, as well as a subset of female‐typed tasks. We find that across both arrays of tasks, mothers with more perceived control over work‐related schedule predictability and those that had the ability to secure employment again after an extended break had higher levels of satisfaction with their husbands' participation in household labor. In addition, short‐term time off to address unexpected needs was important for all tasks considered together only.

Abstract Background Early childbearing influences women's health. This study aims to examine the effects of socio-demographic factors on nutritional status of early childbearing mothers in Bangladesh based on Body Mass Index (BMI) as the indicator. Methods Data was extracted from Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS)-2011. The survey was performed on 17,842 married women aged 15–49. We focused on early childbearing mothers (age ≤ 24, and who had delivered their first child ≤ 20). Mothers who were underweight (BMI ≤ 18.5 kg/m 2 ) would be further classified into various grades of chronic energy deficiency (CED): mild (17.0 ≤ BMI < 18.5 kg/m 2 ), moderate (16.0 ≤ BMI <17.0 kg/m 2 ), and severe (BMI < 16.0 kg/m 2 ). Multiple logistic regression model was used to examine the effect of socio-demographic factors on nutritional status. Results Mean age of the mothers was 20.49 ± 2.37 years (ranged 15–24 years). The prevalence of underweight among early childbearing mothers was 32.1 % (urban 25 % and rural 35.1 %). Most of the underweight mothers had mild (62.2 %) CED, while the remaining had either moderate (25.9 %) or severe (11.9 %) CED. Multiple logistic regression analysis demonstrated that young mothers from rural areas, poor families, and those who were illiterate or with low level of education, working, and married to unemployed husband were at higher risk for being underweight. Young mothers who had non-caesarean delivered, delivered at home, or married at early age and had more than two children were also at higher risk for being underweight. Conclusions The prevalence of underweight among early childbearing mothers in Bangladesh is very high (32.1 %), associated with the still common practice of teenage marriage. Education level, wealth index, occupation, place of residence, age at first marriage and parity were important predictors for their nutritional status. The government and non-government organizations should take initiatives to reduce the prevalence of underweight mothers in Bangladesh.

ObjectiveThis study examined associations between workplace policies and maternal depression in the context of mothers' relationship status and job characteristics.BackgroundThe associations between workplace policies and postpartum depressive symptoms may differ based on contextual factors that have received little attention in the literature. In this study, these questions are addressed in an understudied sample of low‐income working mothers.MethodParticipants included 95 employed, low‐income mothers who were recruited from prenatal classes in southern New England. Mothers' self‐reported data was collected at five time points from the third trimester of pregnancy through 12 months postpartum. Multilevel structural equation modeling was used to test all study hypotheses.ResultsLength of parental leave and negative spillover interacted to predict levels of depressive symptoms, such that longer leave mattered more in the context of high spillover. A moderated mediation was found, whereby schedule flexibility related to less of an increase in depressive symptoms for single mothers, whereas partnered mothers with greater schedule flexibility experienced an increase in spillover, with no net benefit to depression.ConclusionContextual factors, such as mothers' relationship status and the level of spillover on the job, can influence whether and how much different types of workplace policies can benefit maternal postpartum mental health.ImplicationsEmployers also may ease the transition back to work after parental leave by taking steps to minimize negative work‐to‐family spillover for new mothers. More work needs to be done to enable partnered mothers to experience the mental health benefits of schedule flexibility policies.

In this article, I use radiation-shielding maternity clothes (cloak) as a window to explore motherhood and reproductive uncertainty in urban China. By engaging with literature on scientific uncertainty and intensive mothering, I argue that the scientific uncertainty over the possible negative impact of electromagnetic radiation (EMF) on pregnancy has led to a situation in which uncertainty is being socially reproduced by experts, markets, and policy makers through different media channels. Middle-class mothers do not fully believe that the cloak is scientifically trustworthy. But under the influence of social networks and the ambient awareness of the reproductive crisis related to environmental pollution and the pressures of modern life, middle-class mothers still choose to wear the clothes for a variable period of pregnancy for psychological feelings of safety. In the end, they choose to cloak their pregnancies (to perform responsible motherhood) but immediately claim their suspicions of the cloak (to perform their scientific knowledge).