Microsoft Word Socialized Choices 31-12 pod docx

Chapter 8 - Synthesis: overview and discussion 
195 
reveal that the ‘false’ starts they made as young adults seemed  hard  to  restore 
later in life. Yet, this classification does not do justice to their aspirations as 
mothers, which were often clear, decisive, and frequently appeared successful. 
Mothers who have a small part-time job (16-24 hours) while also suiting the 
Dutch gender norm of parental self-care, were referred to as the ‘privileged’, most 
importantly because they considered themselves privileged.  Mothers with a large 
part-time job and also trying to fulfil the parental norm of self-care to the very 
best of their abilities,  could be characterised as ‘balancers’. Mothers with full-
time jobs, with the most perceived behavioural control, and (almost) symmetrical 
gender roles with their partners, were called the ‘ambitious’.   
Within a cross-sectional study it is impossible to find out how easy and often 
mothers are able to switch from one category into another. Their narratives 
disclosed that mothers do sometimes move from one category to another, but 
such a move often seemed temporary, and they later returned to their original 
paths relatively quickly. For example, some ambitious mothers could in the spirit 
of the moment give up their job, because they were so ‘fed up’ with work. Yet, 
this decision does actually suit an individual with much perceived self-control. 
And, as their narratives continued, it became clear that they were just as able to 
pick up their full-time career paths again.  
The extent to which mothers’ different employment choices are released from 
society’s ties, as is argued by post-modernist theories, seems open to debate. 
Stay-at-home mothers described how they were for various reasons not able to 
work their preferred number of hours: they were led by negative (work) 
experiences and by their partners’ ‘neutral’ attitudes towards their work 
ambitions, which seemed decisive in directing them towards their role as full-time 
homemakers.   Stay-at-home mothers also experienced a tension between their 
own ambivalent decision to give up work and societal expectations to work part-
time. “Stay-at-home parents expressed feeling society’s disappointment for not 
doing more challenging and interesting work” (Zimmerman, 2000, p.343). 
In addition, we should also question the extent to which it really is a free 
choice when mothers ‘choose’ a life that fits society’s moral standards perfectly, 
while working a small number of hours and being a good and present mother as 
well, such as is the situation for the class of privileged mothers. And how do we 
perceive the choice when mothers try to combine motherhood and work to the 
maximum, and thereby sacrifice leisure time and sleep, while they still carry the 
main responsibility for the domestic unpaid tasks, and evidence of movement 
towards equal role sharing at the home is limited to only a small group of 
mothers? The findings lead to the conclusion that Dutch mothers’ heterogeneous 
labour market behaviour cannot be understood as simple and varied expressions 
of free choice, but rather as the mostly intentional, but also unintentional, 
outcomes of mothers’ diverse – though always engendered – perceptions of 
dominant norms, possibilities and constraints. 

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Socialized Choices - Labour Market Behaviour of Dutch Mothers  
196 
8.4 
A mother’s general gender values and personal gender and 
work attitudes are influenced by parental socialization during 
childhood 
The second important theoretical starting point of this study is socialization 
theory, of which main components will be recalled here briefly. Socialization 
theory focuses on the social relational context in which specific normative 
standards and expectations are socially transmitted. People make societal norms 
and values their own, internalizing them, by learning from others what is to be 
expected of them in the social system (Wallace and Wolf, 2006, p.28; also Berger 
and Luckmann, 1967). When full internalization has occurred, the presented 
norms and values exist, and are easily accessible within the person herself, so that 
they no longer need to be presented by the socializing agents.  According to 
Bandura (1977), most modelled behaviour is learned through the medium of 
imaginable (visual imagery or mental associations with, for example, the person 
who was modelling the behaviour) and verbal coding, referred to as mental and 
verbal symbols (Bandura, 1977, p.33). If the association with specific symbols to 
behaviour is firmly built and stored in memory, observing the association will be 
strong enough to recall the ‘learned’ behaviour, which will happen automatically 
and outside of their awareness. Subsequently, one exhibits imitative behaviour 
without considering the underlying processes (Bandura, 1977). 
Childhood is viewed as the most important formative period in life, in which 
the basic structure of the individual’s social world (base-world) is built, with 
which it will compare all later situations (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; 
Everingham et al., 2007). Socialization is only possible when the parents or 
others who take care of the new-born, have an interest - whether automatically or 
enthusiastically - in developing the child. This interest can be expressed through 
various kinds of emotional appraisals, like ‘good child’ or ‘good behaviour’ and 
‘bad child’.  These initial appraisals construct the beginning of the self: the ideas 
a person has of himself are, at first, ideas an individual gains from others about 
himself (Handel, 2006, p.15). Primary socialization is a particularly influential 
process, because a child experiences no problem of emotional identification, 
necessary for internalization, since the parents are the only significant others in 
the world of a child and the parental daily practices are taken-for-granted and feel 
‘natural’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1967, p.154). 
The concern of the study was to disclose which, if any, parental norms, 
values, attitudes and modelling behaviour have shaped mothers’ present personal 
gender and work attitudes and general values. Firstly, the quantitative findings 
demonstrated a significant relationship between parental transmission of work life 
attitudes, like “work is a means to earn money” and “caring for others is 
important” and Dutch mothers’ current traditional/adaptive gender values and 
ideal family life, respectively.  Interestingly, the qualitative findings revealed that 
mothers with traditional/adaptive gender values and attitudes actually did not 
clearly remember their parents transmitting any of these values. What is 

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