ABSTRACT

Background: Researchers have different views about the working status of the mother and its effect on children. Some believe that children of working mothers are getting more suffered and become more neglected as they are not getting enough time to spend with their mother and that may result in development of behavioral problems in children. And some have the opinion that the children of working mother become self conscious, smart, obedient, punctual etc.
Objectives: To assess the performance, behavioural problems of adolescents and working status of mother, to assess the effect of maternal working status on the performance and behavioural problems of adolescents.
Materials and Methods: The effect of maternal working status on behavioural problems and performance among 300 school going adolescents selected by non probability purposive sampling from  2 selected schools at Mangaluru was done using quantitative study approach and descriptive study design. Chi square and fishers exact test statistics were computed to determine significant relationships between variables and p-value was set at 0.05 significant levels.
Results: The study was done among 162 male and 132 female adolescents in the age group of 12-16 years. The findings of the study showed that out of 300 adolescents, 78 mothers of adolescents are working and 222 are not working.  Most of the adolescents 58.0% (174) belonged to normal and 27.7% (83) belonged to borderline and 14.3% (43) belonged to abnormal SDQ score. Though maternal working status was found to have significant effect of on the behavioral problems of adolescents, statically, no association was found between maternal working status and behavioral problems. Maternal working status was found to have significant effect on performance of adolescents. Religion was found to have a significant relation with the behavioral problems of adolescents
Conclusion: The study finding cannot be generalized as the sample size is 300. The findings of the study point to the need for supporting working Indian mothers so that they balance work life as well as personal life effectively and learn to spend quality time with her family and care her children.

Key Words: Working Mothers, Non-Working Mothers, Adolescence, Behavioural Problems, Performance, Mangaluru.

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