Introduction
A women’s leisure style changes abruptly upon the arrival of children because she is no longer only responsible for her personal needs, but the needs of other human beings. Her time is no longer her own; she coordinates eating, sleeping, school, and homework schedules. In addition to juggling these activities, she has a marriage to sustain, as well as her own personal matters. This can be a lot for one person to handle and leaves little time for personal leisure pursuits for any mother. Mothers tend to be hard-workers, as they spread themselves thin amongst all of the children who are dependent upon them for life. This sense of duty a mother feels towards her children is so strong, many mothers may have a hard time feeling justified in taking time out of family life for leisure.
McCombs’ (1991) research tells us that the concept of “locus of control” can be referred to as “self as agent”. In other words, it is up to the individual to decide on his/her own personal endeavors; this is internal locus of control. McCombs (1991) states that “The self as agent can consciously or unconsciously direct, select, and regulate the use of all knowledge structures and intellectual processes in support of personal goals, intentions, and choices" (p. 6). He continues to say, “the degree to which one chooses to be self-determining is a function of one's realization of the source of agency and personal control" (McCombs, 1991, p. 7). A mother, while running a household, probably does not have the benefit of feeling this locus of control that McCombs’ research explores.
Problem
We want to know if the leisure satisfaction of a woman is dependant on the number of children she has. We believe that as a woman has more children, her level of leisure satisfaction decreases.
Working hypothesis. There is a negative correlation between the number of children a stay-at-home mother has living in the home and her level of leisure satisfaction.
Null hypothesis. There is no correlation between the number of children a stay-at-home mother has and her level of leisure satisfaction.
Dependent variable. The level of stay-at-home mothers’ leisure satisfaction.
Independent variable. Stay-at-home mothers.
Definition of Terms
Stay-at-home mothers. Mothers who do not work or go to school.
Mothers. Those who have chil...
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... of the motherhood role. As a mothers’ children begin to grow older and eventually leave the house, “the women seem to recognize a need to return to leisure experiences which focused more on self” (Bialeschki & Michener, 1994, p. 65). A return is made back to the same leisure behavior and habits that existed before, and the mother finally has the chance to participate in all the years of leisure satisfaction that she missed out on.
Conclusion
The study of a woman’s leisure satisfaction is very important to understand. Mothers need to have time when they can be relaxed and enjoy something that they have chosen to do. So much of their lives are bombarded with obligations and responsibilities, which may serve as constraints to leisure. Many studies have been conducted on leisure and its benefits to life and health. Our study will attempt to fill the gap in the research by exploring the relationship of the number of children a mother has and her leisure satisfaction. Since leisure creates so many health benefits we must come to understand a mother’s need for and lack of leisure time. We must understand it so that we may help mothers to satisfy their leisure needs and appetites.
Marks, L. (2006). The Loss of Leisure in a Culture of Overwork. Spirit of Change Magazine.
Many individuals would define leisure as time free from paid work, domestic responsibilities, and just about anything that one would not do as part of their daily routine. Time for leisure and time for work are both two separate spheres. The activities which people choose to do on their spare time benefit their own personal interests as well as their satisfactions. While some people may enjoy one activity, others pay not. Leisure is all about personal interests and what people constitute having a good time is all about. Some may say that the process of working class leisure can be seen to contribute their own subordination as well as the reproduction of capitalist class relations. Self-produced patterns of working class leisure can lead to resistance to such reproduction. This leads to social class relations and inequalities, and the fact that it they can never be completely reproduced in the leisure sphere. This film Home Feeling: Struggle for a Community, gives some examples of the role of leisure within a capitalist society dealing with issues such as class inequalities, and how they are different among various societies.
Evidence suggests that families often enjoyed everyday leisure but in reality working class social life was divided by gender. Married women’s leisure tended to be separate from the public domain and was not very different from work, but was linked with domestic duties and family relations. It was during this period that to survive families had to send their sons and daughters into the labor force to supplement the earnings of the father, while the mother cooked, cleaned, cared for the children and manufactured goods in the home. The typical wage-earning woman of 1900 was young and single.
Through the use of insanity as a metaphor, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, William Blake, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, introduced us to characters and stories that illustrate the path to insanity from the creation of a weakened psychological state that renders the victim susceptible to bouts of madness, the internalization of stimuli that has permeated the human psyche resulting in the chasm between rational and irrational thought, and the consequences of the effects of the psychological stress of external stimuli demonstrated through the actions of their characters.
The Supreme Court is perhaps most well known for the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. By declaring that segregation in schools was unconstitutional, Kevern Verney says a ‘direct reversal of the Plessy … ruling’1 58 years earlier was affected. It was Plessy which gave southern states the authority to continue persecuting African-Americans for the next sixty years. The first positive aspect of Brown was was the actual integration of white and black students in schools. Unfortunately, this was not carried out to a suitable degree, with many local authorities feeling no obligation to change the status quo. The Supreme Court did issue a second ruling, the so called Brown 2, in 1955. This forwarded the idea that integration should proceed 'with all deliberate speed', but James T. Patterson tells us even by 1964 ‘only an estimated 1.2% of black children ... attended public schools with white children’2. This demonstrates that, although the Supreme Court was working for Civil Rights, it was still unable to force change. Rathbone agrees, saying the Supreme Court ‘did not do enough to ensure compliance’3. However, Patterson goes on to say that ‘the case did have some impact’4. He explains how the ruling, although often ignored, acted ‘relatively quickly in most of the boarder s...
“We conclude unanimously that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” (qtd. in Irons 163). Many African-Americans waited to hear this quote from Chief Justice Earl Warren after many years of fighting for better educational opportunities by means of school desegregation. African-Americans went through much anguish before the Brown v. Board of Education trial even took place, especially in the Deep South. Little did they know that what looked like the beginning of the end was just another battle in what seemed like an endless war. Brown v. Board of Education was an important battle won during the Civil Rights Movement; however, it did have a major drawback simply because no deadline existed, an issue that author James Baldwin grasped from the moment the decision was made. The South took full advantage of this major flaw and continued to keep its segregated schools with no intention of ever integrating.
On May 17, 1954, in the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education, the High Court, for the first time in American legal history, challenged the “separate but equal” doctrine previously established in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and outlawed racial segregation in public schools. The decision, igniting fierce debates throughout the country, was met with violence and strong defiance in the South. The years after Brown, however, saw the passing of several important Acts: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Today, Americans remember Brown v. Board of Education as a success in African Americans’ struggle for equal rights, a change of sea tide for the civil rights movement. While Brown deserves its place in American History Books, its direct product – desegregation – is not the ultimate solution to the education for African Americans. Desegregation only amends the system of education. America has to reassess the word “education,” for black Americans and other minority groups to achieve a real equal education.
For Hays, intensive mothering is characterized as child-centered parenting in which the mother, as the supposed primary caregiver, must personally obligate herself to the enhancement of her child’s intellectual capacity (Hays 414). Intensive mothers believe that meeting the needs of their child is intrinsically necessary, even in the expense of their careers, and requires substantial investment of mental, emotional, moral, and physical energy. However, as part of her cynical questioning, Hays emphasizes that the practice of intensive mothering is a social construct that is situated within a specific economic and historical context (Hays 410). Therefore, intensive mothering is neither natural nor
Today, Oliver Brown’s case is deemed one of the most important Supreme Court decisions of the 20th century. Brown’s case is just one of the five cases concerning the issue of segregation in public schools that all make up Brown vs. Board of Education. These five cases include; Brown v. Board o...
Poe endured more than any individual should endure, and experienced so much negativity it was almost inevitable that the theme of insanity would appear in his works. He suffered from an excessive amount of hardships and tragedies throughout his life that placed him on the brink of insanity. The first sign of Poe’s insanity is found in his short story “The Black Cat” where the narrator claims “mad [he] is not”. Present in the state of denial, Poe’s character will say or do anything to relinquish the claim of ...
As a child, many individuals have free time where they can participate in leisurely activities often. Known as the preparation phase, leisure at this point is usually where a child forms relationships and set goals they wish to achieve in the future. This differs drastically from the establishment phase, where an individual is usually too busy to participate in leisure as much. At this phase, leisure is viewed as purposive, such as taking their child to a museum. The focus is generally not focused on just the individual themselves but rather on acting upon their previous goals to successfully reach them. The final phase is known as the reintegration phase where an individual reflects on the course their life has taken due to the preparation and establishing they have done. At each stage, there are constraints and facilitators that affect what an individual may do as leisure. However, there are other cultural and social factors that affect this as well. Ever since ancient times, an individual’s economic status is a factor that has affected their participation in certain leisure activities that they can afford or not. Today, this still occurs as some people can afford to do activities for leisure while others can not. There are other constraints that an individual can face as well based on where they live, their religion and what race they are. It is unfortunate that not all
Edgar Allen Poe may just be both-- a 19th-century genius and a literary lunatic. His tales mentioned here, of mystery and murder, are wrought with insanity, instability and the ramblings and doings of mentally deranged psychopaths. Though his themes are many, and the character motives always up for interpretation, the theme of madness and insanity seem to grab hold of the reader and pull him or her directly into the story. Critic Patrick Mcgrath ends his essay, “Method to the Madness,” by stating, “The reader who’s been successfully enlisted as a kind of psychiatric detective will find herself engaged with minds blind to their own dysfunction, which makes them as rich in complexity as any in our literature.”
The purpose of therapeutic recreation is to enable all individuals to achieve quality of life and optimal health through meaningful experiences in recreation and leisure. In this paper the definition of therapeutic recreation will be discussed as well as what should be included in the definition and what should be rejected. This definition will mainly focus on health and use the Health Promotion Model to further explain my choice to focus on health and well-being. I will also be discussing the importance of inclusion in therapeutic recreation for different learning styles in many environments, and the significance of diversity in the community and what we hope to achieve by being fully inclusive.
The term gothic is often portrayed as dark, mysterious, horrific, and suspenseful. During the eighteenth and nineteenth century gothic writing became a successful genre in the world of fiction. Many fictional works during this time period were gothic and known for being dark and creepy leaving the reader in a state of pleasing terror. Edgar Allan Poe became one of the most popular gothic poets of his time, and mostly known for the unusual and disturbing themes throughout his poems. A common theme throughout his two works, “The Raven” and “The Cask of Amontillado”, was sanity and where the narrator lacked thereof. “The Raven” begins with a man being disturbed by a knock at his door and is eventually driven mad by a raven who can only recite the word “nevermore”. Likewise, Montresor is narrating a murder he committed fifty years previous in “The Cask of Amontillado.” Each of these works, written by Poe, has a dark underlying theme.
In the United States, a third of mothers return to work within three months of childbirth compared to only five percent in other industrialized nations such as Germany, Sweden, and the UK (Berger, Hill, and Waldfogel 29). The rapid return of mothers to the workforce sparked interest in the effects the return has on the child’s behavior and health. The experiments measure the child’s health and development by the amount of time the mother breastfeeds, the immunizations the child receives, their score on a vocabulary test, behavioral problems, and the amount of doctor’s visits (Berger, Hill, and Waldfogel 36). Mothers who returned to work within twelve weeks were less likely to breastfeed their child, provide as many doctor’s visits and immunizations, and there were more noticeable behavioral problems at age four (Berger, Hill, and Waldfogel 39-42). The data is significantly lower for mother’s who work full time within twelve weeks after maternity leave (Berger, Hill, and Waldfogel 43). Therefore, it is proved that the duration of maternity leave is directly correlated with children development and