Monoparentalidad, trabajo materno y desarrollo psicomotor infantil: Un estudio chileno en niños que asisten a salas cuna en contexto de pobreza

The absence of the father in poverty contexts has been related to difficulties in the exercise of parenting, affecting negatively infants' mental health. Because of the recent social changes, in respect with the participation of women in work and the growth in the number of woman who are managing their homes alone, there has been an increasing interest in comprehending the situation of boys and girls that are entering nurseries and playgrounds in a younger age. This article studies the relation between the infant psychomotor development, the mothers' working day and the family configuration, in a sample of 199 children between ages 8 to 24 months, in a low socioeconomic level who attend nurseries in Santiago, Chile. The psychomotor development of the infants was evaluated with the Scale of psychomotor development 0-24 months (EEDP) of Rodríguez, Arancibia and Undurraga (1976). The information regarding the family configuration and the working day was extracted from the interview to the parents made by the person responsible of the institution. The results show that children who attend nurseries and whose mothers work a complete working day and who come from a single-parent family, score meaningfully lower in psychomotor development than the children whose mothers have a complete working day, but come from a bi-parental families.