Blaming the Mother: An Experimental Investigation of Sex-Role Bias in Countertransference

Abstract

Male and female family therapists read bogus case descriptions of families in which a boy or girl was depicted as athletically incompetent or obese and unattractive (i.e., masculine or feminine sex-role inadequate), rendered judgments of mother versus father blame and treatment need, and completed a self-report measure of sex-role attitudes. Mothers tended to be implicated in children's psychopathologies slightly more than fathers, but less so than expected. Therapists who reported traditional sex-role attitudes assigned greater treatment need to mothers of obese-unattractive children than to mothers of athletically incompetent children. Mothers of disturbed girls were regarded as more blameworthy and as requiring treatment more than mothers of identically-described boys. Altogether, the notion of sex-role related clinician bias received only partial support.