Examining the personality dimensions of adolescents in the light of the perfectionist persistence to excel as a trait based on their mothers' occupati

Introduction Life provides multitude of-colours - with emotions, thought processes and different response patterns serving as constituents of the paint-brush. This is nature. Some are soothing and calming to the individual while the rest offer coarser, darker and lurking edges. Be it beauty, nicety, sense of well-being or else threat, danger, misery, anxiety, and worry - life has all components together. They exist because they are being perceived by the living agents - the humans. Being the most rational creature of the universe, human beings possess the sensory equipments, perceptual processes and associative meanings. Their interpretative ability initiates life-styles of distinctive kinds. This interpretative angle is dependent not only on intellectuality but emotional acceptance or non-acceptance too. Intelligence prompts us to analyze the situation; emotions aid us in its acceptability. It is to be understood that mothering plays an eminent role in this context. It is the unique bond shared by the ‗mothering' person and the individual which serves as the template for the quality of interpersonal relationships later on in his/ her life. The need had been palpably felt by the researcher to probe into the nuances of mothering in terms of its effects, if any, on certain personality correlates of their adolescent offspring, based on nature of maternal occupation. The present thesis delves into such an arena along with allied associated constructs to unfurl the personality dynamics of adolescent offspring of such mothers. 1.1 Mother: The primary nourisher in children's lives Within the existential bond of human relationships, mother-child dyad seems to be the most cherishable one in physical, developmental and emotional tunes. Of the myriad glittering facets of womanhood, it is generally said that the experience of motherhood completes the cycle of sensing and feeling the woman-contents explicitly. In a healthy context, mothers are outstanding personalities in one's life. They are the source of our existence, they are the best protectors, crusaders against the predators in life, they are ‗all embracing' in terms of warmth - the providers of unconditional love to develop ‗trust' in external life. To the infant, mother appears as a ―global, inchoate, all-embracing presence,‖ as unbounded and amorphous, as the ―monolithic representative of nature‖ (Dinnerstein, 1976),