Which profession makes it hardest to be a good parent?

"But what I wanted to examine was the extent to which discrepancy between the cultural meanings of a person's occupational and parental identities could impact the psychological well-being of working parents. What we found is, in fact, it does."

The study concluded that lawyers, salespeople, labourers, receptionists, police officers and politicians were regularly met with cynicism about their careers that could damage their parenting skills.

"We use cultural information to define those identities," Mr Walker said. "How people treat us and react to us is based on that cultural information."

"If a person is constantly met with scepticism, he or she can begin to feel stressed because that scepticism will take a toll over time.

“Those parents are always swimming upstream trying to convince people they are, for example, a legitimate parent or a legitimate lawyer."

By comparison, the preconceptions attached to being a professor, doctor, nurse, teacher or principle can help a parent raise their children, the study found.

Study co-author Mary Noonan, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Iowa, said the findings developed traditional analysis of the time and resource constraints felt by working parents.

"I used to think the whole conflict was about time and energy and not so much this internal conflict about identity," she said. "These are pretty exciting results."

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