Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol.6, No.1 Publication Date: Jan. 25, 2019 DoI:10.14738/assrj.61.6041. Rizkyanti, C. A., Murty, A. I., & Wahyuni, C. (2019). Has a Mother’s Role been Substituted? A Study of Mother’s Empathy toward their Young Children in Jakarta. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 6(1) 527-536. Copyright © Society for Science and Education, United Kingdom 527 Has a Mother’s Role been Substituted? A Study of Mother’s Empathy toward their Young Children in Jakarta Dr. Charyna Ayu Rizkyanti Faculty of PsychologyUniversity of Pancasila Jakarta Indonesia Dr. Ade Iva Murty Faculty of PsychologyUniversity of Pancasila Jakarta Indonesia Citra Wahyuni, M.Si Faculty of PsychologyUniversity of Pancasila Jakarta Indonesia ABSTRACT Regardless of woman status (whether a housewife or a career woman), the number of mothers who need to employ nannies are increased, particularly in Jakarta. In consequence, the mother’s empathy is needed to detect each changes that could potentially harm children’s physical and psychological healthiness relationship due to different caregivers explain this sentence. The current research aims to investigate mother’s empathy toward their young children in Jakarta, Indonesia. A total of 250 mothers who have children under the age of seven completed the empathy scale that was adapted from The Basic Empathy Scale (BES) by Jolliffe and Farrington (2006). There were 88 mothers with nannies and 159 mothers without nannies participated in this research. All mothers were divided into three categories of working status, i.e full- time mothers (60%), full-time working mothers (32.8%) and part-time working mothers (6.8%). The result revealed that there is significant difference of affective empathy between mothers who have nannies compared to mothers with no nannies. Mothers without nannies were found having higher affective empathy than mothers with nannies. In addition, there is also a difference of cognitive empathy between full time mothers and working mothers where full time mothers show higher mean score than working mothers. This finding implies the significancy of attachment between mothers and children relationship in the interest of developing mothers’ empathy. Through attachment, mothers with nannies might elevate their skill to emphatize both cognitively and affectively, thus, mothers could identify and understand their children’s need more accurately. Keywords: mothers, empathy, affective-cognitive empathy, nannies INTRODUCTION Children violence can occur in many forms, such as sexual, physical, psychological or a combination of any of these. The Global Report 2017: Ending Violence in Childhood stated that 73.7 percent of Indonesian children aged 1-14 years experience violence at home 12 . The Indonesian Child Protection Commission (KPAI) has recorded that there are 4.294 cases of child abuse committed by families and caregivers. It becomes a huge concern while KPAI has also pointed that 75% of children in Indonesia are cared for by another caregivers which might come from people in extended families or official babysitter. A previous research about child abuse had found that 16.67% of sexual abuse is perpetrated by babysitters 23 . In other words, there are many potentially unexpected events could happen when the mother is not around 38 .