With an increasing proportion of women working in the paid labour force over the last 40 years, researchers have long been debating the effects of this trend on child development. The crux of the debate centers on whether the mother's time with the child is more valuable than the income she earns in the labour force. A mother's time spent interacting and reading to her child is thought to promote better outcomes in her children. But income provides the child with the necessities of living and a good education. Researchers have some difficulty on agreeing if the mother's commitment to the labour force might have some negative effects on how much time she spends with her child.
This research paper addresses some crucial questions around this topic. First, does maternal employment have positive or negative implications for children's well-being independently from both child and family background characteristics that make some women more likely to work? Second, do better outcomes for children actually reflect differences between families? Third, do better outcomes for children appear to be more strongly related to income from earnings than to income from government transfers?
Results from the NLSCY indicate that the number of weeks worked in the previous year does not have an impact on child behaviour but has a weak negative impact on Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). The amount of money a family earns does not really impact child outcomes but receiving welfare has a strong negative effect on behaviour and PPVT. In addition to this, the parents' human capital variables all have positive effects, whether they operate through education, income, or child-parent interactions such as frequency of reading (particularly non-working mothers). Therefore, making sure young women get good schooling could be a key preemptive measure against cognitive delay and behavioural problems for children.
The most important finding may be a positive one. First, parental work and maternal non-employment do not have direct effects on cognitive outcomes of 4- to 5-year-old children. Second, even if maternal full-time work is associated with higher levels of negative behavioural outcomes (three out of the four scores for the full sample) of 4- to 11-year-old children, these negative effects are small relative to the effects of the other co-variates such as dependency on welfare and family structure.
Although maternal work did not have a large impact on PPVT scores, reading to the child did. Therefore, programs inciting mothers to read to their children often and for a substantial amount of time could be valuable for welfare mothers. For working mothers, substitute care should include reading sessions to children. Given the low caregiver-child ratio in child care facilities, it would be surprising that one to one reading sessions be available. Government programs could be more aggressive in this regard.
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