Anonymous wrote:OP here. I've never before posted anything on the WOHP/SAHP debate, but I happened upon this article in my Sunday morning reading and decided to post here since I know it's a popular topic. I thought it might be reassuring to both working moms who feel guilty for working, as well as SAHMs who might rather being working at least part-time but worry about detrimental effects on their children.
As I mentioned in my original post, I'm in a different but related field where years ago I had to be acquainted with studies on maternal employment and its effects on child-related outcomes. I decided to do a quick search just now on the current research since I was curious, and have posted citations for a few more studies below. I did find some older studies that found that maternal employment was harmful for children on some variables (e.g., behavioral problems, vocabulary). However, below is a sampling of more current studies (although by no means a comprehensive review of the literature; I just thought these were interesting).
I'm sorry if some of the language in the abstracts below is a bit technical--I've bolded the main findings in each study for ease.
1) Wills, J. B., & Brauer, J. R. (2012). Have children adapted to their mothers working, or was adaptation unnecessary? Cohort effects and the relationship between maternal employment and child well-being. Social science research, 41(2), 425-443.
Drawing on previous theoretical and empirical work, we posit that maternal employment influences on child well-being vary across birth cohorts. We investigate this possibility by analyzing longitudinal data from a sample of children and their mothers drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We introduce a series of age, cohort, and maternal employment interaction terms into multilevel models predicting child well-being to assess whether any potential short-term or long-term effects of early and current maternal employment vary across birth cohorts. Results indicate that maternal employment largely is inconsequential to child well-being regardless of birth cohort, with a few exceptions. For instance, children born in earlier cohorts may have experienced long-term positive effects of having an employed mother; however, as maternal employment became more commonplace in recent cohorts, these beneficial effects appear to have disappeared. We discuss theoretical and methodological implications of these findings.
2) Chatterji, P., Markowitz, S., & Brooks-Gunn, J. (2013). Effects of early maternal employment on maternal health and well-being. Journal of population economics, 26(1), 285-301.
This study uses data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study on Early Child Care to examine the effects of maternal employment on maternal mental and overall health, self-reported parenting stress, and parenting quality. These outcomes are measured when children are 6 months old. Among mothers of 6-month-old infants, maternal work hours are positively associated with depressive symptoms and parenting stress and negatively associated with self-rated overall health. However, maternal employment is not associated with quality of parenting at 6 months, based on trained assessors' observations of maternal sensitivity.
3) McMunn, A., Kelly, Y., Cable, N., & Bartley, M. (2011). Maternal employment and child socio-emotional behaviour in the UK: longitudinal evidence from the UK Millennium Cohort Study. Journal of epidemiology and community health, jech-2010.
Background Mothers of young children are increasingly combining paid work with childrearing. Empirical evidence on the effects of maternal employment on children is contradictory and little work has considered the impact of maternal employment within the context of the employment patterns of both parents. Methods Data on parental employment across three sweeps (when children were in infancy, age 3 and age 5 y) of the Millennium Cohort Study, a large nationally representative prospective birth cohort study, were used to investigate the relation between parental employment and child socio-emotional behaviour at age 5 years independent of maternal education, maternal depression or household income. The cumulative effect of maternal employment across the early years was investigated. The impact of maternal employment in the first year of life was separately examined as a potentially 'sensitive period'. Results There was no evidence of detrimental effects of maternal employment in the early years on subsequent child socio-emotional behaviour. There were significant gender differences in the effects of parental employment on behavioural outcomes. The most beneficial working arrangement for both girls and boys was that in which both mothers and fathers were present in the household and in paid work independent of maternal educational attainment and household income. Conclusion No detrimental effects of maternal employment in the early years were seen. There were important gender differences in relationships between parental working arrangements and child socio-emotional outcomes.
4) Lombardi, C. M., & Coley, R. L. (2014). Early maternal employment and children’s school readiness in contemporary families. Developmental psychology, 50(8), 2071.
This study assessed whether previous findings linking early maternal employment to lower cognitive and behavioral skills among children generalized to modern families. Using a representative sample of children born in the United States in 2001 (N = 10,100), ordinary least squares regression models weighted with propensity scores assessed links between maternal employment in the 2 years after childbearing and children's school readiness skills at kindergarten. There were neutral associations between maternal employment and children's school readiness, which were not differentiated by maternal time, stress, or wages. However, as nonmaternal household income decreased, maternal employment begun prior to 9 months was linked with higher cognitive skills, while employment begun between 9 and 24 months was linked with lower conduct problems.
5) Hsin, A., & Felfe, C. (2014). When Does Time Matter? Maternal Employment, Children’s Time With Parents, and Child Development. Demography, 51(5), 1867-1894.
This study tests the two assumptions underlying popularly held notions that maternal employment negatively affects children because it reduces time spent with parents: (1) that maternal employment reduces children’s time with parents, and (2) that time with parents affects child outcomes. We analyze children’s time-diary data from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and use child fixed-effects and IV estimations to account for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that working mothers trade quantity of time for better “quality” of time. On average, maternal work has no effect on time in activities that positively influence children’s development, but it reduces time in types of activities that may be detrimental to children’s development. Stratification by mothers’ education reveals that although all children, regardless of mother’s education, benefit from spending educational and structured time with their mothers, mothers who are high school graduates have the greatest difficulty balancing work and childcare. We find some evidence that fathers compensate for maternal employment by increasing types of activities that can foster child development as well as types of activities that may be detrimental. Overall, we find that the effects of maternal employment are ambiguous because (1) employment does not necessarily reduce children’s time with parents, and (2) not all types of parental time benefit child development.
6) Goldberg, W. A., & Lucas-Thompson, R. G. (2014). College Women Miss the Mark When Estimating the Impact of Full-Time Maternal Employment on Children’s Achievement and Behavior. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 0361684314529738.
The goals of the current study were to apply the construct of stereotype accuracy to the domain of college women’s perceptions of the effects of full-time maternal employment on children. Both accuracy/inaccuracy and positive/negative direction were examined. Participants were 1,259 college women who provided stereotyped projections about the effects of full-time employment on children’s IQ scores, formal achievement tests, school grades, and internalizing and externalizing behavior problems. Their stereotype effect sizes were compared to meta-analytic effect sizes used to estimate the “actual” effects of maternal employment on children. Individual differences in these stereotypes were also examined. Results indicate that, on average, college women overestimated the negative effects of full-time maternal employment on child outcomes, especially behavior problems. Significant variability in the direction and accuracy of the stereotypes was explained by individual characteristics such as gender ideology, extrinsic work values, and beliefs about the costs of maternal employment. Concerns are that college-educated young women may retreat from the labor force due to stereotypes about the effects of their future employment on children. Efforts by researchers, practitioners, and policy makers should be directed toward disseminating accurate information and dispelling myths about the likely impact of maternal employment on children’s development.
OP here. Reposting my earlier post above in case anyone missed it. I posted a sampling of studies that overall seem to suggest that there are not many differences between having a SAHP and a WOHP on a number of different outcomes of interest (intelligence, child well-being, etc.).
I posted the original Post article hoping it would do more good than harm for those reading. Specifically, I hoped that both mothers that feel guilty about working, and SAHMs who feel guilty about contemplating a return to work, would feel reassured that studies suggest that quality of parental engagement matters more than spending all of your available time with your child(ren). I figured that those who are either happily working or happily staying at home need not read the above, as this is targeted more so to those who may be conflicted about working.
Of course there are extreme cases of parents working crazy hours and not seeing their kids at all, but in the aggregate these data seem to suggest that if kids have a warm, stable environment during the early years, even infancy, that this is what is most important for their later wellbeing.
Of course, there will be some people who read the above and completely disregard the data and choose what they want to believe, as is the case with those who choose not to believe the data re: the safety of vaccines. I didn't post the above data for this group, since there's no convincing them. I posted this solely for parents who might be reassured by the above.
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I am afraid I need more enlightenment. Can you please define what you mean by broken English, since apparently you didn't mean English as spoken by non-native speakers?