Making time for kids? Study says quality trumps quantity
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Anonymous
If men and women chose to make that "sacrifice" in roughly equal proportions, you might have a point. But the expectation about 99% of the time is that women will make that sacrifice--in part because the government propagandized the importance of women "being at home" in the 1950's to get them all back out of the workforce and open up the jobs for men. And now we're in this vicious cycle where women are paid less and mommy-tracked and otherwise financially penalized for being mothers while facing vastly disproportionate societal pressure to intensively parent (at the cost of personal time for the mother)....which makes it easier for women to "make the sacrifice" to stay home--after all, they get paid less, face a glass ceiling, and are stressed out from the expectations associated with raising kids and keeping house. I wish there were more studies that said you shouldn't feel pressure to SACRIFICE yourself. |
Anonymous
Could you please refrain from using such loaded language? A child spending time with a nanny, a small in-home daycare, or other comparable option is not "warehoused." In this economy, dropping out of the workforce may not end up being "such a small amount of time." The news is full of people who have been laid off and have spent the past several YEARS trying to find any sort of job. There are plenty of us who work and still love our children every single bit as much as you do. To imply otherwise is insulting. If you didn't mean to be, then I'm asking to consider your words more carefully. If you did mean to insult all women who made a different choice, then I'm asking you to consider a whole lot more about yourself. |
Anonymous
I think your response is beautifully written and heartfelt. As a mom who's been in the education profession a long time, I agree that many of us need to work. Nonetheless, there are a lot of children who spend long periods of time away from their parents because of their parents' decision to pursue an expensive lifestyle. Those couples have every right to make that choice; however, it doesn't negate the fact that they're opting to have others take over much of the parenting role. |
Anonymous
Yes, it does appear that it's easy for you. |
Anonymous
+1 |
Anonymous
Either a certain amount of "quantity" of time does make a difference in a relationship, or it doesn't. The point is that there are great differences in time away from children, depending on a person's job. The study is a poor one in that it doesn't control for those variations. "Quality" time for just a few hours a week with a child is not sufficient, and there are a lot of children in our schools today who verbalize their sadness about it to their counselors, teachers, and school psychologists. |
Anonymous
There is a whole industry devoted to trying to prove childcare harms kids. Read about Jay Belsky and his moneymaking books, etc. There are others too. They've been trying to do it for 50+ years now. There is no conspiracy theory that's somehow magically suppressing this explosive research or something, it's just that there aren't legitimate studies that reach the conclusion you'd like. There are a lot of studies that get to what's associated with good outcomes for children, but daycare is evil just isn't there. |
Anonymous
| Why did this have to devolve to an anti WOHM thread? Unbelievable. There are crappy working moms and crappy stay at home moms. Breathing the same air as your kid all day doesn't per se make you a good mom. |
Anonymous
Because there are a few crazy SAHMs (NOT most) who will grasp at any straw trying to justify their decision. |
Anonymous
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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. |
Anonymous
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P.S. OP again. Sorry for the lengthy above post. Certainly make draw your own conclusions based on the above or similar studies.
My own tentative conclusion is that if there are some women (or men, really) who are in the fortunate position of being able to decide whether to be a SAHP, they should do so if that's what will make them happy and allow them to best take care of their families and contribute to their communities. Also, moms who prefer to work should also feel fine doing so if they enjoy their career, or need to work to pay the bills, and can put their child with a trusted caregiver or high-quality daycare. Of course, there are extreme cases re: working parents--for example, mom mentioned to me recently that her husband sees their young child for only about 30 minutes per day, which I think is too bad (for either mom or dad) although I don't know their circumstances--but in general it seems that maternal employment has limited effects on child-related outcomes. |
Anonymous
I stay at home and don't think this, and I doubt any of my SAH friends do, either. We like it for ourselves and it works for the family, that's all. 
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Anonymous
I will never understand why SOME (not all) stay at home moms seem to need to prove that they love their kids more than working moms do. Such a clear sign of insecurity. I grew up with a full time working mom (after I was ten, she was a single mom), and she and I are still incredibly close and speak on the phone almost daily. SHE raised me--not day care, not school, not camp--though I spent many hours at all of those places. She did. Hers are the values I grew up with --her kindness, her work ethic, her amazing sense of humor, her love. My toddler has been in day care since she was six months old and has had some wonderful caregivers. She has a blast at day care and loves telling me about her day. She's incredibly independent and social, but is very bonded to Mommy and Daddy. In the evenings and on weekends, we read, dance, sing songs, play outside, do puzzles, go to the pool, all the things you do. And I promise you, if you think that your staying at home means that you love your kid more than I love mine, you are profoundly mistaken. |
Anonymous
| This conversation seems to suggest the question is "to work or not to work." I think that in the D.C. area, with the typical long work days and long commutes, the real question is how long are people away in total. For me, if I were to go back to work in the typical job in my field in downtown D.C., my kids would be in school/aftercare from 7:15 am - 6:30 pm. If I could work nearby and work a regular day, they would be in school/aftercare from 8:45am - 5:15pm. That's a huge difference to me. So if people are saying hey, it's no big deal to work, please let us know what kind of hours you work. |
Anonymous
Are you suggesting that mother's work so they can live in a luxurious home? If this is what you think - you need to broaden your horizons. |