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Title: Does Mothers' Employment Affect Children's Development: Evidence from the Children of the British 1970 Birth Cohort and the American NLSY79
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Cooksey, Elizabeth C. Joshi, Heather Verropoulou, Georgia |
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Does Mothers' Employment Affect Children's Development: Evidence from the Children of the British 1970 Birth Cohort and the American NLSY79 Longitudinal and Life Course Studies 1,1 (May 2009): 95-115 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: Longview Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Behavior Problems Index (BPI); British Cohort Study (BCS); Child Care; Child Health; Family Structure; Job Characteristics; Maternal Employment; NCDS - National Child Development Study (British); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading) Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Background The increasing employment of mothers of young children in the UK and the USA is widely believed to affect children adversely. Maternity leave and part-time employment, more common in the UK than the US, are possible offsets. Methods This paper analyses the cognitive and behavioural development of school-aged children by maternal employment before the child's first birthday. Data come from the second generation of two cohort studies: the 1970 British Birth Cohort Study (BCS70) and the US 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth Child (NLSY79). Both contain several outcomes per child, in some cases several children per mother. The hierarchical structure is tackled by multi-level modelling. Each data set supplies a good array of controls for confounding variables (such as maternal education and ability, family history) which may affect labour market participation. Results Similar to other studies, results are mixed and modest. Only two out of five US estimates of maternal employment in the child's first year have a significant (0.05 level) coefficient on child development – negative for reading comprehension, positive for freedom from internalized behaviour problems. None of the estimates were significant for four child outcomes modelled in Britain. Conclusions Despite public opinion to the contrary, our study finds little evidence of harm to school-age children from maternal employment during a child's infancy, especially if employment is part-time, and in a context, such as Britain in the 1990s, where several months of maternity leave is the norm. |
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Bibliography Citation
Cooksey, Elizabeth C., Heather Joshi and Georgia Verropoulou. "Does Mothers' Employment Affect Children's Development: Evidence from the Children of the British 1970 Birth Cohort and the American NLSY79." Longitudinal and Life Course Studies 1,1 (May 2009): 95-115.
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