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Title: Early Maternal Employment and Child Outcomes: A Longitudinal Analysis of Children from the NLSY
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Waldfogel, Jane Han, Wen-Jui Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne |
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Early Maternal Employment and Child Outcomes: A Longitudinal Analysis of Children from the NLSY Presented: Los Angeles, CA, Population Association of America Meetings, March 2000 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: Population Association of America Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Breastfeeding; Employment History; Ethnic Differences; Fathers, Presence; Hispanics; Maternal Employment; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. This paper investigates the long-term impact of early maternal employment on children's cognitive and behavioral outcomes, using data on 1872 children from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). We analyze non-Hispanic white, African American and Hispanic children separately and find that the effects of early maternal employment on later cognitive outcomes vary by race/ethnicity. For the non-Hispanic white children, employment in the first year of life has small but persistent adverse effects on cognitive outcomes even after controlling for poverty and other maternal and child characteristics, while employment in the second or third year of life has a small but persistent positive effect: having a mother who worked in the first year of life is associated with a 3-point lower score on the PPVT at ages 3 or 4, and a 2- to 3-point lower score on the PIAT Math and PIAT Reading Recognition at ages 5 or 6, and 7 or 8, while employment in the second or third years is associated with a 2- or 3-point higher score on most of these measures. These negative effects of first-year employment on cognitive outcomes, and positive effects of subsequent employment, are not found for the Africa-American children, while the results for the Hispanic children are mixed. The results for behavior problems also vary by race and ethnicity. For non-Hispanic white children, first-year maternal employment is associated with somewhat higher levels of internalizing problems at age 4 while second or third year employment is associated with lower levels of internalizing and externalizing problems at age 4, but all these effects fade out by age 7 or 8. For African-American children and Hispanic children, we found no significant effects of first, second, or third year employment. |
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Bibliography Citation
Waldfogel, Jane, Wen-Jui Han and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn. "Early Maternal Employment and Child Outcomes: A Longitudinal Analysis of Children from the NLSY." Presented: Los Angeles, CA, Population Association of America Meetings, March 2000. |