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Title: Home Alone: Maternal Employment, Child Care and Adolescent Behavior
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Aizer, Anna
Home Alone: Maternal Employment, Child Care and Adolescent Behavior
Working Paper 807, University of California - Los Angeles, October 2001.
Also: http://www.econ.ucla.edu/workingpapers/wp807.pdf
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79
Publisher: Department of Economics, University of California, Los Angeles
Keyword(s): Adolescent Behavior; Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Behavioral Problems; Child Care; Child Self-Administered Supplement (CSAS); Delinquency/Gang Activity; Deviance; Injuries; Labor Market Outcomes; Maternal Employment

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

As female participation in the labor force continues to grow in the US, so too does reliance on non-parental child care. However, the high cost of child care has impeded the ability of many working mothers to find sufficient child care for their children. As a result, as recently as 1998 over eight million children ages five to fourteen spent time without adult supervision on a regular basis in the US. I examine the effect of the lack of adult supervision after school on panel of school-age children using ordinary least squares and fixed effect estimation. I find that children with adult supervision are less likely to skip school, use alcohol or marijuana, steal something or hurt someone. These findings suggest that expanding after school or child care programs typically geared to preschool age children to accommodate more school age children may have important consequences for their human capital development and labor market outcomes later in life....The information on adolescent behavior and adult supervision is gathered as part of the child/young adult questionnaire of the NLSY administered every other year from 1986-1998. Questions in the survey with respect to supervision and adolescent behavior(skipping school, getting drunk/high, stealing something, and hurting someone badly) refer to the period one year prior to the date of interview. Data on accidents are available for children of all ages and are gathered from the child's mother.
Bibliography Citation
Aizer, Anna. "Home Alone: Maternal Employment, Child Care and Adolescent Behavior." Working Paper 807, University of California - Los Angeles, October 2001.