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Title: Parental Employment and Child Cognitive Development
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Ruhm, Christopher J. |
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Parental Employment and Child Cognitive Development Working Paper, Department of Economics, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, September 2002. Also: http://www.uncg.edu/bae/people/ruhm/ Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79 Publisher: Department of Economics, University of North Carolina at Greensboro Keyword(s): Cognitive Development; Fathers, Involvement; Maternal Employment; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT); Test Scores/Test theory/IRT Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Revised version of May working paper. This study investigates how parental employment affects child cognitive development. The results suggest that maternal labor supply during the first three years of the child's life has a small deleterious effect on the predicted verbal ability of 3 and 4 year olds and a larger detrimental impact on the reading and mathematics achievement of 5 and 6 year olds -- working an extra 20 hours per week is associated with test score reductions from the median to the 49th, 46th, and 47th percentiles respectively. The negative relationship between cognitive performance and maternal job-holding during the second and third years is particularly strong if the mother works long hours or was also employed in the child's first year. These findings are robust to the inclusion of controls for day care arrangements or paternal employment. There is some indication that early work may be especially costly for children in 'traditional' two-parent families and the data hint at the importance of time investments by fathers. There are two main reasons why this study provides a more pessimistic assessment of the impact of early employment than most prior research. First, previous analyses often control relatively crudely for differences in child and household characteristics that are correlated with parental labor supply. Second, the negative relationships are more pronounced for the reading and mathematics performance of 5 and 6 year old children than for the verbal test scores of 3 and 4 year olds that have more frequently been examined. |
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Bibliography Citation
Ruhm, Christopher J. "Parental Employment and Child Cognitive Development." Working Paper, Department of Economics, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, September 2002. |