Family Fact: Mother-Friendly

Family Quote: Dad-Shaped Soul-Holes

Family Research Abstract: Money for Mom, Bane for Baby

From Save the Children: "The Mothers' Index reflects how individual countries compare in meeting the needs of mothers."  The top countries to be a mother:Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Finland, Canada, The Netherlands, Australia, Austria, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

(Source: Save The Children, in "Ratings: Not Mother's Day," Newsweek, May 12, 2003, p. 8.) 

"American children are not starving for food, but they are starving for a more generous portion of their mothers' presence in their lives.  Instead of accepting personal sacrifice for the sake of their children, as do mothers in India, American mothers spend their energy debating how to have both a career and kids without missing a beat.  It is tragic. Caught on this success-based, me-centered merry-go-round, mothers abandon six-week-old infants to virtual strangers at mercenary daycare centers.  They put their school-aged children in before- and after-care programs that have the kids eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner at school.  Mothers leave kids just approaching their teens to be unsupervised latchkey kids."

(Source: Heidi Bratton, "Soldiers on the Home Front," Touchstone, vol. 16, no. 4 [May 2003] p.18.)  

For decades, feminists have encouraged young mothers to pursue self-fulfillment through employment, assuring them that their children will do just fine in the day-care center. Such assurances look deeply suspect in the light of sobering data recently available from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care (NICHD-SECC). Based on three years of observations of 900 European-American children born in 1991, the NICHD-SECC data leaves little doubt: mothers who leave the home for employment less than a year after a child's birth are exposing that child to real and lasting psychological risk.

The risks posed by maternal employment stand out clearly in statistical tests establishing that "children whose mothers worked at all by the ninth month of their life had lower scores on a [standard test of child cognitive development] at 36 months than did children whose mothers did not work by that time." Although only the effect of maternal employment initiated by the ninth month reached the threshold of statistical significance, the researchers note that "the effects of any maternal employment by 1, 3, 6, or 12 months were also negative."

Maternal employment puts children most at risk when it is full-time: the data show that "the negative effect of having a mother who began employment by the ninth month was most pronounced for children whose mothers worked longer hours (30 hr. or more per week) in the first year." In part, children of mothers employed full-time are especially vulnerable because of the relatively inferior care these children receive when their mothers are at work and the insensitivity of the care they receive from their mothers themselves when they are at home. The analysts of the NICHD-SECC data conclude that children with mothers working more than 30 hours per week by nine months were being placed, on average, in "lower quality child care at 36 months [than children] whose mothers worked fewer hours per week." Perhaps even more disturbing is the finding that children with mothers employed more than 30 hours per week by nine months were receiving "less sensitive care at 36 months" from their mothers than were children who were not employed during the first year of their children's lives.

Many readers will interpret the finding of maternal insensitivity among mothers employed full-time during the first year of their children's lives as a definitive refutation of the feminist notion that employed mothers can do as much for their children with a little "quality time" as homemaking mothers can do with much more "quantity time." Unfortunately for feminist theorists, these data also show that full-time maternal employment hurts children even in those relatively rare cases in which employed mothers find high quality surrogate care for their children and in which they themselves manage somehow to avoid the maternal insensitivity usually associated with their employment status. The NICHD-SECC analysts acknowledge that "even after [statistically] controlling for child care and home environment, a negative association was still found between full-time employment begun in the first 9 months of children's lives and the children's [psychological development] scores at 36 months."

Given the current ascendance of feminist ideology, especially within academe, it is entirely predictable that the NICHD-SECC analysts stress the importance of improving the quality of child care available to employed mothers and of passing federal legislation giving employed women the option of paid maternal leave from their jobs. Still, the evidence of the harm maternal employment holds for children is so compelling that the analysts actually inch toward a challenge to feminist doctrines of female employment. They question whether it would not be "prudent for policy makers to go slow" on welfare-reform measures that "would require mothers to enter the labor force (full-time) early in the first year of [their child's] life." And when the focus is not welfare mothers but mothers in general, the analysts remark that "one could conclude that encouraging mothers to stay home or work part-time during the first year would produce children with higher [psychological development] scores."