Family Fact: Working Moms

Family Quote: Perpetuating Social Ills

Family Research Abstract: The Career Woman's Baby

Almost sixty-two percent (61.9% or 9,651,610) of American mothers over 16, with children under six years of age, were working moms in 1999-2000.  Three-quarters of mothers with children 6 to 17 years old worked.

(Source: United States Census Bureau, Census 2000, "QT-P26. Employment Status and Work Status in 1999 of Family Members:  2000," http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/QTTable?_ts=70771945100.) 

"Children have taken their mothers' example to heart. Ninety percent of the young women I interviewed, across a full range of backgrounds, said they hoped to combine work with motherhood, while two-thirds of the men said they wanted to share parenting and work. Jerry A. Jacobs of the University of Pennsylvania found that 93 percent of college seniors of both sexes consider balancing work and family a top job priority, second only to having interesting work."

(Source:  Kathleen Gerson, "Work Without Worry," The New York Times, May 11, 2003; http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/opinion/11GERS.html?th.) 

When a mother returns to employment soon after the birth of a new child, she may be making a smart choice for career advancement, but she may be retarding her child's cognitive development with some of the adverse effects not showing up for years to come. The effects of early maternal employment recently received close scrutiny from a team of researchers at Columbia University, who had access to data from nationally representative data for 1,872 children born between 1982 and 1989 and tracked through ages seven or eight. These data indicate clearly "there are some negative effects of maternal employment in the first year on cognitive outcomes for white children that persist as late as age seven or eight and that these effects are larger for children whose mothers worked more hours per week in the week."

In tracking the effects of maternal employment, the Columbia scholars sought to measure children's abilities in "receptive vocabulary" at age three or four and in math and reading at ages five or six and again at ages seven or eight. The researchers report that among the white children in this study, "maternal employment during the first year of life is associated with significantly poorer scores on all five of our age/outcome measures, with the effects ranging from -1.96 to -3.23 points." The authors of the new study further stress that "these effects are present even after we controlled for a range of individual and family characteristics that affect child development, including those that are likely to be correlated with maternal employment, such as breast-feeding and the use of nonmaternal child care."

Perhaps to deflect attacks from feminist colleagues angered by their politically incorrect findings, the authors of the new study characterize the harmful effects of early maternal employment as "fairly small." However, they are compelled to admit that "the fact that [these effects] persisted to age seven or eight is still cause for concern." What is more, readers might suppose that it might disquiet at least a few feminists that the researchers documented "more pronounced effects [of early maternal employment] on cognitive outcomes for girls."