(Posted 6-15-00)
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
News Service Contact: Steve Gilliam, 336-334-5371
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STUDY SAYS MOTHERS WORKING MAY HINDER
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN
GREENSBORO—The first three years of life are acknowledged as critical in a child’s development, and a new study indicates that cognitive development may be impaired in children whose mothers work outside the home during that period.
The study, conducted by labor economist Dr. Christopher Ruhm of The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, said that three- and four-year-olds tend to have lower verbal ability if their mothers worked during the child’s first year. They have a slightly higher verbal ability if their mothers worked when they were two or three, the study shows.
Titled “Parental Employment and Child Cognitive Development,” the study’s findings are based on a survey of data on more than 4,000 American children in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. It was published in the Working Paper Series of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Ruhm is the Jefferson-Pilot Excellence Professor of Economics in UNCG’s Bryan School of Business and Economics.
“The study was designed to examine the relationship between parental employment during the first three years of a child’s life, and how that affects verbal, reading and mathematics skills,” said Ruhm. “The children of mothers who are working during those early years appear to do less well than children of mothers who don’t work.”
Ruhm says his research suggests that parental investments of time at the beginning of their children’s lives play an important role in fostering the cognitive development of children.
The study shows that a maternal employment during the child’s first year is associated with lower verbal ability at the ages of three and four years. When a mother also works during the second and third years after birth, lower levels of reading and mathematics abilities are reported in five- and six-year-olds, the study indicated.
From U.S. Census data, Ruhm pointed out that in 1980, 44 percent of single females and 45 percent of married females with children under the age of six were working. Less than 20 years later, in 1996, those numbers had increased to 55 percent and 63 percent, respectively. Over that same period, the percentage of children raised in single-family households rose from 20 percent to 28 percent.
“These changes suggest that parents have less time to invest in raising their children, with potentially harmful effects,” said Ruhm. “What we wanted to do in this study was analyze the relationship between parental employment and child cognitive development."
Ruhm noted that earlier studies in the United States and other countries have shown that mothers working outside the home produced little effect on child development. Those studies, he said, used smaller samples and controlled for fewer factors such as family size and parent education levels. “These findings suggest that prior research may have presented an overly optimistic assessment of the impact of work by mothers,” said Ruhm.
Time investments by fathers also appear important. The analysis suggests that long work hours by them may have additional negative effects on child cognitive development.
Ruhm points out in the study that there has been an effort since the mid-1980s to increase the employment rates of women with young children. The increases thus far may have been assisted by changes in welfare and Medicaid policies, the Earned Income Tax Credit and government funding for childcare.
He said that despite enactment of the Family and Medical Leave Act, rights to maternity leave are limited in the United States compared with other industrialized nations.
“We should be cautious about inferring too much from the study, although it points out developmental problems occurring at higher levels than some of the earlier studies on this same topic,” said Ruhm. “Having said that, though, the results do suggest that public policies which are more family-friendly might need to be considered. One example is parental leave.”
Ruhm has done other studies on topics that include economic conditions and alcohol consumption in the United States, and parental leave rates and infant mortality in Europe. His interests include the role of time and other investments in health, as well as other areas of health and labor economics. He spent the 1996-97 year working in Washington, D.C., as a senior economist with the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. He is co-author of the 1991 book, "Turbulence in the American Workplace." Since 1994, he has been a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research, and since 1991 he has been a research fellow with the Employee Benefits Research Institute. He holds the master's and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley.
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