Maternal Employment During the First Year of Life as Related to Cognitive and Socioeconomical Development in Seven Year Old Children PDF Download

Author: Andrea B. Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Child development
Languages : en
Pages : 624

View

Book Description

Author: Jeanne Brooks-Gunn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Child development
Languages : en
Pages : 166

View

Book Description
Using data from the first two phases of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care, the links between maternal employment in the first 12 months of life and cognitive, social, and emotional outcomes for children at age 3, age 4.5, and first grade are examined. Families in which mothers worked full time (55%), part time (23%) or did not work in the first year (22%) are compared. Most families involved non-Hispanic White children although some analyses did involve African-American children. Structural equation modeling results indicated that, on average, the associations between first-year maternal employment and later cognitive, social, and emotional outcomes are neutral because negative effects, where present, are offset by positive effects. The results confirmed that maternal employment in the first year of life may confer both advantages and disadvantages and that for the average non-Hispanic White child those effects balance each other.

Author: Adele Eskeles Gottfried
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1489908307
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 305

View

Book Description
In a review written in 1979, I noted that there was a paucity of research examining the effects of maternal employment on the infant and young child and also that longitudinal studies of the effects of maternal em ployment were needed (Hoffman, 1979). In the last 10 years, there has been a flurry of research activity focused on the mother's employment during the child's early years, and much of this work has been longi tudinal. All of the studies reported in this volume are at least short-term longitudinal studies, and most of them examine the effects of maternal employment during the early years. The increased focus on maternal employment during infancy is not a response to the mandate of that review but rather reflects the new employment patterns in the United States. In March 1985, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 49.4% of married women with children less than a year old were employed outside the home (Hayghe, 1986). This figure is up from 39% in 1980 and more than double the rate in 1970. By now, most mothers of children under 3 are in the labor force.

Author: Cori Rochelle Rattelman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Child care
Languages : en
Pages : 116

View

Book Description

Author: Christopher J. Ruhm
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Child development
Languages : en
Pages : 72

View

Book Description
This study investigates the relationship between parental employment and child cognitive development using data from multiple years of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Maternal labor supply during the first three years of the child's life is predicted to have a small negative effect on the verbal ability of 3 and 4 year olds and a substantial detrimental impact on the reading and math achievement of 5 and 6 year olds. Working during the second and third years appears to have less favorable or more deleterious consequences when the mother is also employed in the first year. The results are robust to the inclusion of controls for day care arrangements or paternal job-holding and there is some indication that early employment may be particularly costly for children in traditional' two-parent families. Finally, the data suggest that paternal and maternal employment have qualitatively similar effects, hinting at the importance of time investments by fathers. The overall conclusion is that previous research may have provided an overly optimistic assessment of the effects of parental employment on child cognitive development.

Author: Teresa Katherine Lightbody
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Children of working mothers
Languages : en
Pages : 221

View

Book Description
This thesis focused on the associations between maternal employment in early childhood and the developmental outcomes of infant, toddler, and preschool age children in Canada. It is well established that maternal employment in the first year is negatively associated with children's development, particularly cognitive outcomes. However, a number of questions remain about the effects of the number of hours that mothers work, differential outcomes for boys and girls, and the contributing role of the factors in children's family and child care contexts. Thus, I examined the nature of relationships among maternal employment in early childhood, children's gender, family context, child care context, and young children's development. Guided by Bronfenbrenner's Bioecological Model of Human Development, I conducted a secondary analysis of data from the Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth using Cycles Six (2004/2005), Seven (2006/2007), and Eight (2008/2009). The method of analysis was multiple linear regression. I tested the associations between mothers' employment in the first four years of children's lives and the motor and social development of zero to four year old children and receptive language of four and five year old children (commonly used as an indicator of cognitive development). Further, because previous research has shown that the influence of maternal employment on children's cognitive development varies with the specific timing of mothers' return to work, I examined the associations between maternal employment in the first two years of children's lives and the receptive language of children four and five years. Additionally, I ran a sub-group analysis comparing children of mothers who worked more than 20 hours a week to children of mothers who worked fewer hours. To examine the influence that child's gender and family and child care contexts have on the relationship between maternal employment in early childhood and children's developmental outcomes, I investigated the moderating effects of child gender, family economic well-being, mothers' marital status, maternal education, and child care type and quality. I also analyzed the mediating effects of family functioning, depressive symptoms, and parent-child interactions on the relationship between maternal employment in early childhood and children's developmental outcomes. With children's motor and social development, I found that mothers who returned to work when their children were between zero to four years old had enhanced motor and social development in comparison to children of mothers who did not work during this time. However, the magnitude of the effect was relatively weak. Additionally, findings indicated that maternal employment within the first four years had stronger positive effects on the motor and social development (improved motor and social development) for female children than it did for male children. Findings showed that the only Contextual Process that played a mediating role was parent-child interactions. The enhanced motor and social development of children of mothers who worked was explained in part by more positive parent-child interactions displayed by employed mothers. Regarding receptive language, findings showed that maternal employment between zero and four years was not significantly associated with children's receptive language. However, I found that relative to children of mothers who worked 20 hours or less per week in the first two years of their children's lives, children of mothers who worked more than 20 hours had lower receptive language scores at four and five years of age. An additional analysis suggested that maternal employment initiated between 12 and 17 months was a sensitive period in which working more than 20 hours a week was negatively associated with children's receptive language. The small positive associations between maternal employment in early childhood and children's motor and social development provide some reassurance to mothers who engage in maternal employment in early childhood. That being said, my research suggests that working more than 20 hours a week in the first two years of children's lives and even more so between 12 and 17 months of age has negative associations with children's later receptive language. These findings could be of interest to policy analysts and government officials who create and monitor Canadian maternity and parental leave policies/programs in that they bring attention to areas (i.e., hours worked in early childhood) that policy developers may want to consider in future changes to current Canadian maternity and parental leave policies/programs.

Author: John Horan Cawley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Children
Languages : en
Pages : 40

View

Book Description
Recent research has found that maternal employment is associated with worse child performance on tests of cognitive ability. This paper explores mechanisms for that correlation. We estimate models of instrumental variables using a unique dataset, the American Time Use Survey, that measure the effect of maternal employment on the mother's allocation of time to activities related to child cognitive development. We find that employed women spend significantly less time reading to their children, helping with homework, and in educational activities in general. We find no evidence that these decreases in time are offset by increases in time by husbands and partners. These findings offer plausible mechanisms for the association of maternal employment with child cognitive development.

Author: Meizhen Hu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 192

View

Book Description

Author: Society for Research in Child Development
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Child development
Languages : en
Pages : 134

View

Book Description

Author: Brittany English
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 78

View

Book Description
This study examines the effects of maternal employment during the first year of a child's life on their cognitive and non-cognitive development at age nine using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. The relationship is estimated using multiple regression in which the outcomes are a child's percentile rank on four nationally-normed assessments and their score on a delinquency scale, and the independent variable of interest is a variable indicating if a mother worked at all during the first year of her child's life. The models used in this study control for child, maternal, and family characteristics. Results suggest no relationship between maternal employment and children's development. This is robust across outcomes and subgroups and suggests that any relationship between maternal employment and child outcomes might fade out by age nine. Secondary analyses using full-time employment as the key independent variable do show a potential relationship between full-time work and children's development at age nine. While these results cannot be interpreted causally, they support the hypothesis that increased financial resources gained through maternal employment support children's cognitive development through age nine.