Investing in Working Mothers, Investing in Children

I’m lucky that my job has taken me to Chautauqua Institution for the next few days.  Chautauqua is a summer learning community that hosts daily lectures from leading minds on a range of topics from science to art to music.  This week is focused on early childhood education, and yesterday’s speaker, the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman, spoke on his research indicating that intervention programs in early childhood yield the most return on investment, as opposed to those addressing youth or high school students.

Even more importantly, Dr. Heckman spoke about the types of early education that we should be fostering.  To date programs like Head Start have been oriented towards building cognitive skills, but it turns out that the greatest determinants of school success aren’t letters and numbers; rather, it’s what we have traditionally called “soft skills” like motivation, interpersonal communication, work ethic, delayed gratification, appreciation of diversity and cooperation.  

One particular quite from Heckman’s talk really stood out for me:

Women who are more educated are working and earning more. Their families are more stable and mothers in these families are also devoting more time to child development activities than less educated women. 

Heckman contrasts these women to less affluent working mothers, who are also spending more time working, but have fewer resources to invest in their children’s early learning, and are less educated about the advantages of activities that build cognitive and socio-emotional skills.  I see two takeaways from Heckman’s comments on working mothers:

First, it’s not whether a mother works or not, but the quality of the time that parents and caregivers together spend with the child building those “soft” skills that contributes significantly to a child’s successful learning and development.  Dr. Heckman advocates for high-quality universal early child care that focuses as much or more on a socio-emotional skills and love of learning as it does on cognition.  He doesn’t for a minutes suggest that women stop working, but he does say that we need to better educate both parents and daycare providers about strengthening the development of children in their care.

Second, women who are earning more are investing more in their children.  To me this is a very powerful argument for keeping women in the workforce.  Many studies have suggested that putting money in the hands of women is highly beneficial to children and society at large.  This principle is most often applied to the developing world, where international aid organizations focus on microfinance projects for women and girls.  But the idea is just as relevant here in the United States.  Mothers want to invest in their children, and they do so when they have the resources and education to know how.

Quality early childhood education programs are critically necessary to help ameliorate social problems, but support for working parents that allows women to participate in the workforce is equally important.  Women who have their own financial resources are not only more secure in their own right; they have the power to find and provide the best educational options for their children.

Related links:

• Practicing Social Skills with Children from Developmental Behavioral Pediatrics Online.
• Social Competency: Fostering Your Child’s Lifelong Success from Child Care Aware.
• “What’s a Working Mother Worth?” from The American Prospect.
• Combatting the Motherhood Penalty from The Mama Bee.