Will we never learn that when we ask whether a child is better off with a working mother or a stay at home mom nobody wins? Such is the case with the most recent study reported in the Washington Post that shows “the overall effect of 1st-year maternal employment on child development [to be] neutral.”
Titled “Working Mothers Not Necessarily Harmful to Child Development,” as though there had been definitive proof that working mothers were necessarily harmful to children, the report tells us something those of us on the front lines have known for years: there are pros and cons to working, trade-offs at every level, every day. High-quality early childcare is key, but that care need not be provided exclusively by a mother.
A study like this should be a good thing for mothers, working and non-working, because it essentially suggests that you can be a good parent no matter what choices you make. But the devil is in the details. By contextualizing child development gains in terms of whether the mother works or not, we miss out on the greater truth: it’s not about working in or out of the home, it’s about how parents communicate with their children, arrange for childcare, buy into early education practices and connect emotionally.
As soon as we invoke the mommy wars, and in effect, that’s the way this study is framed — working versus stay-at-home — we lose the opportunity to think critically about capturing the best childcare practices from all different kinds of mothers and fathers. Once we’ve uncovered these “best practices,” there might be opportunity to advocate for public policy that would make them available to all parents, working in and out of the home. Instead of the headline “Babies Don’t Suffer When Moms Return to Work,” there might be an article that offers a roadmap to successful parenting, regardless of work schedule.
Working mothers have the money to invest in high quality early childcare, stay at home mothers have the time. The real question is what can be done for both groups to ensure the best outcomes for children. This study and many others indicate that high-quality early childhood education in formal and informal settings offers a path to better cognitive and socio-emotional development. Rather than asking how we can ensure that all children have access to the kind of early learning that would help them reach their highest potential, we continue to ask ourselves is it better for women to work or stay home.
Ultimately, the report proves nothing so much as that working versus staying at home is a lose-lose question. The study found that children of working mothers score slightly lower on cognitive testing, at least until first grade. But stay at home mothers were less responsive and emotionally sensitive to their children’s needs, and had less income to plow into formal education and childcare. So we all have something to feel badly about.
But there’s hope. This study overturned findings by the same researchers at Columbia University from 2002. If we wait another couple of years, I’m sure we’ll get another study with new conclusions about mothering. Maybe this time it will be truly be about parenting, and not about mommy wars.
Related links:
- Love this hypothesis suggested by NY Times Economix blog (interesting this was covered in the Business section): “women who like their work and find it challenging may make better mothers. Or at least, that they are just as good as stay-at-home mothers.”
- Reports on the study from The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal‘s Juggle blog.
- The Eponymous Flower gets it right when she points out that The Washington Post article goes on about how working mothers don’t need to feel guilty — and then puts the screws on anyway.
- From The Mama Bee archives: “Are Working Mothers Giving Their Children As Many Cuddles As Stay-at-Home Parents?”
One of the fun parts of social science research is that you are never going to get a clear answer to a question like “do kids do better if mom stays home?” for a few reasons. First, what is “better?” In school? Income at age 45? Health outcomes? Overall life satisfaction?
Second, women are out of the workforce for many reasons. Some are law partners who opted out to devote their full energies to childrearing. Others don’t have the skills and education to get a job that covers the cost of childcare. These point toward slightly different narratives.
You can try to control for income, but you can never truly control for this. For the most part, 2-income families have more money than 1-income families, and kids need both time and money from their parents. And finally, as I’ve written about, the total time moms spend interacting with their children is not that different, regardless of labor force status. Hence the unlikelihood of getting the kind of crystal clear answer many pundits want.
I’ve gotten so much more laid back about this sort of thing as I’ve gotten more confident in myself as a mother. I saw this and rolled my eyes. Back when I was pregnant with my first baby, it would have upset me.
Have you seen Sarah Hrdy’s book “Mothers and Others”? I blogged about it awhile back, and I’m going to shamelessly self-promote and put a link here- but only because I think that the premise of the book might make other moms who use day care feel better:
http://wandsci.blogspot.com/2009/07/this-should-make-you-feel-better-about.html
Whenever someone gives me grief about being a working mom, I like to point out that women have always done work beyond child care. I suggest they go look up the instructions for making soap, for instance. The period in time in which mothers devoted huge amounts of their day exclusively to child care is a short one- if it even existed at all.
GREAT post. Here’s my fave part:
“A study like this should be a good thing for mothers, working and non-working, because it essentially suggests that you can be a good parent no matter what choices you make. But the devil is in the details. By contextualizing child development gains in terms of whether the mother works or not, we miss out on the greater truth: it’s not about working in or out of the home, it’s about how parents communicate with their children, arrange for childcare, buy into early education practices and connect emotionally.”
THANK YOU! I have been saying this for years. It doesn’t matter if you work or not. It doesn’t matter if you bake cookies from scratch or buy them in a bag. It doesn’t matter if your kids shoelaces match their hair bows.
It matters how you raise them. It matters that you teach them manners. It matters that they know to be kind to others and that learning is a good thing. This is what makes a good mother (parent, for that matter).
At some point, we have to start focusing on this end result, not the situation of the mom. Need to look at the bigger picture here.