Have children adapted to their mothers working, or was adaptation unnecessary? Cohort effects and the relationship between maternal employment and child well-being

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Abstract

Drawing on previous theoretical and empirical work, we posit that maternal employment influences on child well-being vary across birth cohorts. We investigate this possibility by analyzing longitudinal data from a sample of children and their mothers drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We introduce a series of age, cohort, and maternal employment interaction terms into multilevel models predicting child well-being to assess whether any potential short-term or long-term effects of early and current maternal employment vary across birth cohorts. Results indicate that maternal employment largely is inconsequential to child well-being regardless of birth cohort, with a few exceptions. For instance, children born in earlier cohorts may have experienced long-term positive effects of having an employed mother; however, as maternal employment became more commonplace in recent cohorts, these beneficial effects appear to have disappeared. We discuss theoretical and methodological implications of these findings.

Highlights

► We study if maternal employment effects on child well-being vary by birth cohorts. ► Regardless of birth cohort, we find maternal employment is mostly inconsequential. ► Children from earlier cohorts show positive effects of having an employed mother. ► These beneficial effects appear to have disappeared in recent cohorts.

Introduction

One of the most prominent demographic trends in contemporary family life is the rate at which American women have entered the paid labor force over the past several decades (Bianchi, 2000). In fact, the most recent data suggest that women now stand to outnumber men in the work force if current recessionary trends continue with men experiencing unemployment at a higher rate than women (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2009). Even though women’s employment is a normative feature of contemporary families, controversy continues to surround the issue, with special attention given to mothers’ employment. Maternal labor force participation is still scrutinized and questioned in the popular media, and child outcomes are often placed at the center of these debates out of concern over the consequences of maternal absence from the home (Hirshman, 2006, Sayer et al., 2004).

Even scholarly research frequently approaches the issue of maternal employment from what Gottfried and Gottfried (2006) call a deprivation perspective, where researchers search for negative outcomes related to mothers’ labor force participation without placing this family process within a sufficiently broader context. In this study, we place maternal employment and its potential influences on child well-being within such a broader context—in this case, the context of birth cohorts. The contemporary milieu of maternal employment is different than it was decades ago. For instance, child care now is more readily available and arguably of higher quality, cultural attitudes about women’s work roles have become less traditional as women have established rewarding and successful careers, and fathers have assumed more active parenting responsibilities within families. Therefore, children born in more recent cohorts likely experience their mothers’ labor force participation differently than children born in earlier cohorts did, and we suspect that this effect of historical time is consequential for children’s developmental trajectories.

By contextualizing child outcomes associated with maternal employment within birth cohorts, we seek to reconcile some of the mixed findings so common within the maternal employment and child well-being literature. Especially when negative effects of maternal employment are documented using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), researchers tend to rely on subgroup analyses and restricted samples—for instance, only examining White children (Waldfogel et al., 2002) or 10 and 11 year olds (Ruhm, 2008)—and an inconsistent array of categorical measures of maternal work hours (cf. Burchinal and Clarke-Stewart, 2007). In contrast, we conduct longitudinal analyses using a fully inclusive sample from the NLSY79 that permit us to correctly account for age and timing effects associated with comprehensive measures of maternal employment as we investigate cohort differences. As such, a focus on birth cohorts, in addition to being theoretically and empirically justified, requires us to use analytic techniques that allow us to avoid many of the shortcomings of previous research in this area.

Section snippets

Background

The majority of American women—wives and mothers—are employed. About 60% of all women over age 16 and over 70% of mothers are currently employed, compared to just 42% and 47% respectively in 1975 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2006, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2007). Wives’ contributions to total family household income grew from a median of about 27% in 1970 to 35% in 2004, and now about 25% of married women out-earn their employed husbands, compared to just 18% in 1987. These changes in women’s

Sample

The sample data for this study are drawn from the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (C-NLSY79), which is sponsored by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. This data set is among the most popular for examining maternal employment and child outcomes (Lucas-Thompson et al., 2010). The C-NLSY79, which started in 1986 and continues on a biennial schedule, is comprised of all children born to the 6283 original

Descriptives

Table 1 displays overall means and standard deviations by birth cohort for all variables used in the growth curve analyses. A brief examination of these descriptive statistics indicates important differences in mean scores for some key variables across the five birth cohorts identified in this study. First, ignoring all other variables (including age), mean values for reading scores and math scores do not appear to vary in a predictable manner across all five cohorts; however, children in more

Discussion and conclusion

The context of maternal employment certainly has changed over the past several decades. Child care arrangements are more abundant, fathers are more involved in family life, women are benefitting from the financial and psychological rewards that come from having a career, and cultural attitudes about maternal employment are more supportive. These trends suggest that adaptations have been made to maternal employment as a normative feature of contemporary families. Our investigation of cohort

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