Working moms, your kids will do just fine

New Delhi, March 1: Good news for working moms, bad news for those who whine about working moms. A recent American psychiatric study, bas...

New Delhi, March 1: Good news for working moms, bad news for those who whine about working moms. A recent American psychiatric study, based on two decades of surveying more than 12,000 women and their children, has concluded that “a mother’s employment outside of the home has no significant negative effect on her children.” And, in fact, “early parental employment appeared to be somewhat more beneficial for single mothers and lower-income families.”

This should be music to the ears of working mothers who constitute nearly a third of all Indian women coming as it does on the eve of International Women’s Day next week. About 85 million Indian women are classed as economically active by the International Labor Organization in 1998.The study, authored by American psychologist Elizabeth Harvey of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, examined the long-term effects of early parental employmentemployment during the child’s first three years of lifeon the functioning and development of the child.

Itlooked at four basic questions: Whether the mother worked during the first three years of the child’s life; how soon a mother returned to work after childbirth; how much did she work (hours per week) during the first three years of her child’s life, and the discontinuity of employment (if there were any periods of unemployment during the same time frame). These were compared with five child outcome measures: compliance, behavior problems, cognitive development, self-esteem and academic achievement.

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While there will be a temptation here to dismiss this as a study of affluent American mothers, hardly relevant to Indian conditions, two points need to be made: one, the sample cuts across all income groups and it doesn’t factor any variation in the kind of child-care support the mother has.

The study, reported in the prestigious Developmental Psychology, shows that children of mothers who work during the first three years of their children’s lives were not much different from children whose mothers did notwork during that time frame. Three and four-year-olds whose mothers returned to work later showed slightly higher compliance than the same age group whose mothers returned to work sooner but these differences were small and disappeared by the time the children were five to six.

Harvey found that children whose mothers worked long hours were found to have slightly lower scores on tests, which measures children’s vocabulary and individual student achievement, but again these differences were small and faded over time. As part of the study, the fact that these differences are insignificant makes Harvey conclude that a working mom needn’t necessarily be a sad mom. As for the impact a working dad could have on his child, the study also establishes that there’s no significant effect of fathers’ employment hours on children’s development.

These findings are based on an analysis of data collected in a survey of approximately 12,600 Americans who have been interviewed annually since 1979 when they were between 14and 22 years of age. Beginning in 1986, the children of women in the group were also assessed.The study also states that “early parental employment appeared to be somewhat more beneficial for single mothers and lower income families.”