In the latest skirmish in the ongoing culture war that pits stay-at-home moms against those who work outside the home, working mothers are the winners. A new study, published in the March issue of the journal Developmental Psychology, has exonerated mothers from charges of causing harm to their children by working. Reported by Elizabeth Harvey, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts, the findings suggest that even children who were babies when their mothers started back to work did not suffer because of their moms' absence. Harvey evaluated the development and health of more than 6,000 youngsters, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

If mothers employed outside the home -- a full two-thirds of all American mothers -- are to take a break from their relentless guilt, however, they had better hurry. It is probably only a matter of time before some new study or book infects our collective mind-set and causes us to obsess about how we might be damaging our children. In the maddeningly mysterious process of shaping little personalities, it seems that parental anxiety is a nagging constant, while child-rearing lore fluctuates wildly, fueling that anxiety to a fever pitch. We seem to assume that there is one correct way to mother and that science will tell us what it is.

Don't get me wrong. I am not critical of this new research in and of itself. In fact, as a social science study, it is unusually rigorous. Containing a larger and more representative sample of children than most prior research, it goes a long way toward improving upon the faulty data that is often used to prop up the cherished myth that exclusive, full-time mothering is an ideal.

But the perpetual game of research one-upmanship played by developmental psychologists and child-rearing gurus obscures an important fact: It is next to impossible to prove that observable, measurable parenting behavior has a predictable impact on children's well-being. To date, our scientific investigatory tools are not up to the complexity of the task. Even Harvey's study suffers from an unavoidable woolliness with regard to its methodology -- it does not, for example, control for quality of child care. This does not necessarily disprove its findings, but it does leave the field wide open for future obfuscating -- which will undoubtedly occur, given the strong wish of many to find Harvey wrong. Yet lost in all the research and counter-research is the simple truth that a mother's working outside the home (or not) has never been shown to be more than a weak predictor of anything in her child.

The fact is that even our most cherished beliefs about child-rearing do not rest on scientific proof but on fashion and politics. On the mommy front, sentiments holds sway. Only last year we were told by grandmother Judith Harris, in her widely publicized book "The Nurture Assumption," that a child's peer group, not his or her parents, has a more powerful influence on the child's development. Before that, MIT historian Frank Sulloway resurrected the old chestnut about the importance of birth order in child development.

Twenty years ago, when I was in the throes of child rearing, maternal bonding was presumed to be the preeminent determinant of later mental health. I dutifully schlepped around my daughter's "security blanket," a ratty old stuffed rabbit supposedly symbolizing me, lest she be traumatized by its -- my -- absence. My own mother would have summarily thrown the thing out because it was undoubtedly full of germs. In accordance with the expert advice of her day, she took care not only to avoid germs, but to avoid "smothering" or "castrating" her children. (Remember the fate of Mrs. Portnoy!) Yet my mother's mother was more concerned with daily bowel movements and good posture. All of these ideas about proper maternal behavior were purportedly bolstered by hard data but, strangely, so-called objective science has suspiciously managed to affirm the prevailing public mood, however it has swung.

Next page | My patients are messed up -- but not because their mothers worked