Where's poppa?

Another study causes alarm about children of working mothers. But one of the authors admits that fathers were again left out of the equation.

By Audrey Fisch

Aug. 5, 2002 | In their just-released study, "Maternal Employment and Child Cognitive Outcomes in the First Three Years of Life," researchers Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Wen-Jui Han, and Jane Waldfogel have more bad news for working mothers. The trio used data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care to measure the impact on cognitive skills of maternal employment in a child's first year. (The skills were evaluated by the Bracken School Readiness Test, which is administered when a child is 3.) The study found "negative effects" on children whose mothers worked 30 hours or more per week in the first nine months, "even when controlling for child-care quality, the quality of the home environment, and maternal sensitivity." In other words, quality childcare and quality mothering notwithstanding, a mother who works fulltime in the first nine months of her child's life is statistically likely to have a child, who at age 3, scores lower than children of non-working mothers on a cognitive test.

The New York Times headline, "Study Links Working Mothers to Slower Learning," sparked a new wave of guilt and frustration in the ranks of working mothers, or at least those of the 25 million in the workforce who went back to jobs when their children were infants. Others were further exhausted by the new onslaught of statistics, bracing for the attendant criticism and finger wagging about their selfish priorities, even though many of these mothers have no choice when it comes working outside the home.

But when they are asked about the implications of the study, published in the academic journal "Child Development," the authors point out that individual outcomes can vary widely. Some variables, such as the quality of the childcare or the attitudes of the mothers, had a significant influence on individual children. Overall, they emphasize that the study shouldn't necessarily discourage mothers of young children from working, but encourage government policy that would improve the quality of childcare, change the length of family leave and include pay for those who take it, as well as promote job-sharing and flexible hours that would help working parents who struggle with work and caring for young children.

Dr. Jane Waldfogel, associate professor at Columbia University in the School of Social Work, and a research associate at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics, spoke about the study from her office in London. Expressing her own occasional frustration with the lack of nuance and explication in news reports about the work, Waldfogel talked about the data used in the study and the implications of her research, as well as research trends in her field, and, in particular, the ways in which fathers get left out of the equation.

Can you begin by discussing the research from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care? As a researcher in the field, what do you find helpful about this study as opposed to earlier data sets? What kinds of problems do you see with the study? In particular, were there any questions you would have liked to study about working parents and child health and development that were precluded by the structure and setup of the NICHD-SECC study?

As you probably know, this study was a collaborative effort on the part of several teams of leading developmental psychologists from around the country, and it was specifically designed to study the effects of early childcare on child development. So, it's got wonderful measures of childcare quality and also measures of parenting quality. It's really head and shoulders above any other resource that we've ever had before to look at the effects of early parental employment or early childcare on children's outcomes.

Of course, there are always more things that any individual researcher would want to have in the data set, and I'm sure there must have been some compromises that were made. When you have families included in a survey like this, there are limits as to how much time you can be in their homes or have them come into the laboratory, and so you can't ask them everything that you'd want to ask. Decisions have to be made about what to include and where to place the most emphasis.

Were there things that I wish had been included? Sure. There are always more things that I would want. I wish they had done more to look at the quality of the fathers' care of the child/children, in addition to the mother's care. I wish that they had done more to gather information about the quality of the mothers' jobs and how the mothers felt about their jobs. But that's difficult to do. In the scheme of things, I'm about 99 percent satisfied with what they did.

Next page: I don't think we found that father care is particularly protective