Working mothers face many stresses. Juggling child care and work responsibilities doesn’t always make for a balanced lifestyle – for mothers or their children.
A new study by Dr. Christopher Ruhm, Jefferson-Pilot Excellence Professor of Economics, raises more questions, and possibly more worries, particularly for affluent mothers who work more than 20 hours a week.
In a study published in the European journal Labour Economics, Ruhm looked at advantaged and disadvantaged working mothers and their 10- to 11-year-old children. He used variables that included education, ethnicity, marital status and income prior to pregnancy.
Ruhm found that children of mothers with high socioeconomic status who work outside the home did less well on vocabulary and math tests and weighed more than their less-advantaged counterparts.
On the other hand, children from low-socioeconomic status families don’t appear to suffer as much when their mothers work. In fact, they perform better on the same tests and don’t exhibit the same weight gains.
Work-family balance
“The message to working moms, no matter their level of affluence, isn’t that working is bad for children, it’s that we need policies that support work-family balance,” stresses Ruhm, a labor economist whose prior research on family work-life issues examined parental leave policies, the impact on children’s cognitive development when both parents work, and how economic downturns promote healthy behaviors.
More than 90 percent of all mothers now work during the first 10 years of a child’s life. When work tops 20 hours a week, the more “deleterious” effects related to maternal employment start showing up for affluent mothers and their children, says Ruhm.
Fortunately, few of the deleterious consequences associated with working mothers persist past adolescence.
Why the disparity between affluent and non-affluent working mothers? Ruhm intuits that when affluent mothers work, they may be less able to provide perks such as after-school homework help, sports teams or visits to museums and other enrichment activities. Accruing extra pounds may be the result of working mothers stocking the house with snack foods and allowing sedentary activities such as playing video games in their absence.
More intellectual stimulation
Ruhm theorizes that children of less-affluent mothers don’t experience cognitive declines when their mothers work because they may get more intellectual stimulation in day care, or with other caretakers such as grandparents. Low-status kids don’t gain or lose weight when their mothers work, perhaps because their diets don’t change, Ruhm adds.
The good news is that for most children, few of the deleterious consequences associated with working mothers persist past adolescence. Still, Ruhm says that more study is needed to determine why and how specific family circumstances impact children. “Working is a risk factor for work-family balance,” he says. “You can always do things to mitigate risk factors.”
Photography by Chris English, University Relations
