It’s All Working Mothers’ Fault, Again

When the news of this survey first came through, I have to admit I ignored it because it freaked me out a little too much.

Last week, University of North Carolina economist Christopher Ruhm published a study showing that kids from high-socioeconomic-status families suffer when their mums work outside the home. At ages 10 and 11, they perform more poorly on cognitive tests and are also more likely to be overweight than those whose high-status mothers leave the workforce.

Conversely, children from low-status families, on the other hand, don’t seem to suffer as much when their mums work. In fact, many of them do better on the same tests, and they’re more fit, than similarly disadvantaged kids with stay-at-home moms.

The more these affluent moms worked — especially if they went back to their jobs while their children were still very young — the less well their kids did on cognitive tests later in childhood. (The high-status children with working moms still did better overall than all the low-status children — so class, not employment, was ultimately the stronger factor in their well-being.)

As a working mother with a child in daycare three days a week, this was not music to my ears. So why is childcare so bad for children of affluent parents mums?

The theory is that affluence correlates with education. The low-status kids get more intellectual stimulation in day care or with other caretakers, such as grandparents, than they do at home. Meanwhile, the high-status kids may find day care less enriching than being with their highly educated mothers.

*Not listening…not listening*

There were a few crucial elements missing from the survey, as Newsweek points out:

The statistics he analyzed didn’t provide much information on who was taking care of the kids while their mothers worked: whether there were stay-at-home dads or other family caregivers around, whether the household employed a nanny, whether the child went to day care and, if so, how good that day care was.

Nor did Ruhm collect the data himself – his analysis is based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a long-running US government survey that is updated every two years.

But even the author admits that his research findings don’t equate to ‘high-status women should stay out of the office’.Instead, he believes that parents of both genders need more support in their efforts to balance their lives. “I don’t think it’s realistic or desirable to go back to the 1950s,” he says. “And I don’t believe this is exclusively related to mothers. This is fundamentally a question of how we balance the needs of work and family. My personal take-home message is that we really need to think about policies to help with work-family balance.”

Indeed.