Study confuses, irritates, emphasizes the need for paid family leave

(Article originally published by WFC Resources, August 2002, as an UpDate Column)

As if working mothers didn’t have enough to worry about, a recent study, and the attention-getting New York Times headline that emphasized its negative message, stuck it to ‘em again.

For those of you who missed the article, the headline was “Study Links Working Mothers to Slower Learning.” Researchers had sliced and diced previous findings of a major study conducted by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. That study followed the progress of more than 1,300 children in 10 cities over seven years.

This analysis, by scholars at Columbia University, found that three-year-olds from an “average” home environment, in “average” quality childcare, whose mothers did not work before their babies turned nine months old, scored at the 50th percentile on a school readiness test. (The test assesses children’s knowledge of colors, letters, numbers, shapes and comparisons.) Children in similar settings whose mothers were working by the 9th month scored at the 44th percentile. And where mothers were “insensitive” or childcare was “poor quality,” (the article didn’t say how they arrived at those conclusions) children’s readiness slipped to the 37th percentile.

The study left us with a few questions of our own, and this month our Trend Report will review some additional studies on the subject of working mothers and the impact on kids. But what we found every bit as interesting as the study itself was what others said about it.

Families and Work Institute’s president Ellen Galinsky was quoted in the New York Times article. "For the last 20 to 30 years,” she said, “as more and more mothers have been in jobs away from home, we've been on a detective search for what it all means for the children. It's very confusing to people on the sidelines,” she acknowledges, “because first one study says this and then another study says that. All of them give us clues, but none of them give us answers.”

Not only was this one confusing, many found it irritating. Snapped a Minnesota Mom in a letter to the editor of the Star Tribune, “I’ve worked 50 hours per week outside my home since long before either of my two sons was 9 months old. My husband, their father, stays home. Do you suppose our children are doomed to lag cognitively and verbally because their mother works outside the home and their father stays home with them?” Up to now they had been grateful, she goes on to explain, because he is so well suited to be the primary caregiver, a job for which she is totally unsuited. “Now, according to this study,” she says, “we realize that my husband can’t possibly be an effective stay-at-home parent – he is too male.”

A Seaford, NY stay-at-home mother agrees. This is “just what we need,” her letter begins, “when many Americans are coping with the loss of the savings they entrusted to the stock market – another study detailing the ways working mothers fail their children.” And she goes on to say, “I would respect this study more if it had considered the benefits of having one parent, not necessarily the mother, stay out of the workforce to raise the children.” And Galinsky agrees that the involvement of the Dad, along with the quality of the childcare, how much the mother wants to be doing the work she is doing and how stressful the job is are just a few of the factors that must be taken into consideration.

(We also wondered if anyone had researched how long it took for the same preschoolers to raise their scores on this particular test once they started kindergarten.)

We agree with another New York letter-writer who suggests moving the issue of childcare “away from the angst over working mothers and toward constructive analyses that will help parents find the most child-beneficial options within their means.” And Ann Crittenden, author of “The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the least Valued,” wrote that the one beneficial option that continues to elude the U. S. is paid leave. (The U. S., she reminds us, is one of only five countries – Papua New Guinea, Swaziland, Lesotho and Australia – that don’t have paid maternity leave, and Australia is expected to enact a paid leave law soon.)

As a result, American mothers, particularly poor mothers, have to go back to work much sooner after childbirth than mothers in other countries, leaving more American infants in non-parental care in their first few months than in any other developed country. “Are these our real family values,” she asks, “stripped of all the hypocritical rhetoric?”

This study, says Crittenden, is simply more evidence that it’s a critical need, a “clarion call to the United States to join the rest of the world in making it possible for women to spend more time with their babies without sacrificing their economic security.”