Institute of Marriage and Family Canada eReview – August 12, 2010 * Vol. 10, NO. 15
The eReview provides analysis on public policy relating to Canadian families and marriage.
Drop the hyperbole! New childcare research is not as categorical as it appears
By Andrea Mrozek, Manager of Research and Communications, Institute of Marriage and Family Canada
How do the children of mothers who work outside the home in the first year of life fare? This was the subject of two recent newspaper columns, one based on an August 2010 release of new research. [1] That was the main meal, anyway, the appetizers, drinks, desserts, salads and aperitif were spent addressing the guilt factor. Should working mothers of infants feel bad about it? Now certainly it is the job of newspaper columnists to inject opinion, and Janet Bagnall did so with gusto in the Vancouver Province, as did Leah McLaren of The Globe and Mail. Drop the guilt, they both screamed with glee, because the kids are better than fine. They might as well have added a triumphant “so there” in caps.
There are two problems with this, however. Firstly, earlier research did not mandate guilt, rather stressed both positives and negatives in various environments. Secondly, upon closer examination, this most recent research release actually echoes the earlier results.
Earlier research, using the same detailed dataset from the American NICHD Study of Early Child Care, spoke to high quality care having positive outcomes for some children, particularly with regards to improvements in math and vocabulary. Some of the same research also said that longer amounts of time spent in care increased problem behaviours, like aggression. [2]
The very recent August 2010 First-year maternal employment and child development in the first 7 years actually says something similar. [3] Of course, the headlines didn’t come from nowhere: the (lengthy) verbiage around the research takes a different tone and does conclude in the abstract that the results of mothers of infants working outside the home are completely neutral. “Our SEM results indicate that, on average, the associations between 1st-year maternal employment and later cognitive, social, and emotional outcomes are neutral,” write the authors, “because negative effects, where present, are offset by positive effects.” [4]
This neutrality statement is what the media picked up on. But the study itself is well over one hundred pages and is more complicated than that. The authors consider an array of possible moderators to maternal employment outside the home in the first year. They consider the child’s gender (boys may be more affected by their earliest experiences than girls) and child temperament. They consider what the mother’s job is, hypothesizing that “professional jobs would be less detrimental to child outcomes than would be 1st-year maternal employment by women in nonprofessional jobs because women in professional jobs would be more likely to be in positions that are challenging and satisfying and that afford flexibility to address child and family needs.” [5] They consider the mother’s earnings, hypothesizing that mothers who work in the first year of their child’s life will always have higher earnings, and that those higher earnings “will be associated with better child outcomes.” [6]