Study Links Working Mothers
Study Links Working Mothers to Slower Learning This is sure to stir up a hornets’ nest.
“What we found was that when mothers worked more than 30 hours by the time their children were 9 months old, those children, on average, did not do as well on school-readiness tests when they were 3 years old,” said Jeanne Brooks-Gunn of Columbia’s Teachers College, the lead author of the study. “In other work we’ve done, we’ve seen that those negative effects of early full-time maternal employment persist among children who are 7 or 8.”
I wonder if the researchers controlled for breast-fed babies vs. bottle-fed? Surely, women who are back in the work force are less likely to be nursing at 9 months than those who are home.
Here are a couple of sad quotes:
“We really looked at different questions,” Ms. Waldfogel said. “They looked at early child care, while we looked at early maternal employment. You’d think that those would be the same, but it turns out that a third of the nonworking mothers put their children in child care before 9 months.”
In the families studied, 55 percent of the mothers were working by the third month, 71 percent by the sixth month and 75 percent by the ninth month.