Mothers do not harm their young children emotionally or socially by going
out to work, according to research that offers reassurance to women worried
about juggling jobs and family responsibilities.
In fact, girls seem to gain from being in a household where their mother
works, according to analysis of families with children born in 2000. In a
project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, a team from the
department of epidemiology and public health at University College London found
no evidence of detrimental effects on the young children of mothers working
part-time or full-time.
The ideal scenario for children of both sexes was for both parents to
live at home and for both to be working, a finding that will encourage
policymakers' moves to help families stay together, if not critics of the
rising numbers of working mothers.
There seemed to be many benefits from both parents working "as long
as parents are supported, do not have to work long hours and are able to
combine child-rearing with paid work ... In this study they did not see any evidence for a longer-term
detrimental influence on child behaviour of mothers working during the first
year of life."
Thousands of parents, mainly mothers, answered questionnaires about their
children in infancy and when they were three and five. They covered external
behaviours such as hyperactivity, tantrums and aggression, and internal ones,
including unhappiness, tearfulness and worry. There were more than 12,000
responses for each stage, and the percentage of mothers working rose from 55%
in children's infancy to 60% at the age of five.
The study, which looked only at white children because of statistical
difficulties in sampling other ethnic groups, is the latest contribution to the
decades-long, often fraught debate about whether mothers' paid employment is good
or bad for their children. Among many conflicting messages, there have been
suggestions that young children looked after by people other than their parents
may be more prone to bad behaviour, that there could be a link between working
mothers and overweight children and that working mothers in steady
relationships are the healthiest women.
The new study suggested that boys whose mother was the breadwinner had
more difficulties at the age of five than those living with two working
parents. Girls whose father was the breadwinner were more likely to have
problems than when both parents were earning.
The idea that working mothers might act as behavioural and emotional role
models for their daughters needed more investigation. Researchers were relying
on the evidence of parents alone, but said the results of the next checks, made
on children's behaviour at the age of seven, would include the views of
teachers.
