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4. Maternal Employment and the Family Environment
Pages 65-98

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From page 65...
... Chapter 5 looks at early child care and school-age child care settings and considers the effects of care on children. It reviews conceptual and methodological advances that have informed recent research, reviews a set of large-scale studies that have examined the implications of child care quality on child developmental outcomes, and reviews evidence on associations between child care quality and various dimensions of the care.
From page 67...
... This chapter reviews evidence on how maternal employment, particularly employment of low-income families, appears to affect the home environment of children and how that, in turn, affects children. Chapter 5 goes on to focus on the effects of child care environments on young children, while Chapter 6 focuses on the effects of care environments on adolescents.
From page 68...
... found evidence to support the following patterns: on the positive side, school-age and adolescent daughters of employed mothers show higher academic aspirations and achievement and are more likely to make nontraditional role choices than are daughters of nonemployed mothers, and both sons and daughters of employed mothers have less traditional attitudes about gender roles. The evidence further indicates that when preschool and school-age children in poverty show differences in development in light of their mothers' employment status, they also show more favorable cognitive and socioemotional outcomes.
From page 69...
... At the same time, they perceive themselves as less available to their children and express concern about their ability to supervise them. Findings of neutral or small associations of maternal employment with child outcomes may actually reflect counterbalancing influences in the family rather than an absence of influences.
From page 70...
... As such, these studies provide a context for considering child outcomes when employment increases as a result of welfare-towork programs. Another important development in the research is an explicit focus on the processes underlying associations between maternal employment and child outcomes, such as family economic resources, maternal parenting behavior, father involvement, and maternal psychological well-being.
From page 71...
... hypothesizes that there are three key aspects of the family environment that differ in light of the mother's employment status and that in turn may be important to children's development: parenting behavior and the home environment, father involvement, and mother's psychological well-being. In addition, the work on maternal employment in the context of welfare reform adds a fourth key element to this list: family economic resources, which may in turn affect any of these three factors.
From page 72...
... 72 WORKING FAMILIES AND GROWING KIDS BOX 4-1 Research Terms Experimental design: involves the random assignment of individuals to either a treatment group (in this case, participation in the program being assessed) or a control group (a group that is not given the treatment)
From page 73...
... Economic resources can derive not only from earnings, but also through benefits intended to support employment, such as financial work incentives, including the federal and state earned income tax credits and child care subsidies (Zedlewski, 2002)
From page 74...
... There were few impacts at all in these evaluations on outcomes related to children's health. Although health outcomes were studied in the least detail in these evaluations, the pattern of findings in these evaluations parallels the pattern of findings linking economic resources and child outcomes directly: outcomes related to intellectual achievement are most consistently found to be 2Experimental evaluations of welfare reform programs done in five of the states that were granted welfare waivers in the years prior to the 1996 welfare reform (Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, and Minnesota)
From page 75...
... The evidence indicates that while participation in the earned income tax credit is strong among eligible families, a substantial proportion of eligible families are not receiving food stamps, Medicaid, or child care benefits for which they are eligible. An important step for the research on maternal employment will be to take a closer look at how family economic resources are defined, in order to determine which approach best helps to explain associations between maternal employment, family resources, and children's outcomes.
From page 76...
... Their review finds that mothers of young children in a number of welfare reform programs (though not all) were more likely to make use of formal child care arrangements for their young children.
From page 77...
... . These researchers distinguish between two types of welfare reform programs in terms of child care benefits: those that provide enhanced child care supports for families in the program group, and those that simply offer more of the same child care supports and benefits as employment increases, not distinguishing the nature of supports for those in the program and the control groups.
From page 78...
... provide exploratory evidence that the impacts on dyadic aspects of parenting, when they did occur, helped to explain program impacts on child outcomes for the school-age children in the JOBS program. For example, two years after assignment to the Atlanta labor force attachment JOBS program (a program emphasizing work first rather than starting with education or training before attempting to locate employment)
From page 79...
... While positive parenting behavior did predict more favorable child development outcomes in this sample over time, there were important negative influences on development that appeared to counterbalance positive parenting, including very low income, difficult life circumstances, residential mobility, and isolation or lack of social support for the very young welfare-receiving mothers in this study. These results suggest that parenting education has the potential to influence parenting behavior positively, even among very disadvantaged welfare-receiving families (in this case, adolescent mothers who had dropped out of school)
From page 80...
... There was little anticipation that changes in mothers' employment status or assignment to a welfare reform program could change adolescents' experiences or development in a substantial way. But results from these studies have moved the focus on this age group from peripheral to central.
From page 81...
... diminution in parental monitoring among mothers in welfare reform program groups as a result of employment demands, which could result in too great autonomy, particularly in high-risk neighborhoods; and (3) increased assumption of adult-like roles by adolescents to help the family function after the mother becomes employed, but to an extent that exceeds a positive range (that is, regularly caring for siblings for prolonged periods)
From page 82...
... Parenting of Infants The experimental studies of welfare reform and children have another important gap with respect to child age: these studies rarely considered program impacts on infants and, when they did so, did not use extensive or in-depth measures (see the review of these measures and findings in Zaslow et al., 2002)
From page 83...
... Furthermore, children of mothers who worked 30 or more hours per week by the 9th month scored lower on a measure of cognitive school readiness at 36 months than children of mothers who did not work full time early on. Maternal sensitivity and the quality of the home environment as well as the quality of child care helped to explain the relationship between extensive early maternal employment and children's scores on the school readiness measure.
From page 84...
... suggests that the timing of return to employment even in the first months of the infant's life may be important to the quality of mother-infant interaction, other work suggests that time together may continue to be important to the quality of motherchild interaction even beyond the first year. The NICHD Study of Early Child Care reports findings suggesting that "the amount of time that mothers and children spend together is associated with the ease of their interaction and communication" (1999a:1410)
From page 85...
... It is important to note that the findings on which this rough hypothesis is based are drawn from studies of very-low-income families (the experimental studies of welfare reform programs) or are particularly strong in the lowest income families studied in broader samples (the findings for infants)
From page 86...
... This patterning of results anticipates findings in the area of maternal employment and mothers' mental health (summarized below) and maps onto the pattern of child outcomes that Hoffman and other reviewers have summarized for low-income families (of outcomes for children of employed mothers falling in a neutral to positive range)
From page 87...
... cognitive or literacy test scores administered to the mothers at the start of a welfare reform evaluation or survey data collection. For example, mothers were administered the AFQT in the NLSY; this is often used as a control variable in analyses examining employment in this dataset.
From page 88...
... . Using data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care, Han found less positive cognitive and social developmental outcomes over time for children whose mothers had ever worked nonstandard hours by the child's third year of life in comparison with those who had not, controlling for extent of employment.
From page 89...
... We note that research to date focusing on father involvement in single-parent families in welfare reform programs has tended to examine the economic contributions of the father, through formalized or informal child support (and paternity establishment as a prerequisite to formalized child support) , rather than involvement in the care of the child or the household (McLanahan and Carlson, 2002)
From page 90...
... caution that the sense of being pressed into greater responsibility for child care early on by fathers of wives employed full time does not appear to be sustained through the end of the first year in their sample, "suggesting that they may have become more proficient at balancing work and family responsibilities" (p.
From page 91...
... In a study of stable maternal employment (consistent employment status over a three-year period) in low- and middle-income families with 3rd and 4th grade children, they found that the greater the father's involvement in household tasks and child care, the less stereotyped were the children's attitudes about appropriate roles for men and women.
From page 92...
... It is indeed possible that mothers may derive a sense of competence from their work, that contact with coworkers serves as a source of social support, and that the income derived from employment may reduce anxiety about family economic resources. However, it is also possible that mothers with poor mental health may find it more difficult to find or maintain employment, and that this is the source of the employment-mental health link (see findings in Vandell and Ramanan, 1992)
From page 93...
... Interestingly, in most of the programs in which the unfavorable impacts (increases in depressive symptoms) occurred, overall family income did not increase despite the family's participation in a welfare reform program.
From page 94...
... examined time use data for mothers with infants in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care. They found that employed mothers did spend less time overall with their infants.
From page 95...
... For example, one of the six programs examined in this evaluation, the JOBS labor force attachment program in the Atlanta site of the study, had a favorable impact on children in reducing their externalizing behavior problems. This program had a positive impact on a summary rating of mothers' parenting behavior.
From page 96...
... Instead, impacts on parenting in the welfare-towork evaluations are concentrated in the gatekeeping aspects of parenting, such as enrollment of children in child care and after-school activities. There are indications in the welfare-to-work evaluations of the particular importance of economic resources associated with employment in shaping positive impacts for young children of mothers making the transition to work (although these same factors do not seem to contribute to positive impacts for adolescent children in these families, who show a pattern of unfavorable impacts irrespective of whether increased employment was associated with increased family income)
From page 97...
... They may, for example, take into account to a greater extent their own satisfaction with a child care arrangement, the availability of other adults to help, job characteristics, and issues concerning their children's well-being, such as health. In future work, it would be particularly helpful to look systematically in heterogeneous samples at whether maternal employment is associated with different family processes and child outcomes in light of history of welfare receipt and socioeconomic circumstances.
From page 98...
... for which they are eligible and targeting families struggling to make the transition to work. The research also suggests that a particular focus be given to the needs of adolescent children in these families.


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