Working mums: new study finds going out to work has no harmful effect on small children

[HelenMumsnet]

Hello. We've just had the heads-up on this study suggesting that there are no significant detrimental effects on a child's social or emotional development if her or his mother works during her or his early years.

In fact, young girls may even gain from being in a household where their mother works, say researchers at University College London, in a UK-wide project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

These findings run counter to those of some previous studies, which have suggested that children whose mother works in the first year of their life may be more prone to bad behaviour, or even to be more overweight.

What do you think? Do the new findings surprise you? Or confirm what you already knew? Do tell...

why have children if you dont want to watch em
thats a clichetastic one

And .... 'I just couldn't leave my baby with anyone else'!

lol,yes thats a goodie

And, of course, our long-standing favourite, let's hear it for...

Why have children if you're just going to hand them over to someone else?'

That's nice for you, porcupine. Personally, I had to earn a proper living - when my children were small I was the main earner - and, despite being freelance, not at times when (a) nobody to interview was available - I'm a journalist (b) I was exhausted from childcare.

Of course fathers 'ain't that interested': not because of biology but because they do not inhabit a culture that tries to make them feel guilty for working and being a parent.

can imagine the rattle tattlers goggling cortisol and attachment disorder

I'm not arguing against the findings but I don't think this study proves anything.
It's ludicrously subjective.

I love my job. I'd be a shit mother if I had to stay at home looking after DS all the time because I'd be bored and miserable. Therefore he benefits from having a mother who is happy and fulfilled and brings home the money to clothe, feed and house him.

I don't give a bollox what the studies say and I never feel guilty about the fact that I work (although I am lucky in that DH works PT, my parents help out and DS loves nursery).

All of my friends who SAH say 'Why would I let someone else raise them/nurseries are too institutionalised/ cortisol/first 3 years/neural pathways forming', etc

All my friends who WOH say 'The time I DO spend with the is quality time/ I'd go mad if I were at home/ I'm setting a good example/ nursery is good for them' etc.

All of us would answer questionnaires about their development from the starting point that we had made the 'right' choice. The whole premise to me seems flawed.

Agree the questionnaire approach is flawed. So why do it? What is the purpose of giving it such publicity? We are cutting services for disabled people and are cutting the police force, so why spend money on a questionnaire based survey?

It might be subjective but it came from the Millenium Cohort study - so they matched up unrelated and different data collected at different times.

It's not like they put out an advert saying 'we need some working and some SAHM mums to rate their childs behaviour because we want to see if working mothers ruin their childs life'

iwouldnotcouldnot- do you think perhaps it just doesnt really matter? As long as the child is loved, happy and cared for...and we spend too much time thinking about it? There is no right choice and children are likely to be fine as really the vast majority of children in the UK are very privileged (on a global comparison level)?

The Millennium Cohort Study produces lots of different kinds of information. It's not set up purely for this one bit of research. So those of you worrying that it's a waste of money can relax.

I very much doubt that they said 'please would you tell us whether you engage in paid work and whether you think your child is damaged or not'. That would be daft. I assume (because these are reputable researchers) that they will have collected data on all sorts of measures of children's well being and checked them against the stated economic status of the mother.

(oops sorry peppa cross post - it is taking me AGES to do anything because my 'e' key has broken right off)

Peppa I'm not making a value judgment either way, I'm just saying that to me the premise of this particular study seems flawed.

Yes, but really design-wise it is flawed, as you might expect working mums to report less behavioural issues/less emotional issues (even if there were more) as they are well aware of the stereotypes and may be, without realising it, slightly emphasising the positive aspects of their children's behaviour and bonding.

You see it all the time on here, people saying my children were in full-time daycare since 4 months, but are so happy, bonded, cuddly (insert positive behaviour of choice). This may be true, but it's a self-report measure that also serves a function, to reassure the parent they are doing the right thing, and so is not as concrete as, say, an observer in a classroom observing aggressive behaviour (which some of the other studies showing an effect have done).

I don't say this to undermine working mums, I am FT working mum, just that I don't think asking already judged mums to describe their children's behaviour is especially neutral. And I see a mixture of outcomes in my own children, there have been times where they have had a hard time at school, for example, and I simply haven't been around enough.

Bingo, allinabag.

for me this confirms that there's a report/study out there to support whatever side of the fence you happen to sit on and that people on the opposite side on the fence will look for flaws in the studies they don't agree with.

unless you study every child and every parent and every childcare option and every work life balance then surely there is just no way anyone can ever say that working or not working is damaging for each individual child or family.

I think the only right option can be what suits the individual family - as many have said, it's great if either parent has a job they love - they will be happy doing the job, and this is a very positive message to send the child, especially a working mother setting an example to a daughter.

However, if mothers enjoy being at home and they can afford to, then they should.

Of course, it is always good to have positive research which does not lay the blame on mothers.

Sign me up as another person sick of studies (and media reporting) reinforcing the maternal guilt/mother's-place-is-in-the-home/fathers-are-the-breadwinners nonsense. I would utterly love a media report that talks about the benefits or otherwise of working or stay at home parents, not mothers.

Guess what? My husband is taking his share of parental leave, and he's the one dropping his hours when we're both back at work so that we don't have to do five-day-a-week nursery. He's chuffed about it, but he's also VERY aware the number of men who look askance and say it's not for them -- because that's the society we inhabit and very few men can be arsed questioning that.

It's hilarious how people can talk about a study being flawed without having read it or having any academic grounding in the subject.

The questions will have been well designed. Come on, people. It's a massive sample, too.

Women have worked outside the home throughout history, always, as an economic necessity. Only the very rich could afford to have wives who did not work (manually), and they had servants who were, wait for it, women, who were also mothers, as there was no contraception in those days which worked. In 1910 there were about 5 million women working outside the home in paid employment, it was normal.

I await the "Edward the 3rd would have been a better king if his mother hadn't been running the country during his childhood" report.

working9while5, what do you mean? This analysis of the Millenium Cohort is the same set of data used for the paper that showed that working women have unhealthier children with worse lifestyles a year or two back, so it is throwing up some strange and not entirely consistent results. If you read the press release, it also states that boys do worse in households where women are the main breadwinners?! So, not everyone is a winner if the mother works then, as the title suggests.

So: what does that tell you to do as a mum in practice? If you value health, don't work, if you value social and emotional development, do, and if you have a boy, immediately quit employment and shout at your husband til he gets a job? It's throwing up some complex and interesting patterns, but it's a different type of data than some other studies in this area that are often cited in these discussions (e.g. the aggression ones), and deserves to be critically inspected. Now, if they linked these self-report measures to external measures in nurseries/schools of behaviour at age 3 and 4, say, that would even more interesting.

As for inspecting the paper, you can't, despite the fact that the ESRC is funded from the public purse, the paper is published behind a paywall as is common for academic journals, thus making it very hard for people to read it and judge for themselves.

And, from what I can see, pretty much all the parents in the study are mothers. I would say that's a design flaw in a large longitudinal study designed to look at influences in childhoood over the long-term and the reason why we get endless media stories about mothers working and not dads.

Another vote here for "no shit sherlock"! Completely missing the wood for the trees to ask whether a mother going out to work harms small children. And of course fathers SHOULD work. There are challenges with going out to work - mostly to do with how much support and help the mother gets - but that has nothing to do in the first place with whether a mum should get a job outside the home or not. And the stresses and dangers of poverty (which could be alleviated by a mother going out to work) are not conducive to making a warm, relaxed and nurturing home.

What about the effect on mothers? I had to go back to work after 7 months and really didn't want to, I wanted to be a stay at home mum. I ended up with post natal depression, I'm sure that had a more negative effect on my daughter than any 'advantage' I gave her by being a working mum

I'm with Edam, Peppa, and Working9til5 here: please, before you dismiss the study as 'flawed' and 'subjective' and 'proving nothing' would you actually read about the cohort, the study, the analyses and the interpretation of the data? I work alongside people using and gathering data from the GMS cohort, and it's one of the better sets of studies going on in my opinion (better, or at least more representative of the UK as a whole, than ALSPAC).

For what it's worth, here's my take on it.

1. So: who did the research?

Dr Anne McMunn and researchers from the International Centre for Lifecourse Studies in Society and Health at UCL Here.

1. Who funded it?

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), which is the UK's largest organisation for funding research on economic and social issues. It supports independent, high quality research which has an impact on business, the public sector and the third sector. The ESRC?s total budget for 2011/12 is £203 million. At any one time the ESRC supports over 4,000 researchers and postgraduate students in academic institutions and independent research institutes. I am one of those postgraduate students. Perhaps Claig can tell me a way in which my longitudinal research into the eating attitudes and obesity of 7-11 year olds is part of a vast conspiracy to get us all to work longer.

I'm emphasising independent because this funding body does not tell researchers what to find, and nor does it influence what research is or is not published (by published I mean reported, scrutinised by other academics and published in an academic journal - at the point of publication there is usually a press release too, which is what has hapened here).

1. Okay, so where was it published? Where can I read the actual evidence?

In an international respected journal, the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. Click here for the study abstract.

1. Did it look at the working patterns of fathers too?

Yes, actually. It's just that the newspapers aren't reporting any of this bit. One of the study's primary purposes was to stop looking at working mums as if they were a single, deterministic variable in children's wellbeing and to start looking at WOH and SAH mums in the context of WOH or SAH dads i.e. taking a family unit perspective on outcomes.

1. Did they take into account other influences upon outcomes such as income?

Of course they did. They took into account multiple other variables, notably household income, parental education and parental age, which are known to have an effect on outcomes. By statistically 'controlling' for these effects, it was possible to take potential intervening (mediating / moderating/ other) variables out of the picture to see whether a relationship between the variables of interest still remained.

1. What were the key findings?

Overall, the most beneficial working arrangement for both girls and boys was that in which both mothers and fathers were present in the household and in paid work independent of maternal educational attainment and household income.

Did it prove anything? Why does it matter?
No, it doesn't 'prove' anything. Any social scientist claiming to have proved something is talking b*llocks. No-one is claiming that this finding is definitive. It is an interesting finding that should be taken in the context of other studies in the same area.

It matters because:

1. In comparison with other studies in the area, it used a larger and more representative sample.
2. It isn't designed to tell us what to do i.e. to change things /guilt people into going back to work / not doing so. For a start, few of us actually have that choice. It's primarily designed to give us some indication of what is currently happening in the UK from an epidemiological perspective i.e. overall trends, not individual imperatives. The overtones of blaming / not blaming mums primarily originate amongst the press.