Effects of Maternal Employment and Child-Care ...

Developmental Psychology 1991, Vol. 27, No. 6,932-945

Copyright 1991 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0012-1649/91/S3.00

Effects of Maternal Employment and Child-Care Arrangements on Preschoolers' Cognitive and Behavioral Outcomes: Evidence from the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Abuth Nazli Baydar

Jeanne Brooks-Gunn

Center for the Study of Children and Families Teachers College Columbia University

Battelle Human Affairs Research Center Seattle, Washington

The intersection of maternal employment and child care in the first 3 years oflife was considered. The cognitive and behavioral effects of continuity, intensity, and timing of maternal employment in the 1st year and of the different types of child-care arrangements were investigated. Employment in the 1st year had detrimental effects on the cognitive and behavioral development of all children regardlessof gender or poverty status. Infancy-care arrangements affected cognitive and behavioral outcomes. Grandmother care was the most beneficial arrangement for cognitive development of children in poverty. Regarding behavioral development, mother care was most beneficial for boys, and baby-sitter care was most beneficial for girls.

The dramatic rise in the proportion of working mothers with young children over the past quarter century is well documented. The number of women who were employed and who had children under age 6 increased from 2.3 million in 1960 to 7.1 million in 1988 (US. Bureau of the Census, 1989). One half of mothers with infants 1 year of age or younger and almost two thirds of mothers with toddlers (2- to 3-year-olds) are in the work force. The percentages are higher for married mothers, for mothers with fewer children, and for mothers with more education, even though the percentages for all subgroups are over one half (Bureau ofLabor Statistics, 1988; Hayes, Palmer, & Zaslow, 1990). At the minimum, two thirds of infants and toddlers are expected to have an employed mother by 1995 (Scarr, Phillips, & McCartney, 1989). The increases in the proportion of young children with working mothers over the past 20 years are most pronounced for children in their first year oflife: In 1988, more than one half of mothers with babies under I year of age were employed, compared with one third of similar mothers in the mid-1970s (Bureau ofLabor Statistics, 1988). As a result many, if not the majority, of young children today are cared for, at least part of the time, by someone other than their mother. These trends have generated research debates on the effects of nonmaternal care and maternal employment on young children and policy debates on the need for high-quality child care, its cost, and its availability (Chase-Lansdale, Michael, & Desai, in press; Clarke-Stewart, 1989; Hayes et al., 1990; Maynard, 1989). Somewhat surprisingly, however, research on the effects of maternal employment has remained separate from research

The research in this article was supported by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Grant HD 26066. We thank Roberta Paikofffor her thoughtful comments, Don Rock for statistical consultation, and Rosemary Deibler for manuscript preparation. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Center for the Study of Children and Families, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027. 932

on the effects of various child-care arrangements, even though the two are clearly intertwined. With the exception of programs aimed at ameliorating the effects of poverty on young children, child care during the first year is used primarily by employed women. Research on the effects of maternal employment on children grew in part out of a concern for the effects of maternal separation on young children, particularly regarding social and emotional development in the first year (Bowlby, 1969; Bretherton & Waters, 1985; Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Rutter, 1981a; Sroufe, 1979). Few studies address the effects of maternal employment in the first year on children's cognitive functioning (see for exceptions, Hock, 1980; Pedersen, Cain, Zaslow, & Anderson, 1982). The bulk of the research on the effects of maternal separation during infancy is focused on the mother and infant in a laboratory-based setting, using the Strange Situation to assess infants' responses to separation from and reunion with the mother (see Campos, Barrett, Lamb, Goldsmith, & Sternberg, 1983). The studies looking at employment effects tend to have small samples composed of primarily White middle-class families. Many report that 1-year-old White, middle-class boys whose mothers work are more likely to be insecurely attached (as evidenced by avoidant and anxious behavior) than same-age boys whose mothers do not work (Barglow, Vaughn, & Molitor, 1987; Belsky & Rovine, 1988; Chase-Lansdale & Owen, 1987; Doyle & Somers, 1978; Hock & Clinger, 1980; Schwartz, 1983). However, it is not known whether such behavior among boys with employed mothers is associated with later maladjustment. Links between insecure attachment and Later social and emotional problems are reported in studies that do not focus on maternal employment (Farber & Egelan, 1982; Sroufe, 1983; Vaughn, Deane, & Waters, 1985). Research to date has been unable to elucidate possible mechanisms underlying the phenomenon: Insecure attachment may be indicative of problems associated with separation or may be a reflection of earlier independence and autonomy (Clarke-Stewart, 1989). Maternal

SPECIAL SECTION: EFFECTS OF MATERNAL EMPLOYMENT AND CHILD CARE characteristics associated with entry into the labor force may also play a role in increasing insecure attachment (Clarke-Stewart, 1989; Rutter, 1981b; see study results of Hock, 1980). Most studies on maternal employment do not consider either the type or the quality of care that infants are receiving, even though the latter is known to be associated with child functioning (Phillips, 1987). The effects of timing of maternal entry into the labor force during the first 3 years have also not been examined, although the significance of the development during the first year suggests that this period might be a particularly vulnerable developmental period. A separate body of research focuses on the child care received, rather than on maternal employment. Almost no research compares the effects of different types of nonmaternal care. Instead, most of the research to date focuses on centerbased care and, more recently, on family-based care (Hayes et al, 1990). One line of research concentrates on children in poverty who receive early educationally oriented intervention services through home visiting, center-based care services, or both (Beller, 1979; Bronfenbrenner, 1975; Bryant & Ramey, 1987; Clarke-Stewart & Fein, 1983; Haskins, 1989; Zigler & Valentine, 1979). For children who participate in center-based intervention, negative effects on social or emotional functioning are not found (Haskins, 1989). On the contrary, more positive motherinfant interaction and infant social development are shown in over one half of the studies evaluating social and emotional outcomes (Benasich, Brooks-Gunn, & Clewell, in press; Haskins, 1989). Almost all program evaluations report enhanced cognitive functioning through the preschool years (Lazar, Darlington, Murray, Royce, & Snipper, 1982). Although the provision of daily center-based care services might facilitate entry into the work force, most of the early intervention programs did not have this as an explicit goal. The studies that investigate maternal employment find it to be higher in the families who participated in these programs than in the families in the control groups (Benasich et al., in press; Clewell, Brooks-Gunn, & Benasich, 1989). These studies have neither looked at differential effects of intervention for children whose mothers were employed versus children whose mothers were not employed nor looked at the effects of child-care arrangements in the comparison groups (many of whom were probably receiving some nonmaternal care). Two other avenues of research on child care exist. One focuses on the variations in the quality of child care, and the other considers the links between the quality of family and child-care environment (Hayes et al., 1990). To date, these research lines have had center-based child care as their primary focus. The intersection of maternal employment and child-care type was considered in this article, vis-a-vis its effects on subsequent cognitive and behavioral outcomes in children at preschool ages. Such an analysis requires a large and heterogeneous sample, and the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of \buth (NLSY) data set is well suited to addressing the outcomes of intersecting life circumstances of children and their families. In keeping with the preceding two articles (BrooksGunn, Phelps, & Elder, 1991; Chase-Lansdale, Mott, BrooksGunn, & Phillips, 1991), we also considered various methodological issues that arose when using the Children of the NLSY data: How to operationalize child care and employment; whether retrospective and prospective child care data are simi-

933

lar; whether to analyze results for ethnic groups separately; and ways to construct multivariate models to examine differential effects of independent variables on the dependent variable as a function of background characteristics such as sex and poverty status. Although these methodological issues do not constitute an exhaustive list of problems that might be encountered when analyzing the data from the Children of the NLSY, they are illustrative of the issues pertaining to the use of this or other national data sets to address developmental issues. Three sets of questions were addressed. Thefirstset inquired about the effects of maternal employment in the first 3 years of life on cognitive and behavioral functioning of 3- and 4-year-old children and the factors that possibly mediate these effects. The effects of timing of maternal entry into the labor force were examined by estimating the effects of entry in each of thefirst3 years on subsequent child outcomes, controlling for maternal characteristics that are associated with entry into labor force. In keeping with previous studies, we expected maternal entry into the labor force during the first year of life to have a negative effect on cognitive and behavioral functioning of preschoolers (cf. reviews by Chase-Lansdale, Michael, & Desai, 1991; Hayes et al., 1990). We expected the negative effects of maternal entry into the labor force to decline over the first 3 years with minimal effects of entry in the third year. On the basis of previous studies, effects of maternal employment in the first year were expected to vary by gender, with stronger effects for boys. Another analysis of the NLSY data set (Desai, Chase-Lansdale, & Michael, 1989) found gender variation in maternal employment effects only for high-income families. Hence, we investigated the differential effects of maternal employment by poverty status as well as by gender. Previous studies have not identified the particular aspects of maternal employment in thefirstyear that might be most detrimental. The second set of questions related to the continuity, intensity, and timing of maternal employment in the first year of life. Among the children whose mothers were employed in the first year, those whose mothers were employed continuously throughout the first 3 years were expected to experience more detrimental effects than those whose mothers remained home during some of those years. Maternal employment was expected to have stronger negative effects with increasing weekly number of hours worked by the mother. A few studies suggested that negative effects appeared when the number of hours worked per week was over 20, although few direct tests of the amount of hours worked per week were made (Barglow et al., 1987; Belsky, 1988; Belsky & Rovine, 1988; Heynes & Catsambis, 1986; Milne, Myers, Rosenthal, & Ginsburg, 1986). In addition, the timing of maternal entry in the labor force during the first year was expected to have substantial impact on children. Children of mothers who enter the work force later in the child's first year could be expected to fare better than children whose mothers enter the work force earlier in the first year, possibly because of the amount of time spent with the mother. We expected more negative effects from maternal entry into the work force during the second and third quarters of thefirstyear than from entry during the first or fourth quarter. This prediction is based on the admittedly speculative premise that infants in the last quarter of their first year have more sophisticated cognitive conceptions of object and person permanence (Harris, 1983; Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979), rendering the

934

NAZLI BAYDAR AND JEANNE BROOKS-GUNN

older infant less vulnerable to the coming and going of a mother who has been available earlier than infants in the second or third quarters of theirfirstyear (Chase-Lansdale & Owen, 1987; Hoffman, 1984). During the first quarter of the first year, person permanence is not yet formed, as such, and maternal entry into the labor force at this time may be less detrimental than later (Hock, 1980), during its formation. The third set of questions investigated whether the types of child-care arrangements influence child outcomes over and above the expected maternal employment effect. Quality of child care could not be explored with the Children of the NLSY data set because the characteristics of child-care arrangements used in the first, second, and third years of life were not asked. Note that information on child-care type was not used to test hypotheses regarding the effects of quality of child care. Care by relatives was expected to be beneficial for infants of employed mothers when compared with care by nonrelatives in the first year. On the basis of scanty evidence, grandparents and fathers were posited to enhance functioning as compared with other relatives because of their stability (i£., presence in the child's life even when not performing primary child care) and long-lasting relationship and presumed commitment to the child (Furstenberg, Brooks-Gunn, & Morgan, 1987; Lamb, 1976; Parke, 1979; Tinsley & Parke, 1984). Whether care by other relatives operates in a similar beneficial fashion is not known. Nonrelative care in the first year was expected to have particularly negative effects for poor children, because the quality of paid care that is affordable for families in poverty is likely to be low. Hence, the comparative advantage of relative child care as compared with paid child care was expected to be larger for children in poverty than for children not in poverty.

Method Sample This study examined the 1,181 children who were 3 to 4 years of age at the time of the 1986 child assessment of the NLSY. Analyses were restricted to children of this age because of three factors: (a) possible confounding of the effects of mother's age with the effects of child's age; (b) possible confounding of the effects of school attendance and child care for school-aged children (including 5-year-olds, the majority of who attend kindergarten); and (c) availability of child-care histories for the first 3 years of life only. Of the I, J 81 children, 351 were classified as Black and 258 as Hispanic, ' We felt that combining ethnic groups was inappropriate for the following reasons; (a) In 1986, the cognitive assessment that was administered to 3- to 4-year-old children (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test —Revised, or PPVT-R; see below) was given in English only, resulting in a very high noncompletion rate among Hispanic children. Additionally, the validity of the cognitive assessment among Spanish-speaking children is unknown, (b) In preliminary analyses, the effects of childcare arrangements were found to differ significantly for Black and White 3- to 4-year-old children, making it inappropriate to combine the two groups, (c) The mean cognitive ability scores for Blacks and Whites were very different. In this sample, the mean PPVT-R scores were 96.5 (SD = 16.2)forWhites and 73.9 (SZ)» 17.7) for Blacks.2The measurement errors of such assessments can be expected to be larger, when scores are more extreme (Lord & Novick, 1968, pp. 141-148). In this example, the measurement error of the FPVT-R was expected to be higher among Black children. Hence, combining the two groups in a regressioniike model might have resulted in biases, (d) The social context of cognitive and behavioral development is quite different for

White and Black children. The proportions of Black children who were poor (58% during the first year of life), whose mothers had little education (30.9% under 12 years of schooling) and who had single mothers (73.2% during the first year of life) were substantially higher than the corresponding proportions for White children (19.8%, 24.8%, and 15.4%, respectively). Additionally, the labor force attachment of Black mothers was somewhat weaker than that of White mothers. The mothers of 52% of Black and 44% of White children were not employed during the third and fourth quarters of the first year, (e) In this sample, the predictors of Black and White 3- to 4-year-old children's cognitive and behavioral scores were somewhat different-3 These factors warranted separate analyses of ethnic groups. One of the objectives of our research was to determine if the effects of maternal employment and types of child care vary among different sociodemographic groups of children. However, there were not enough Black children in the sample to conduct analyses demonstrating the variation in the effects of maternal employment and child-care arrangements simultaneously by poverty status and gender.4 The rest of this article focuses on the White subsampie. Of the 572 White children, 49.9% were girls and 50.1% were boys.5 The majority of these children were firstborn (58.1%). Very few children (1.9%) had three or more siblings at the time they were born. At the time of birth of the children, their mothers were ort the average 21.4 years old. About onefifth(22.2%) of the children were born to mothers less than 20 years old. The mothers had a mean of 11.8 years of education at the time of birth; 27.3% of the children had mothers who had not completed high school; and 84.5% of the children's mothers were married at the time of the first survey following the birth of their children.

Measures Employment. Detailed maternal employment information is available for the Children of the NLSY from week-by-week employment histories of the mothers taken at each survey- Although the week-byweek information may have been less accurate for those mothers who held a variety of jobs during a year than for those who were more stably employed, such longitudinal information was preferable over the concurrent employment information pertaining to the employment status at the time of the survey at each round. The information pertaining to the concurrent employment status at the time of the prior NLSY surveys did not refer to comparable points in the lives of the sample children. For example, the employment status of the mother taken from the survey when the child was under 1 year of age could have described the mother's status at any time point between the 1st and the 12th month of the child's life. The early years of a child's life were characterized by rapidly increasing maternal employment rates (see Figure 1). 1

These are the unweighted numbers of subjects. Weighted statistics. For example, in a simple ordinary least squares regression predicting the PPVT-R scores for Blacks and Whites, the standardized beta weights of often-used sociodemographic predictors are different. Standardized beta weights are (for Whites and Blacks, respectively) mother's cognitive ability score (measure described later; .36 and .27), age of mother (dummy coded as teenage mother or not at the time of birth of the child; .00 and - . 13), poverty (dummy coded as in poverty for any of the first 3 years of life;-.11 and .01), number of additional children (-.14 and -.03), maternal employment in thefirstyear of the child's life (-. 16 and -.00), and marital status (dummy coded as single or not in thefirstyear of the child's life; .05 and -.02). 4 Preliminary regression analyses indicate that maternal employment in the first year oflife is not associated with Black preschoolers' PPVT-R scores. 5 All weighted statistics. 2 3

SPECIAL SECTION: EFFECTS OF MATERNAL EMPLOYMENT AND CHILD CARE Hence, maternal employment information must be anchored to the child's age. The retrospective week-by-week employment data were used to infer maternal employment status at time points referenced to the child's date of birth. Thus, the employment information underlying the current analysis was obtained from the week-by-week data.6 The employment status of a mother during each of thefirst3 years of her child's life was established on the basis of her reports about the last two quarters of that year. The usual hours of work per week during the last two quarters of each year were averaged to obtain a measure of maternal employment during the first 3 years of life. On the basis of these data, the following measures were constructed for the analyses: 1. Children were classified as having mothers who were not employed, employed 1-10 hr, employed 11-20 hr, or employed more than 20 hr for each of the 3 years. All children whose mothers were employed for 1 or more hr on the average were assumed to be children of employed mothers. . 2. A child whose mother was not employed in infancy but was employed during the second and third years of life was considered to have a mother who entered the labor force in the second year. A child whose mother did not work during the first 2 years but worked during the third year was considered to have a mother who entered the labor force in the third year. Dummy variables that indicated these two groups of children were constructed. 3. A measure of any employment during the second and third years of life was constructed to indicate if a child's mother had been employed for at least an average of 1 hr per week during the second or third years of life. 4. A measure of mixed employment pattern was constructed to indicate if a child's mother had experienced employment patterns that involved a period of unemployment following a period of employment during the first 3 years of a child's life. 5. For a more detailed look at the maternal entry into the labor force over the first year of life, mean work hours per week at each quarter of the first year were used to construct dummy indicators of having worked in a particular quarter given no employment in any of the previous quarters. Child care. Child-care arrangements during the first 3 years of a child's life were asked of the mothers retrospectively at the time of the 1986 NLSY survey. In this study, we used the primary child-care arrangement reported retrospectively by the mothers. Three issues arose when looking at the retrospective child-care arrangement data in the Children of the NLSY Thefirsthad to do with the retrospective nature of the data. The reliability of the retrospective reports of child-care arrangements during the first 3 years of life was investigated for a subset of children by means of the concurrent child-care information collected in the 1984 and 1985 surveys of the NLSY. An analysis of these data (see Baydar & Brooks-Gunn, 1991) showed that the mothers of more than one half of the children retrospectively reported the same child-care arrangement as the one reported concurrently in prior surveys. Because the time reference of retrospective and concurrent childcare items, their wording, and their structure did not match, the proportion of matching reports was surprisingly high. The type of childcare arrangement that was most likely to be retrospectively misreported was that provided by the other parent. Mothers may have perceived such arrangements as shared caregiving rather than as the father being the primary caregiver, thereby increasing the recall errors retrospectively (see Brooks-Gunn & Chase-Lansdale, in press, and Furstenberg et al., 1987, for a similar argument about joint care among teenage mothers and their mothers). Misreporting was not associated with socioeconomic status indicators (maternal education, age of mother, poverty, family income, or maternal cognitive ability). Employed mothers tended to retrospectively report child-care arrangements more accurately than mothers who were not employed. The second issue pertaining to the use of NLSY's retrospective maternal reports on primary child care was the possibility that some chil-

935

dren could have experienced multiple child-care arrangements. Among the children whose mothers were employed in their first year of life, 15.5% had a secondary child-care arrangement. Secondary arrangements were most common for the children who were cared for at a center or by their fathers (more than 50%) and least common for children who were cared for by their grandmother (12.4%). A nonrelative (baby-sitter) was the most common secondary care provider for the infants of employed mothers. In this study, because of sample size problems, we did not examine the effects of experiencing a combination of different child-care types on children. The third issue regarding the use of child-care arrangement information of the NLSY data was the absence of any data on the quality of the care.7 Child-care type may have had little association with child-care quality, and these data did not allow us to test hypotheses on the effects of quality of care on child outcomes. Child outcomes. In this study, we considered a cognitive and a behavioral child outcome, using the PPVT-R and the Behavioral Problems Index (BPI), described in Chase-Lansdale, Mott, Brooks-Gunn, and Phillips (1991). Here, the standardized PPVT-R and the raw total BPI scores were used .8 The 2 items of the BPI that referred to school behavior were excluded from the computation of the total scale, leaving 26 items. Only 4-year-olds were assessed with the BPI; therefore, the sample size for these analyses was considerably reduced. Sociodemographic covariates. Entry into the work force and choice of child care are associated with many sociodemographic characteristics. Analyses were conducted comparing the sociodemographic characteristics of women who entered the labor force in the first year and those who entered in the second or third year with those who did not enter the work force in thefirst3 yearsof the child's life. The characteristics of the child and mother that were associated with the mothers' decisions regarding entry into the labor force are presented in Table 1. Boys and children who were not firstborns were less likely to have mothers who entered the labor force during the first year of life compared with girls and firstborn children. Similarly, children whose mothers were teenaged, in poverty, and lesser educated and had low levels of cognitive ability (measured by the Armed Forces Qualification Test [AFQT ] score, see below) were less likely to have an employed mother during the first year of life than were the other children. Most of these characteristics were associated with each other. For example, children whose mothers were teenaged at the time of their birth were more likely to be in poverty than those who were born to older mothers. When these characteristics were simultaneously controlled for, the only significant predictors of maternal entry into the labor force during the first year of life were poverty status (not being poor), mother's having a high school diploma, and the mother's level of ability.9 Among the children whose mothers entered the labor force during 6 These data are included in the merged mother-child NLSY data set where all weeks are dated in reference to the week of the child's birth. 7 The NLSY included some questions eliciting the quality of the child-care arrangement that was used by the mother at the time of the 1986 interview. These concurrent child-care data are not used here. Rather, we focus on the information on child-care arrangements during the first 3 years of life. B The BPI has been standardized by age and gender. Because of our hypotheses about gender effects, the use of a score standardized by gender was inappropriate. 9 Multivariate logistic regression predicting maternal entry into labor force during thefirstyear of life (vs. mother not working in the first year) included the following covariates (unstandardized coefficients in parentheses): being boys (—.24, p > .10), mother married (-.31, p > .10), in poverty (-.54, p < .05), teenage mother (-.20, p > .10), not firstborn (-.19, p > . 10), mother has high school education (.57, p < .05), mother has higher education (.12, p > .10), and mother's AFQT score (.001, pTUMBER (MAY BE FOUND ONANYPASTKSUE LABEL) DATE YOUR ORDER WAS MAILED (OR PHONED):

ADDRESS P.O. NUMBER: __PREPAID STATEAXHJNTRY

YOUR NAME AND PHONE NUMBER

.CHARGE .CHECK. CHECK/CARD CLEARED DATE:.

(If possible, send a copy, front and back, of your cancelled check to help UJ In our research otyoar claim.} ISSUES: _ _ M I S S I N G __DAMAGED

VOLUME OR YEAR

TITLE

NUMBER OR MONTH

Thank you. Once a claim is received and resolved, delivery of replacement issues routinely takes 4-6 weeks.

DATERECETVED: ACTION TAKEN: STAFF NAME:

945

DATE OF ACTION: INV. NO. & DATE: LABEL NO. & DATE:

SEND THIS FORM TO: APA Subscription Claims, 1400 N. Uhle Street, Arlington, VA 22201-2969 PLEASE D O N O T REMOVE. A PHOTOCOPY M A Y BE USED.