teacherone
12-30-2010, 04:33 AM
Whether mom works or not, the kids are OK
CHICAGO (MarketWatch) — Parents who worry they are forever damaging their children by dropping them off at day-care every morning can find some comfort in a recent study that looked at academic achievement and behavioral issues of children whose mothers work outside the home versus those with moms who stay home.
An analysis of 50 years of research found that kids of working mothers don’t turn out to be much different than those with stay-at-home moms, at least when it comes to academic achievement and behavior issues.
The research, published in November in Psychological Bulletin, examined 69 studies conducted between 1960 and March 2010. The good news is that, overall, children whose mothers return to work early in their lives (before age three) are no more likely to have significant behavior or academic problems than kids whose moms stay at home.
However, the researchers did find some small effects — positive and negative — when they broke the results down into various sub-groups of children. Kids from middle- and upper-class, two-parent families performed slightly worse on formal tests of achievement and showed a slight increase in behavior problems when their mothers worked full-time during the first three years of their lives. And children from low-income, single-parent families actually did better on achievement tests and had fewer behavior problems when their moms were employed.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/whether-mom-works-or-not-the-kids-are-ok-2010-12-30
CHICAGO (MarketWatch) — Parents who worry they are forever damaging their children by dropping them off at day-care every morning can find some comfort in a recent study that looked at academic achievement and behavioral issues of children whose mothers work outside the home versus those with moms who stay home.
An analysis of 50 years of research found that kids of working mothers don’t turn out to be much different than those with stay-at-home moms, at least when it comes to academic achievement and behavior issues.
The research, published in November in Psychological Bulletin, examined 69 studies conducted between 1960 and March 2010. The good news is that, overall, children whose mothers return to work early in their lives (before age three) are no more likely to have significant behavior or academic problems than kids whose moms stay at home.
However, the researchers did find some small effects — positive and negative — when they broke the results down into various sub-groups of children. Kids from middle- and upper-class, two-parent families performed slightly worse on formal tests of achievement and showed a slight increase in behavior problems when their mothers worked full-time during the first three years of their lives. And children from low-income, single-parent families actually did better on achievement tests and had fewer behavior problems when their moms were employed.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/whether-mom-works-or-not-the-kids-are-ok-2010-12-30