A report out today suggests working mothers harm their kids’ education. Kate Figes takes it with a pinch of salt
Wednesday March 14, 2001
The perpetual onslaught against working mothers rears its ugly head again today with the publication of a study from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation which implies that under-fives with full-time working mothers are less likely to grow up into successful A-level students than those whose mothers work part-time or stay at home. The research has found that those who didn’t work increased the chances of their children getting one A-level by 12%, while those who worked part time increased their children’s chances by 6%.
All research needs to be treated with scepticism. This was a study of 1,236 people born in the 1970s, when times were very different. Working mothers were rarer; high-quality daycare was almost nonexistent; and our knowledge of the psychological development of under-fives was scant. There were no early music classes, no dance or drama workshops, and few nursery schools with Montessori equipment encouraging the basic learning skills that we take for granted today.
A great deal happens in children’s lives between the ages of five and 18 that can affect their attitudes to education; without knowing their individual life stories, it is hard to tell surely whether they would have dropped out or failed A-levels anyway. It is obvious, but no less striking, that the children of educated working mothers stood a better chance of getting A-levels than those lower down the social scale.
John Ermisch, co-author of the report with Marco Francesconi at the University of Essex, agrees that other factors inevitably influence educational outcomes: “There are a lot of other things that you can’t control, but I was a bit surprised by the size of the difference. My preconception was that what parents did with their time when they were not working would muddy the waters so much that the difference would be less.”
For every research paper that suggests working motherhood damages children, others indicate more positive effects on the social and cognitive development of children. At the Institute of Child Health, Ian Roberts con ducted a systematic review of childcare research and found that, on balance, it was good for children, provided they were in high-quality care. A trained nursery worker, able to stimulate and excite a child with a wide variety of educational toys for part of the day, is likely to be of far greater benefit than a bored or preoccupied full-time mother who plonks the baby in front of the television for hours at a time. Other research indicates that stay-at-home mothers are more likely to be depressed and feel isolated. Depressed mothers interact far less with their babies, which is in itself a developmental downer.
When this research is put into the wider context of what is happening within education, whether or not mothers are working must surely be secondary to what is happening within our schools. Educational standards are higher than ever for those children who manage to stay the course, and unprecedented numbers of young people now go on to some form of higher education. But, at the other end of the scale, rising numbers of disaffected children fail to see the point of getting an education at all when both of their parents are unemployed (presumably with their mother at home) and they live on run-down estates where the schools struggle to buy books and keep their charges in the classroom.
From pre-conception onwards, parents are bombarded with research that centres on the welfare of their children and the way that parents can unwittingly damage them. At best, parents feel confused about the implications. Most, however, feel a great deal worse. They feel they are to blame for every minor mistake, for eating the wrong foods or living with too much stress while pregnant, guilty about opting for a caesarean rather than a natural birth, guilty about preferring reading the newspaper to engaging in vigorous interactive play with their toddler, and guilty about going back to work when most have little choice but to do so.
Yet other research has shown that, despite our guilt (or perhaps because of it), parents today are spending more “quality time” with their children than ever before. Jonathan Gershuny – by coincidence, a sociologist also based at the University of Essex – found that even full-time employed women in 1995 devoted more time to childcare than non-employed mothers did in 1961. Meanwhile, as Ermisch is willing to concede, we still do not have a systematic overview of what constitutes good childcare: “Society can do a great deal to make it easier for mothers to stay at home more when their children are small, but I’m less clear about what the individual can do. Psychologists don’t have the answers either on the best types of childcare; the jury is still out on that.”
Clearly, we could do with more research.