Does a child's health pay the price for working moms?

by Aimee Keenan-Greene

A new study in the Journal of Health Economics says children of working moms get injured more often.

Melinda Sandler Morrill of the Department of Economics at North Carolina State University, studied the effects of maternal employment on children's health using 'exogenous variation in each child's youngest sibling's eligibility for kindergarten as an instrument'.

Morrill also had restricted-access to the  National Health Interview Survey (1985–2004), and looked at overnight hospitalizations, asthma episodes, and injuries/poisonings for children ages 7–17.

She found maternal employment increased the probability of each adverse health event by nearly 200 percent.

Morrill adds, "These effects are robust and do not reflect a non-representative local effect."

Many hundreds of studies have tackled the topic of the effect of mother's working outside the home.

For example, last year an article in the Journal of Health Economics examined whether maternal employment affects the health status of low-income, elementary-school-aged children.  A study was completed using instrumental variables estimation and experimental data from a welfare-to-work program implemented in the early 1990s. 

Maternal report of child health status was predicted as a function of exogenous variation in maternal employment associated with random assignment to the experimental group. IV estimates showed 'a modest adverse effect of maternal employment on children's health.'

Researchers used data from another welfare-to-work program to propose any adverse effect on child health may be tempered by increased family income and access to public health insurance coverage, findings with direct relevance to a number of current policy discussions. 

In a secondary analysis using fixed effects techniques on longitudinal survey data collected in 1998 and 2001, scientists found a comparable adverse effect of maternal employment on child health that supports the external validity of their primary result.

Research in the Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry revealed in a survey of 488 health professionals that  forty percent of the respondents felt it is better a mother not work outside of the home. 

Seventy-four percent thought part-time work was preferable to full-time employment. 

Male subjects were less favorable than female subjects toward maternal employment. Among the male physicians, older respondents, those with children, and those whose spouses did not work were less favorable toward mothers working. 

Another study suggested children of full-time working mothers are not at greater risk for under-immunization or failure to use seat belts regularly, but they may be less likely to use bicycle helmets.  Children of mothers who worked less than 21 hours per week were 37 percent  more likely to wear helmets compared with children of mothers who worked 21 hours or more per week.