Maternal Employment, Child-Rearing Resources, and Early Childhood Health and Development in Two-Parent Families
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Shih, Shu-Fang
Abstract
Background and Objectives: Female labor force participation patterns over the life course have experienced dramatic changes in the past several decades. One of the issues surrounding these changes is whether a mother’s employment activities influence the well-being of her children. To date, previous studies have not come to a consensus on how or why a mother’s employment might influence early childhood health and development. Applying family health production theory and the bargaining model in household resource distribution theory, this study investigated the possible direct and mediating effect of mothers’ employment and child-rearing resources on the early health and development of their babies.
Methods: This study utilized the data collected from the Taiwan Birth Cohort Pilot Study. Although the study was a pilot study, it had a representative sample of 2,048 babies born in 2003 which it followed up for three years administering surveys when the babies were 6 months, 18 months, and three years old. This study included only the data on the 1,401 children in that survey who belonged to two-parent families. The key independent variable is whether the mother was working when the child was 6 months, 18 months, and three years old. The mediating factors are child-rearing resources including average number of hours the mother spent with her child daily and total monthly child-rearing expenditures. The early childhood health and development outcomes included children’s weight, height, and four dimensions of parent self-evaluated baby development milestone (gross motor, fine motor, language and social skills). In the model, we also controlled for characteristics of children, family socioeconomic background, family health, and child care environment.
The data were analyzed by traditional OLS model and propensity score matching to control for observable variables as well as longitudinal data analysis techniques to control for unobservable variables to overcome endogeniety problems that most previous studies did not take into account. When investigating the possible mediating role of family child-rearing resources, this study used hierarchical modeling, Baron & Kenny’s strategy supplemented with Sobel test, and bootstrapping to help shed light on the future work when the larger data set is available.
Results: The result of the propensity score matching analysis showed that early maternal employment had a slightly negative average treatment effect but statistically insignificant effect on child health and development outcomes at six months and also at three years except for social skills on which we found that the average treatment effect of maternal employment was positive. After controlling for unobservable variables using fixed effect modeling, maternal employment was not found to have a significant effect on early child health and development, although the results of our random effect model suggested that maternal employment had a negative effect on babies’ weight. Regarding the mediation analysis, hierarchical modeling in our fixed-effect model revealed that monthly child-rearing expenditures had a positive effect on fine motor development and mothers’ time with their children had a positive effect on children’s language development. Based on mediation analaysis proposed by Baron and Kenny, using simple time-lag mediation model testing, we found that child-rearing expenditures at baby’s 18 months old played an important mediating role between maternal employment at baby’s 3 month old and fine motor development at baby’s 3 years old. Finally, this study also found that other factors such as child endowment and family health played an important role in shaping early childhood health and development.
Conclusions: Maternal employment not only brings in the income to the family and reshapes the resource allocation in child rearing within the household but also reduces mothers’ time and interactions with their children. Therefore, the effect of maternal employment on child well-being from these two mechanisms might be canceled out which possibly explain why we did not observe any statistically significant effect in this study. Policies aiming to improve early childhood health and development should focus more on how to reduce the health disparity of new-borns and adopt a family-based approach to improve family health and child care environment. Future research can further develop analyses of the economic and social consequences of choices and resource constraints that ultimately determine the health and well-being of individuals and families, as well as family relationships.
Subjects
Maternal employment
child-rearing resources
early childhood health and development
Taiwan birth cohort study (TBCS)
SDGs
Type
thesis
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