Working single mothers who rely on their family, friends, or other informal child care providers to look after their children during work hours may, in doing so, negatively influence their child’s mental development, new study findings suggest.
This negative effect of a mother’s reduced contact time with her child may be offset, however, by enrolling the child in pre-school or some other type of formal center-based care instead, according to the study’s authors.
“I would say that the crucial thing to take from the paper is that separation from the mother can be detrimental for children, but mothers can partially offset this by choosing the appropriate type of daycare,” Professor Raquel Bernal, of Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, told Reuters Health.
The findings were presented today during the 2005 World Congress of the Econometric Society, hosted by the University College London.
Due to the Welfare Reform of 1996, as well as earlier state-level changes, single mothers were forced to increase their work time and their use of child care, which, according to the researchers’ analysis, tended to lessen the amount of contact time the mothers had with their children.
In light of this, Bernal and co-author, Professor Michael Keane of Yale University in New Haven, Conn., compared single mothers who had children between 1990 and 2000 and were therefore subject to the new work requirements, with those who had children in previous years, who were impacted by a different set of welfare rules and were consequently able to spend more time with their children.
Using data collected from 1,519 single mothers involved in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in the States, the researchers looked at the effects of the mothers’ use of child care and their household income on their children’s cognitive-ability test scores at ages 3 to 6.
Overall, the mother’s choice of child care during their child’s first year of life did not seem to affect the child’s later cognitive performance, the study findings show.
Informal child care not best option
However, achievement scores among children placed in informal child care after their first year of life were 3.5 percent lower than they would have been if they had remained in their mother’s care or had been placed in some type of formal child care, the researchers estimate.
In fact, each full year of informal child care, after the child’s first year, was associated with a 2.9 percent reduction in the child’s test scores.
Children who were placed in formal child care settings, in contrast, did not show any significant reduction in test scores.
Household income did not seem to greatly impact the child’s achievement scores, particularly when the mother’s educational level was taken into consideration, the researchers note.
Bernal and Keane did not investigate why children in informal child care had lowered achievement scores, but they speculate it may be due to a number of factors.
For example, workers at child care centers may be better trained than relatives or other informal child care providers. Also, they add, formal child care environments may provide more organization and discipline, more educational activity and more stimulation for the child as he or she interacts with other children.
“Loosely speaking, it would be better if mothers could spend more time with children in the first few years after birth, because the relatively small amount of money they can earn in those years (compared to their lifetime income), isn’t going to make nearly as much difference for the child’s outcomes as the mother’s time input would make,” Keane told Reuters Health.
Bernal added, “We do not advocate for women to stay at home, but rather for policies to be designed in such a way that we can provide women with the types of daycare that can benefit children, with subsidies or with on-site daycare centers.”
