Early Maternal Employment and Children's School Readiness: Differences By Job Quality?

Background/Purpose: Labor force participation rates of mothers with young children in the U.S. are at historically high levels, and safety net program assistance is increasingly tied to work effort. Prior research has extensively examined the effects of the timing and intensity of mothers’ employment on child wellbeing (e.g., Waldfogel, Han & Brooks-Gunn) and found mixed evidence. Yet, little attention has been paid to the effects of mothers’ job quality (e.g., wages, schedules, and flexibility). Conceptually, higher-quality jobs provide greater economic resources (i.e., wages, benefits) that increase families’ ability to invest in their children (Becker & Tomes, 1986), whereas low-quality jobs place similar demands on parents’ time and energy but provide fewer economic benefits and may also increase mothers’ stress, which in turn, could negatively influence child development (Conger et al., 1992). Thus, while high-quality jobs could benefit children’s development, low-quality jobs may be detrimental, and these effects may depend on families’ socioeconomic resources.

Methods: Using nationally-representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Birth Cohort (ECLS-B; N=6,450), the purpose of this study is to: (1) identify sub-types of job quality based on multiple job attributes; (2) examine predictors of job quality; (3) estimate associations between mothers’ job quality when children are 9 months old and children’s school readiness outcomes at kindergarten-entry; (4) test family characteristics as moderators of these associations. We use latent class analysis (LCA) to identify sub-types of job quality based on: work hours (full-time versus part-time), wages, schedules (daytime versus nonstandard), benefits (health insurance, paid sick leave), and flexibility (flexible schedule, working from home). We use OLS and propensity-score weighted (PSW) regression models adjusting for maternal, child, and family characteristics to estimate associations between each job type (relative to being not employed) and children’s academic (reading and math assessment scores) and socioemotional (teacher-reported behavior problems, social competence, and approaches to learning) outcomes at kindergarten-entry.

Results: LCA analyses identified four sub-types of job quality: (1) high-quality jobs that scored high on all indicators (22% of employed mothers); (2) moderate-quality, full-time jobs with average wages, daytime schedules, high benefits, and some flexibility (36%); (3) moderate-quality, part-time jobs with average-to-high wages, nonstandard schedules, low benefits, and high flexibility (14%); and (4) low-quality jobs that scored low on all indicators (27%). More socioeconomically-advantaged mothers (e.g., highly-educated, married, high-income) were more likely to select into high-quality and moderate-quality, part-time jobs; less socioeconomically-advantaged mothers were more likely to select into the other two types, especially low-quality jobs. OLS and PSW regression analyses found limited evidence of associations between job quality and child outcomes; however, we found statistically significant interactions between job quality and family income (excluding mothers’ earnings). Mothers’ employment in either high- or low-quality jobs was associated with more positive outcomes (higher reading scores, fewer behavior problems) when family income was low, with mixed evidence for other job types.

Conclusions/Implications: Findings highlight the wide variability in job quality among mothers with infants in the U.S. and suggest that the implications of job quality for children’s development depend on family income.