Search Results

While research has examined how maternal work and family patterns affect pre-school and younger children, we are less well informed about effects in early adolescence, and in particular, how changes in parents' work and family circumstances over time may alter their children's risks for behavior problems. in this analysis, we focus on one aspect of behavior problems, propensities to oppositional action, and study its trajectory from middle childhood (ages 6-7) to early adolescence (ages 10-11), linking this trajectory to maternal employment patterns over the same time period. We study these trajectories for a national sample of 1,917 children aged 10-11 drawn from the Child-Mother data set of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. This is a synthetic cohort constructed by pooling children aged 10-11 in 1990, 1992, and 1994. We focus on three features of maternal employment: the extensiveness of employment, as tapped by the proportion of weeks worked over the last four years; the st ability of employment, as tapped by the number of starts and stops in employment over that period; and the quality of employment, as tapped by the substantive complexity and opportunities for self-direction of the mother's occupation. We include statistical controls for maternal and child characteristics, as well as for family compositional patterns and spouse employment characteristics. We find that the key contrasts are between mothers with no employment at any point, those with intermittent employment, and those with continuous employment. Children of those never employed are most prone to oppositional behavior problems, while those whose mothers were continuously employed are least prone, even after stringent controls for associated human and social capital, family compositional patterns, and quality of employment. Our data also suggest that low to no maternal employment has more negative effects on children not living stably with their fathers over the past four years. The quality of employment is associated with more stable employment patterns, and we find no independent effect of employment quality on early adolescent outcomes once we take stability and extensiveness into account. Earlier levels of oppositional action (at ages 6-7) are strongly correlated with levels four years later (bivariate r += . 60); multivariate beta = +.52), but earlier levels are not consistently or significantly associated with employment patterns over the four year period, and controlling for those earlier levels does not substantially alter effects of maternal employment patterns previously observed. Thus, these negative impacts of stable non-employment and very low levels of employment persist even when earlier levels of behavior problems are controlled, suggesting that they represent increases over time, not simply persistence of higher levels established at earlier time points.