Moms everywhere can stop feeling guilty for going back to work after giving birth. While countless blogs and so-called parenting experts have long speculated on the damage moms do to their kids by returning to the office, the latest study -- funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) on maternal employment and child socio-emotional behaviour in the UK -- says that's hogwash.
Using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, researchers found the children of working mothers suffered "no significant detrimental effects on a child's social or emotional development" during their early years. But the big picture is more complex than that.
Though the ideal scenario for both boys and girls was to have both parents working from home, girls were found to have more behavioural difficulties at age five when the father was the main breadwinner. Boys, conversely, had more issues when the mother was the main breadwinner than in dual-income households.
Perhaps not surprisingly, both boys and girls experienced more behavioural problems when raised by a single parent, or when both parents were unemployed.
"Mothers who work are more likely to have higher educational qualifications, live in a higher income household, and have a lower likelihood of being depressed than mothers who are not in paid work," said lead researcher of the study, Dr Anne McMunn. "These factors explain the higher levels of behavioural difficulties for boys of non-working mothers, but the same was not true for girls."
So much for mom's career harming her children. McMunn claims she "did not see any evidence [of this] on child behaviour of mothers working during the child's first year of life."
Cue mass sighs of relief.
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