Parental Employment and Child Cognitive Development

This study investigates how parental employment affects child cognitive development. The results indicate that maternal labor supply during the first three years of the childs life has a small negative effect on the predicted verbal ability of 3 and 4 year olds and a larger detrimental impact on the reading and mathematics achievement of 5 and 6 year olds – working an extra 20 hours per week is anticipated to reduce test scores from the median to the 49 th, 46 th, and 47 th percentiles respectively. Job-holding during the second and third years has particularly deleterious consequences if the mother works long hours or was also employed in the first year. The findings are robust to the inclusion of controls for day care arrangements or paternal employment. There is some indication that early work may be particularly costly for children in “traditional ” two-parent families and the data also hint at the importance of time investments by fathers. There are two main reasons why this study provides a more negative assessment of the impact of early employment than most prior research. First, previous analyses often control relatively crudely for differences in child and household characteristics that are correlated with parental labor supply. Second, the deleterious effects are more pronounced for the reading and mathematics performance of 5 and 6 year old children than for the verbal test scores of 3 and 4 year olds that have more frequently been examined.