# Complex links between maternal work and children’s development

Maternal work is linked to children’s development through several channels. On the one hand, maternal work may affect children’s development positively. First, children benefit from living in households with higher income, and mothers—in comparison to fathers—spend a higher proportion of their resources on children (Lundberg 1997; Ermish and Francesconi 2013; Dunbar, Dunbar, Lewbel, and Pendakur, 2013). There are also intangible benefits of maternal work, such as mothers’ exposure to a larger social network through work contacts, greater access to information, and a potential increase in mothers’ decisionmaking power, all of which may allow for better choices around monetary and non-monetary investments in children (Currie, 2009; Doss, 2013; Lépine and Strobl, 2013).

On the other hand, maternal work may affect children’s development negatively through reduction in maternal time spent with children and, consequently, fewer opportunities for interactions and consistent engagement. Child development would be penalized by maternal work if institutional or other nonmaternal childcare is of inferior quality than maternal care and the increase in income does not compensate with nutritional and safety expenses, for example. Stress associated with work may reduce the quality of parenting (Baker, Gruber, Milligan, 2008). The combination of these factors may lead to less secure attachment with the mother - an important factor for children’s socio-emotional development and subsequent academic success (Alto and Petrenko, 2017; Allen, 2008). Maternal work may also increase the likelihood that older children take on more domestic responsibilities and spend less time on homework or enrichment activities (Afridi et al., 2016).

With both positive and negative theoretical impacts of mothers’ work on child development, it is important to examine whether up-to-date empirical evidence suggests overall positive, negative, or null impacts. Our study summarizes the evidence of maternal work on child and adolescent health and intellectual development from the past 20 years. We note strengths and limitations of the studies and highlight common threads relevant to different facets of policy design, including considerations for emerging economies.

# Broad coverage of contexts and measures

Using a variety of search terms, we retreived 1,181 studies from databases that cover medical, psychological, economic and other social science literature. We identified a total of 613 relevantly-titled articles published between 2002 and 2021, and further limited them to 312 which examined the links between maternal work and development of children ages 0 to 18 years. We further narrowed our selection to 80 papers, which utilized statistical methods to plausibly establish causal impact. Within these studies, we limited our analysis to a set of 26 articles, which used the most rigourous methods: instrumental variables, sibling fixed effects, and multiple analytic approaches (most commonly individual fixed effects and lagged dependent variables combined).

Twenty-six causal papers cover a range of contexts: 21 papers are from Western countries (Australia, Denmark, Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and 5 are from non-Western: three lower-middle income (the Arab Republic of Egypt, India, and Indonesia) and one high income (Chile). Among papers on high-income countries (all Western countries and Chile), 5 focus on low-income population s (such as mothers of welfare in the United States), and 22 rely on nationally representative surveys or censuses.

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