Maternal Employment Trajectories and Early Childhood Academic Achievement

• In Event: 054 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 03. Education and the Changing Family

Abstract

Macro-level changes in the structure of the labor market, such as the rise of women in the workplace and the passage of welfare reform in 1996, has led to a more vulnerable work environment, particularly among low-income women. These trends, coupled with the Great Recession, have ushered in a new era of job instability and prolonged unemployment and have heightened sociologists’ focus on understanding the intersection of work and family. Using a nationally-representative sample of children and their mothers from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (n=7,150), this study examines the link between maternal employment experiences and early childhood academic achievement. We use latent class analysis to construct profiles and trajectories of mothers’ employment experiences, capturing multiple aspects of mothers’ jobs and the relative stability of those employment circumstances. Importantly, we pay attention to factors that are hypothesized to select women into different employment trajectories and operate as potential mediators between employment experiences and children’s early academic achievement. We find that, overall, child and maternal characteristics account for much of the association between maternal employment trajectories and pre-kindergarten age test scores. Despite this, we still find evidence that children of mothers who experience persistent employment in low status job profiles have lower math scores than children of mothers in stable high status job profiles. These findings have important policy-relevant implications regarding interventions aimed at families in terms of both the stability and characteristics of low status work experiences.

Authors

• Kate C. Prickett, University of Texas-Austin

• Sarah M. Kendig, University of Texas-Austin