Maternal Employment, Child Care, and Child Behavioral Outcomes: What Do We Know?

Wen-Jui Han, Columbia University
Jane Waldfogel, Columbia University
Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Columbia University

This paper investigates the impact of early maternal employment and child care on children's behavioral outcomes, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and NICHD Study of Early Child Care (SECC). The NLSY is limited in that its behavioral outcomes are based on mothers' reports. Further, the NLSY has no information on the quality of care and only limited information on the quality of children's home environments. Therefore, we use a second dataset, the NICHD-SECC, which has, in addition to early maternal employment and mother-reported behavior problems, the quality of the home environment, the quality of the child care environment, and several additional measures of children's behavior and socioemotional adjustment. Thus, we will be able to use the NICHD-SECC dataset to determine whether the findings from the NLSY hold up when controls for home and child care quality are introduced and when other outcome variables are studied.