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CPR Working Paper Series No. 59

Maternal Employment and Adolescent Self-Care

Leonard M. Lopoo

March 2004

Abstract:    

Mounting evidence shows that self-care produces deleterious consequences for adolescents in the U.S. Since descriptive evidence suggests that maternal employment is the primary explanation for adolescent self-care, maternal employment, it is frequently argued, is harming children. Heretofore, very little empirical research has actually investigated the impact of maternal employment on adolescent self-care, however, calling into question this assertion. This paper aims to fill this gap.

The author uses the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988 supplemented by the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth–1979 to estimate the relationship between maternal employment and adolescent self-care. Unlike prior research, the author employs a variety of fixed effects models to account for omitted variables that may be related to maternal employment and adolescent self-care. Findings suggest that the adolescents of mothers who work full-time spend an additional 43 minutes per week in self-care compared to the adolescents of mothers who work part-time. Further, a standard deviation increase in the number of weeks a mother works during the year increases the probability that her child will be unsupervised by 27 percent. These effects are not constant across socio-economic groups: affluent families have strong effects, while the relationship is more tenuous among low-income families. This finding has important implications for pro-work social welfare policies in the United States.

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