Working moms linked to kids' risk

Stay-at-home mothers may have been right all along when their maternal instincts told them they're best equipped to care for their children.

A new study from N.C. State University concludes that when women work outside the home, they triple their children's risk of health problems, accidents and injuries.

The study found that such children have a 200 percent increase in the risk of experiencing overnight hospitalizations, asthma episodes and injuries or poisonings.

Parenting is an intensely emotional subject that leads to feelings of guilt, inadequacy and - just as often - a sense of superiority among parents, particularly among women who handle the bulk of child-rearing duties. The so-called mommy wars have divided a generation of parents as the proportion of mothers in the work force has consistently stayed above 75 percent over the past two decades.

Dr. Melinda Morrill, the NCSU economics professor who authored the study, warned against making sweeping moral judgments against mothers who work outside the home and said her research is not an endorsement of mothers who do not. But she notes that parenting choices involve trade-offs that must be acknowledged.

"This is a highly sensitive topic as all parents want to do what is best for their children," she said. "I certainly wouldn't recommend people make decisions based on my findings. This study is one piece of evidence in a larger sea of facts."

Morrill's study, to be published in the Journal of Health Economics, says the most likely reason for the increased health risks is the working mother's lack of time and energy to fully devote herself to parenting.

"Maternal employment imposes a burden on a mother's time and may result in the poorer supervision or care of her children. A child's health is at least partially a function of time-intensive activities such as healthy meal preparation and house cleaning."

But Morrill said the increased health risk factors may not apply to a household with a full-time working mother and a stay-at-home father, a relative, older sibling, nanny or any number of alternative child care arrangements.

Morrill's research looked at 89,000 children ages 7 to 17, examining 20 years of data from the federal National Health Interview Survey. While some parents worry that day care centers breed germs, those concerns would not apply to the older subjects of the NCSU study.

Counters other studies

Morrill's research runs counter to studies that have shown that children of working women have improved health. Those studies have said that children of working women benefit from increased income, better health insurance options and a boost in the mother's self-esteem.

But Morrill concludes that the earlier studies confused causes with effects, overlooking the fact that mothers of children with special needs or chronic health problems were often unable to work outside the home. In these situations, electing to become a stay-at-home mother did not cause or exacerbate the child's health problems; rather, the child's problems led to the mother's decision not to work outside the home.

Her study said parenting choices are based on complex variables, but it's also likely that women choose to stay-at home or to because they have different temperaments and talents.

"A mother's decision to work could reflect underlying [and unobserved] ability, skills, or preferences, so that a mother that works may be different in important ways from a mother that does not work," Morrill wrote.