This article uses the 1986 Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data set to investigate the impact of maternal employment on children's intellectual ability, as measured at the age of 4 by using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). Results from multivariate regression analysis show a statistically significant adverse effect of mother's employment on children's intellectual ability, but only for boys in higher income families. Furthermore, the negative impact was related to the timing of maternal employment: employment during the boys' infancy had a statistically significant negative effect on PPVT scores at the age of 4. This pattern was not found for girls, for children in low-income families, or for families in which mothers resumed their employment after the child's first year of life. The impact of other demographic trends in recent yearsdeclining fertility and rising marital instability-are also investigated. The results show an adverse effect of the presence of other siblings on children's PPVT scores; but holding family income constant, the effect of the parents' marital status on children's intellectual ability is not statistically significant. In addition, several family background factors are highly correlated with children's test scores. Three significant and interrelated demographic trends have dominated the social landscape in the United States for the past quarter-century: a dramatic rise in the labor force participation of mothers with young children, a pervasive decline in fertility rates (especially marital fertility rates), and a more than doubling of divorce rates and growing rates of transitory nonmarital cohabitation.
We investigate the influence of family background on early entry into marriage and parenthood among white, Hispanic, and black men and women ages 14 to 22 in the first (1979) wave of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Family background is highly associated with early entry into marriage for whites of both genders and female Hispanics and also with early entry into parenthood for all groups except black males. Large group differences in family characteristics explain most of the difference between white and Hispanic women in early marriage and parenthood and about half the difference in early parenthood between black and white women but do not explain the observed variations among other race-gender groups.
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