Hey, Working Moms, Harvard Says You Have Nothing to Feel Guilty About

http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/06/25/working-moms-kid-success

It may be time to let go of any guilt you were harboring about the challenge to have it all by balancing your duties as an attentive mom while holding on to a job.
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A new working paper from Harvard Business School dove into data from 24 countries (hitting every continent except Africa) to find out how children of working moms turn out.

“Across the globe, millions of mothers leave for work each morning wondering whether their children will suffer from the absence of a mother at home.… Relative to children whose mothers stay at home full time, children of employed mothers do as well, if not better, at school, both in terms of academic achievement and in terms of behavior,” the authors wrote.

Internalizing information like that isn’t easy for working moms because of social norms. In 2014, Pew Research asked Americans if kids were better off with stay-at-home moms. A majority of male and female respondents—60 percent—said yes.


Yet that sort of thinking doesn’t line up with what we’re finding out about the kids of working moms. The Harvard study calls for more research, but the analysis found that sons raised by working moms end up being “more involved at home as adults, spending more time caring for family members than men whose mothers stayed home full time.”

In turn, daughters of working moms spend less time on housework, but no effect is seen in those daughters’ involvement in family care. In the workplace, adult daughters of working moms are more likely to work, “more likely to hold supervisory responsibility if employed, work more hours, and earn marginally higher wages than women whose mothers were home full time.”