Chris Blattman

Search
Close this search box.

What’s the impact of maternity leave on the cognitive and behavioral development of children?

This is not the answer I would have predicted:

The impact is identified by legislated increases in the duration of maternity leave in Canada, which significantly increased the amount of maternal care children received in the second half of their first year.

…Our results indicate that these changes had no positive effect on indices of children’s cognitive and behavioral development. We uncover a small negative impact on PPVT and Who Am I? scores, which suggests the timing of the mother/child separation due to the mother’s return to work may be important.

Of course, I believe maternity leave in Canada went from “long” to “very long”. In the US, where I believe they give you the first six hours off (pay docked, of course) and where there’s a little more inequality, I might expect more impact.

Jeannie works for a major humanitarian organization who have no maternity leave policy, and had to take accumulated sick leave. She recalls a European colleague, who leaned across the desk of the human resource director: “Having a child,” she said, “is not a sickness.”

10 Responses

  1. Chris – Jeannie’s experience with her employer is common across the humanitarian sector. Many (perhaps most?) major NGOs have no maternity or paternity leave policies and simply go with the federal or state minimums. My wife was offered a job with a major child-focused NGO when she was 3 months pregnant. Had she taken it, she would have been ineligible for even the paltry 16 weeks guaranteed under DC law, because that only kicks in after one has worked somewhere for 12 months. So this was an interesting chance to see what a child-focused NGO would do for a new mother when the law didn’t compel them to offer any leave. They offered two months – even less than the federal minimum of 12 weeks. She turned down the job.

    I too am amazed that this is not a bigger US political issue.

  2. Let’s not forget the mom has a weight in the social welfare function as well.

    I wonder if part of the reason women are not up in arms about this is a lack of awareness of just how out of step the U.S. system is with the world. Even many female dominated workplaces are relatively unsympathetic to maternity leave.

    “out of 168 nations in a Harvard University study last year, 163 had some form of paid maternity leave, leaving the United States in the company of Lesotho, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.” http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-07-26-maternity-leave_x.htm

  3. Having children is not a sickness, but neither is it the employer’s responsibility. Incentivizing breeding via generous parental leave packages may be nice, and it certainly gives everyone warm fuzzies, but it also undermines the effectiveness of the organization. At the end of the day, the organization exists for purposes other than facilitating the breeding habits of its employees, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t encourage that behavior. Simple incentives. Think about the relevant margins, economist.

    Also, why (as a social scientist) would you say something like “I might expect more impact” when presenting a study that presents the opposite result? I mean, I know you’re close to this on a personal level, but on what basis are you making that claim? You casually mention income inequality but are you serious? Newborns are sensitive to the Gini coefficient? Come on.

    This study (as you report it) supports the *opposite* notion to the preference revealed in your last paragraph: Canada is too generous with its maternity leave laws, from the perspective of the child’s benefit (rather than the parent’s), and they should move in the direction of the US. Maybe the study is crap, or maybe it doesn’t say that at all (I’m relying on your description), or maybe this recent parental-leave trend has less behind it than many think.

    There’s enough other research that finds that parental influence is limited to suggest (to me) that differences in US/Canada income inequality, or even maternity leave laws, doesn’t have all that much to do with it.

  4. Yes, i suspect the outcome is also heavily weighted on what options one has for child care as well.

    As for the European slant, there are two very different mindsets. Here in small-town Germany, at least, the stigma of the “Raben mutter” (the name applied to women who leave the nest to work) is very much well and alive. Although 1 year of maternity (and 3 years of job protection) is the norm here, very few women in my area exercise this option because of the stigma applied, mostly by the local, older generations. Instead, they quit their jobs and put their careers on hold. For those that do exercise it, child care is hard to find and mostly comes in the form of a grandparent. The other mindset comes from the so-called emancipated “having a baby is not an illness” line where women (mostly urban) are eager to get back to their careers as soon as possible and in white collar urban situations where high quality private nannys or tagesmutters are accessible and financially feasible. In other words, the people that have the power to be in arms about it, aren’t, because they have a slew of ideal, luxury options available to them (good careers, flexibility, mobility, access to high-end child care). The others, in the lower income brackets, simply have to quit their jobs.

    In comparing a child cared for in the 2nd half of the first year by a grandparent, or tagesmutter, I suspect there would be little effect on development. But for a child cared for solely within the confines of a public daycare that has an infant room, like the ones they have in the US for the lower-middle class who are forced to work immediately after child birth, I would say there couldn’t not be a difference. As a new-mom-PhD student (1st baby) turned seasoned-mom-consultant (2nd baby), I’ve had the ‘pleasure’ of experience of both. I have 2 kids’ worth of anecdata to back me up. ;)

  5. I think this excellent post from Shotgun Shack is pretty relevant to Jeannie’s experience: http://shotgunshackblog.com/2011/06/03/pretty-on-paper/

    As to the ridiculously short maternity leave entitlement and poor provisions for parents in the US, one of the things I can’t get my head around is why on earth this is not a major political issue (especially given the sanctity of The Family in American political discourse). From a European perspective, you’d expect women in particular to be up in arms about this, but I for one have not heard of any mainstream politicians picking up on the issue.

    1. The reason is that maternity leave threatens the US male-centered, income-focused view of ‘family values’ not because it enables to leave women for one year to care for children, but because it enables women to RETURN to work following that period. Denying maternity leave is the single largest incentive to remove mothers from the workforce permanently. This is where the European and Canadian experience differs considerably: after the maternity leave period, 95% of Canadian mothers who worked prior to the birth of their child are back at work earning income. In the US, where the choice is 6 weeks off or a lifetime off, many women choose the latter (I suspect many Canadian women would choose the same).

  6. Oh, and on the study, I would imagine that the effects of where you are on the curve matter enormously as you suggest, as would the alternatives available to extra maternity leave (state-subsidised nurseries with qualified staff? being taken care of by slightly older children?)

  7. Chris, that’s disgraceful that a major humanitarian organisation does not operate a maternity leave policy. If it doesn’t affect her position, you should name and shame. Shocking.

Why We Fight - Book Cover
Subscribe to Blog