ABSTRACT
The increased prevalence of maternal employment and nonmaternal child care in the United States and other industrialized countries has prompted wide discussion regarding the impact of these conditions on adult lives and on child outcomes. Much of this discussion has viewed mothers’ employment as a social problem and has emphasized research contrasting the children of employed and nonemployed mothers. Perhaps the single clearest conclusion after decades of such studies is that there is no strong positive or negative effect of maternal employment (Hoffman, 1983, 1989), and that there are wide variations in effects observed. In this chapter, we focus explicitly on an important source of those variations among employed mothers: We emphasize variations in the occupational and economic experiences that employed mothers encounter, and discuss how those maternal experiences can be expected to affect their children’s everyday lives.
