The report, 'Does mothers' employment affect children's development?', said that 'despite public opinion to the contrary', there is 'little evidence' that mothers who return to work in the first year of their child's life damage the cognitive or behavioural development of school-age children.
Professor Heather Joshi, co-author and director of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies, said, 'On balance, the answer to the question that the paper's title poses is, No. It finds no evidence in Britain for mothers' employment during the first year of the child's life affecting these indicators of child development during school ages.'
The study involved 3,400 British and American babies whose mothers are from the 1970 British Cohort Study and the US 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth Child. They were also compared with 2,000 babies born to the 1958 British birth cohort.
There was 'a slightly poorer outcome' for reading comprehension in the children of American mothers who returned to work full-time before their child was one, but this was 'relatively small'. Professor Joshi said, 'The disappearance of this difference between children whose mothers work while they are babies and those staying at home beyond the first birthday is likely to be linked to the continued expansion of maternity leave in Britain during the 1990s.'
Maternity leave and part-time employment are more common in the UK than the US, where a right to 12 weeks' unpaid maternity leave was only introduced in 1993.
In the UK, just under half of new mothers of children born in 2000/01 were working when they were nine months old. In the US, one-third of mothers were working before the child was three months old.
Read the report.