Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by snickerdoodles 4048 days ago
"In a new study of 50,000 adults in 25 countries, daughters of working mothers completed more years of education, were more likely to be employed and in supervisory roles and earned higher incomes" - TLDR, children will imitate what you do, not what you tell them to do. This is good for certain values of good (depending on how you define a 'good' adult).

The title of the article (Mounting Evidence of Advantages for Children of Working Mothers) seems to define having a career as an advantage, but is it really?

1 comments

How about we rephrase this. Daughters of those mothers that earn enough to make putting their children in childcare are more likely to earn more than mothers who's wages are too low to afford childcare. Phrased this way we come to the startling conclusion that the children of the middle class grow up to be middle class. I am shocked.
This doesn't explain why the relationship holds true even in countries with free or heavily subsidized daycare. Or why only daughters are affected, along many variables.

Picked these from the HBS post @ http://www.hbs.edu/news/articles/Pages/mcginn-working-mom.as...

Anyone have a link to the paper?

Even when childcare is heavily subsidised it use will still be dominated by the middle classes. If you are unemployed why go to the effort to cart the children you love down to some strangers even if you don't have to pay anything.
You were talking about low wage mothers, I responded to that. They are anyway more numerous than unemployed-for-reasons-unrelated-to-parenting mothers. (This can also make financial sense to subsidize, as otherwise they'll have a larger probability to go unemployed and permanently fall out of workfroce later when kids go to school)
I think the study controlled for income, as stated:

>daughters of working mothers earned 23 percent more than daughters of stay-at-home mothers, after controlling for demographic factors

Exactly how were these demographic factors controlled?