Shoveling Guilt Onto the Working Mom’s Pile

If you’re a mom reading this at work and your baby is in child care right now, brace yourself for more bad news from the front lines of the battle over working mothers.

A new analysis of the most comprehensive child-care study ever conducted suggests that young children of mothers who work full time wind up intellectually behind those whose mothers work less or not at all.

The news puts moms “between a rock and a hard place,” admits researcher Jeanne Brooks-Gunn of Columbia’s Teachers College, the lead author of the report.

It is, indeed, more grist for the guilt already felt by working mothers. I remember my own desperate search for reassurance, when I went back to work after my first child. I’d sit at my desk and anxiously tally the hours my 6-month-old spent with me and with the sitter--subtracting for naps, adding for middle-of-the-night feedings--until I had convinced myself that I was spending more time with my baby than a stranger was.

I’m only glad I didn’t know then what research shows now: Full-time work by mom in the first nine months of a baby’s life can stall the young child’s intellectual development.

Other studies have made similar findings, but attributed the deleterious effects to factors such as a bad home environment, insensitive mothers or inadequate child care.

This analysis controlled for those factors and still found that the children of mothers who work full time in their babies’ first nine months score lower at age 3 on school readiness measures than the children whose mothers stayed at home.

In other words, it might be the mother’s absence, not the child’s home life or the day-care setting, that is apt to lower a child’s IQ.

The researchers analyzed data from a three-year child-care study of 1,000 families in 10 cities. The good news is that children of mothers who worked part-time, or who delayed full-time work until their children were 12 months old, scored the same on tests of school readiness as the kids of nonworking moms. The negative effects showed up only among children whose mothers worked more than 30 hours a week by the time the child was 9 months old. The bad news is, that’s most of us.

Today, more than half of all mothers are back at work before their babies are 3 months old. In the study sample of white, mostly middle-class families from around the country, 55% of the mothers were working full time by their children’s third month and 71% by the sixth month. Three-quarters of the mothers of 9-month-olds had gone back to work full time.

At 3 years old, the children of those working mothers scored an average of 6 points lower on tests that measured such things as their knowledge of colors, letters, numbers and shapes, and their facility with abstract reasoning.

That’s considered a significant difference in social science terms, one that evidence shows could correspond to lagging development through a child’s elementary years. “From a policy perspective, it’s a concern because you’re talking about millions of children possibly falling behind,” explained Brooks-Gunn.

But what does that really mean to working moms? Not much, unless we’re trying to get the kid into a preschool that treats kindergarten readiness tests with the same import colleges treat the SAT.

I suspect my kids started school behind. I was one of those mothers who had to return to work when each of my three babies was 6 months old. My youngest still recalls feeling bewildered on her first day of school when everyone else could write their names “and I was wondering what all those squiggles were.” That sixth-grader is now near the top of her class. Same kid, same school, same working mom.

Brooks-Gunn agrees that “individual parents shouldn’t be hugely concerned” by a 3-year-old’s low score. “There’s so much change that happens over time, and with high-quality child care and a good, sensitive mother, the difference essentially disappears.”

But while the campaign to expand and improve child-care options has been heating up in recent years, the notion of supporting mothers in their efforts to be “good, sensitive parents” hasn’t gotten as much attention.

It’s hard to be “sensitive” to a youngster’s needs when you’re stressed out from a long day at work, a grueling commute and the pressure of trying to cram laundry and cooking and grocery shopping into the too-few hours you have with your baby.

The study’s authors have heard from hordes of angry mothers since it was published earlier this month in a child development journal. “They say ‘I don’t like this study. It puts the burden on us,’ ” says Brooks-Gunn, a working mother who was back on the job by the time her son--now 12--was 3 months old. “I understand how they feel. But the reality is the burden is on [working mothers], even though the majority don’t have the option not to work.

“Instead of saying ‘I feel terrible. I feel guilty,’ maybe they can take these results and advocate for [national] family leave policies that create more options for mothers of babies. Every other industrialized nation has done it. Why can’t we?”

And support may come from surprising quarters, according to one of the study’s least-publicized findings.

Child care in this country is an emotional issue and mothers are assigned to one of two camps--those who work and dump their kids on someone else, and those who stay home and tend their children full time.

But the researchers discovered, to their surprise, that one-third of the nonworking mothers studied put their babies in day care for long periods of time. “I was so shocked, I had somebody recheck the numbers,” said Brooks-Gunn.

“These are mothers who don’t work but have their kids in child care [an average of] 18 hours a week by the time their babies are 12 months old. Who are these women? I’m really curious about that, but we haven’t studied it enough to know.”

Does that suggest that divisions between us are easing; that working moms seeking better child care can find allies now among stay-at-home mothers? Maybe ... or maybe it just confirms what most mothers know: Raising children is demanding work, and every mom needs a break sometimes.

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Sandy Banks’ column is published Tuesdays and Sundays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes. com.