Do children influence their mothers' decisions? Early child development and maternal employment entries after birth.

Abstract

This study investigates whether early child development influences mothers' decisions regarding when to return to the labor market in Germany. Previous research has examined how institutional, individual and household factors affect maternal work interruption durations after childbirth. This study extends the literature by focusing on the impact of children on mothers' return-to-work behavior after childbirth and by examining mechanisms that might explain this impact. The study builds on data from NEPS Starting Cohort 1, the first large-scale newborn panel study in Germany, which provides measures on four different aspects of early child development, sensorimotor skills, habituation, regulatory capacity and negative affectivity, as well as information on mothers' labor market behavior and household settings. The analytical sample consists of 2,548 mothers with valid child information and contains data from the first four panel waves of the study until the child is 3 years old. The results from discrete-time event history models indicate a differentiated pattern of effects of child development indicators: higher sensorimotor skills and lower regulatory capacity are weakly associated with earlier maternal employment, while habituation and negative affectivity are unrelated to mothers' work behavior. Effects are the strongest among mothers returning to part-time work and among those with a medium level of education.