A Bleak Update on the State of American Motherhood, and Other Interesting New Research
China’s Only Children Don’t Want More Than One Kid; When Do Swedish Kids Start Going to Daycare; Whether You Get a C-Section Might Not Have Much to Do With You; Young Parents Don’t Trust Vaccines
A note for newcomers: Welcome! This is a weekly round-up of newly published research on demography, family policy, and other family stuff. Some of the studies included here may be pre-prints or working papers and have not yet been peer reviewed. And while I have done my best to summarize their findings accurately, I am only human. So we operate on a “pinch of salt” policy around here.
Happy Friday!
I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving.
Above the paywall, we’ve got a few studies that, taken together, paint a somewhat bleak portrait of the state of early motherhood in America. Below the paywall, we’ve got:
A Tale of Two First-Time Moms
When Do Swedish Kids Start Going to Daycare
Whether You Get a C-Section Might Not Have Much to Do With You
Young Parents Don’t Trust Vaccines
China’s Only Children Don’t Want More Than One Kid
I’m going to do something slightly different above the paywall this week. Instead of giving my take on one particularly interesting study, I will cover a few findings from three separate studies and then gently suggest that they are perhaps, uh, connected.
First up is this helpful chart from a paper (technically a job market paper) that investigates the labor market impacts of Early Head Start (EHS), a federally funded early childhood program serving children under three. It is showing us how the labor force participation rate among moms has changed over the past few decades. As you can see in the top panel, employment among moms with a child under three years old has risen quite a bit over the past few decades, from about 50% in 1990 to well over 60% by 2018. In the bottom panel, you can see that employment is even higher among single moms with kids under three.
Next up, we have a working paper with some fresh data on how much leave employed moms in America are taking after they have a baby. The widely shared stat that 1 in 4 employed American moms are back at work within two weeks of giving birth has (rightly) been criticized. But it turns out that figure wasn’t that far off the mark: “one-quarter of employed mothers are back to work by week 3, two-thirds are back to work by week 9, and nearly all have returned before the child turns 5 months old.” On average, moms take 7.2 weeks of (paid or unpaid) time off. (Fathers take less than one week on average.) Again, we’re talking about employed moms here, but as you can see in the chart below (and in line with the study referenced above), most moms work: About 70% of women are employed 24 weeks before birth, falling to about 64% the week prior to birth.
One thing that’s sort of strange is that the average amount of leave American moms are taking hasn’t changed much over time. But moms tend to take more leave in states with paid leave policies.
Finally, there’s this study investigating the link between paid family leave and infant neglect. Using state-level data from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, the authors find that the rate of substantiated neglect involving infants under one year old increased between 2003 and 2022, but that growth was slower in the handful of American states that implemented paid family leave (PFL) at some point over that time period. In their multivariate analysis, they estimate that the predicted probability of neglect increased 61% among non-PFL states, but actually fell 3.6% among PFL states. (In case you are curious, states are coded as PFL states based on the year they implemented their leave policy.)
So to review: employment among moms of babies has risen a lot over the past few decades in America, a substantial portion of those moms are taking very little leave before returning to work (particularly in states without paid family leave), and infant neglect has risen over the same time period (particularly in states without paid family leave). Grain of salt, as always. I’d love it if someone took a second look at the infant neglect data: it contrasts with a broader decline in confirmed cases of neglect among children of all ages. But assuming these studies are accurate, it’s hard not to conclude that we’re living through an entirely preventable cautionary tale.