Home alone: The impact of maternal employment on delinquency

Recently, conservative commentators and parenting experts have been outspok en about the potential Negative effects of maternal employment. Specificall y, there arrears to he a pervasive belief that delinquency is one unfortuna te consequence of maternal work. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), we examine whether the occupational status of mothe rs has criminogenic effects on their children. After tracing the effects of work hours and occupational conditions through risk factors to delinquency , we find that the characteristics of maternal work have relatively little or no influence on delinquency but do hair it slight land complex) indirect effect through the delinquency pathway "supervision." This general pattern holds regardless of whether early maternal employment (i.e., work occurrin g when children were in the pre-school-years) or current maternal of employ ment is considered. Our findings contradict the the view that maternal empl oyment causes child behavioral problems.