A major study of 17,000 British parents and their children has revealed that mums who head back to work before their babies’ first birthdays don’t have a negative impact on their children, reports the Guardian.
Factors like a stable home environment had a bigger influence on a child’s development, suggested the study, which looked at children born in the 1990s.
“There was evidence in some cases of a small negative impact (of mums heading back to work) in earlier decades – particularly for those born to working mothers in the 1970s and 1980s,” said the study’s co-author, Heather Joshi, director of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at the Institute of Education, London, “But when we looked at this other batch of children, mostly born in the 1990s, we found that this smallish wrinkle in a very complicated pattern was not visible.”
Childcare improvements, changes to our attitudes, flexible working and dads taking a bigger role in parenting all contributed to this change, Heather said.
With headlines usually focused on the alleged negatives of returning to work after having a baby, this will come as a breath of fresh air to working mums across the country!
