If you’ve ever suspected that part-time working moms have the best of all worlds, new research backs you up. A study published recently in the Journal of Family Psychology reports that moms who worked less than 33 hours per week were less depressed, had less work-family conflict and spent more time on learning opportunities for their kids than both stay-at-home moms and full-time moms.
The study, conducted by Cheryl Buehler and Marion O’Brien, from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, looked at how part-time work affected mom’s health, life at home, parenting and marital satisfaction. There’s been plenty of research (and internet flaming) comparing the parenting outcomes of working moms to stay-at-home moms – but that misses a pretty significant chunk of the American workforce. About a quarter of all U.S. women work part-time schedules, according to the Department of Labor, and a majority of mothers work part-time at some point in their adult lives.
Over 1,300 moms were followed for 10 years, and interviewed at eight different time periods: when the kids were a month old, 6, 15, 36 and 54 months old, and in their first, third and fifth grade years.
And over those years, the study found that moms who worked full-and-part-time jobs reported being less depressed than stay-at-home moms. The authors theorized that this could be because moms home with young children tend to be more socially isolated than their working counterparts. Or, it could be that women prone to depression have more trouble seeking work or keeping a job, the study said.
Moms who work part-time have fewer concerns that their work is impacting life at home – no surprise there. And moms who work part time were able to provide more extra-curricular learning opportunities for their kids – things like going to the park, taking lessons, going to the museum. “Mothers who are working part time presumably have more time to spend with the child doing things that are enriching,” said O’Brien. But interestingly, the study didn’t find much difference on this front between part-time working moms and moms who weren’t employed.
The study authors had assumed that moms who worked part-time would report higher marital satisfaction than moms who worked full-time jobs, but that didn’t pan out. “There’s no relationship between work status and satisfaction with the marriage,” said O’Brien.
Mom is doing the lion’s share of the child care and housework, whether she works part-time or she’s a stay-at-home mom, according to the study. That burden of household chores doesn’t appear to shift over to dad until mom is working full-time hours, said O’Brien. But still, “mothers always do more, even when they’re working full time,” she added.
The conclusion? Part-time work has some real advantages for mothers and families in terms of lower stress. But part-time work isn’t always an option for mom (or dad, for that matter), due to financial realities and the impact scaled-back hours can have on a career. “A lot of women find it’s not possible for them to work part-time due to the structure of the workplace,” said O’Brien. “Since we would like to see families healthy and happy, it would be nice for workplaces to take more account of part-time work and see it as a viable way of contributing to work, and not just a lower-status kind of thing.”
What’s your work situation, and what would be your ideal? Do you think the grass is always greener when it comes to stay-at-home and working moms?
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