Advances in Life Course Research 47 (2021) 100378

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Advances in Life Course Research

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/alcr

Do children influence their mothers’ decisions? Early child development

and maternal employment entries after birth
Irina Hondralis a, Corinna Kleinert b, *
a
Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences (BAGSS), University of Bamberg, Germany
b
Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi), and University of Bamberg, Bamberg, Germany

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: This study investigates whether early child development influences mothers’ decisions regarding when to return
Linked lives to the labor market in Germany. Previous research has examined how institutional, individual and household
Mothers factors affect maternal work interruption durations after childbirth. This study extends the literature by focusing
Employment career
on the impact of children on mothers’ return-to-work behavior after childbirth and by examining mechanisms
Child development
Germany
that might explain this impact. The study builds on data from NEPS Starting Cohort 1, the first large-scale
Event history analysis newborn panel study in Germany, which provides measures on four different aspects of early child develop­
ment, 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.

1. Introduction each other. It emphasizes the importance of considering how individual

In recent decades, the educational attainment and employment
participation of women has increased steadily in many industrialized
countries (in Europe, cf. Fagan, Grimshaw, Rubery, & Smith, 2015). In
reaction, new policies that aim to foster compatibility between family
and work were introduced in many countries and have further changed
the life course patterns of maternal employment trajectories. Connected
to these changes and debates on work-family policy, a vast body of
literature has examined how welfare state regimes and changes in family
policies affect mothers’ employment patterns after childbirth (Boeck­
mann, Misra, & Budig, 2015; Grunow, Aisenbrey, & Evertsson, 2011;
Hipp & Leuze, 2015; Ziefle & Gangl, 2014) and how mothers’ individual
resources and barriers, such as education or health, influence their labor
market attachment (Drobetz, Maercker, Spiess, Wagner, & Forstmeier,
2012; Drobnic, 2000; Grunow et al., 2011).
Mothers, however, only rarely decide about childcare and work
alone. The paradigm of ‘linked lives’ (Elder, Johnson, & Crosnoe, 2003)
suggests that the life courses of family members are closely connected to
decisions, such as the mother returning to work, are linked to and
influenced by significant others. In this realm, previous studies have
examined the role of partners and the division of labor within house­
holds (Abroms & Goldscheider, 2002; Verbakel & de Graaf, 2009).
Another actor involved in these decisions, the child, has found less
attention. More generally, “reversed” life course effects, that is, the in­
fluence that children’s characteristics may have on their parents’ de­
cisions, have been studied less than the effects of parental life course
changes on their children (Kalmijn & Graaf, 2012). Therefore, this study
aims to examine whether and how young children’s cognitive and
behavioral development influences the timing of their mothers’ labor
market returns after a childcare-related employment break.
Only a few studies have examined the effects of socioemotional,
behavioral and cognitive child development beyond health impairments
on maternal employment behavior (Brown, McBride, Bost, & Shin,
2011; Coley, Ribar, & Votruba-Drzal, 2011; Frijters, Johnston, Shah, &
Shields, 2009; Leach et al., 2006; Nes et al., 2014; Richard, Gaskin,
Alexandre, Burke, & Younis, 2014). Most studies have found a positive

* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: Irina.Hondralis@gmx.de (I. Hondralis), corinna.kleinert@lifbi.de (C. Kleinert).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.alcr.2020.100378
Received 7 November 2019; Received in revised form 14 August 2020; Accepted 20 September 2020
Available online 3 October 2020
1040-2608/© 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
I. Hondralis and C. Kleinert
relationship between child characteristics and maternal work involve­
ment, but they have usually concentrated on noncognitive child char­
acteristics measured via parental perceptions and have looked at ages
from four years old to early adolescence. Most literature stems from
Anglo-American countries, whose labor market and family policies
differ strongly from those in Germany, the country under view in this
study.
Guided by considerations of rational decision models and norm-
based behavior, we expect that the better their young children (age
0–3) develop, the earlier mothers return to work. In contrast to previous
studies, our data allow us to distinguish between the effects of objec­
tively measured cognitive child development (through video-based
scales) and subjectively rated behavioral characteristics (by the
mother). Since mothers’ perceptions might be influenced by their work
orientations and anticipated return behavior, we test for mediating ef­
fects. Additionally, we analyze the heterogeneous effects of child
development in different educational groups. Because low- and high-
educated mothers differ in the amount of resources they have access
to, work incentives and parenting styles, we expect that they might react
differently to their children’s cognitive and behavioral problems.
In contrast to most Anglo-American countries, Germany provides
generous parental leave entitlements, which enable mothers to stay at
home for a longer time span and gather knowledge about their children.
Due to the universal health care system and well-developed pediatric
care, parents of all socioeconomic groups are able to accumulate infor­
mation on their child’s development on a range of measures (Kamer­
man, Neuman, Waldfogel, & Brooks-Gunn, 2003). With regard to the
division of labor, Germany has been described as a
male-breadwinner/female part-time caregiver model (Pfau-Effinger,
2004), with strong norms for the maternal care of children (Grunow,
Begall, & Buchler, 2018). These preconditions have resulted in strong
educational differences in maternal employment compared to other
Western countries (e.g., Grunow et al., 2011). The unique cultural and
institutional context in Germany allows us to examine whether child
development affects maternal employment after childbirth – a topic for
which there have been many theories but that seems difficult to examine
in countries where mothers frequently return to work shortly after
childbirth.
In this study, we draw on newly available observational data from
the National Educational Panel Study, Starting Cohort 1 (NEPS-SC1)
(Hachul et al., 2019). This is the first representative large-scale longi­
tudinal study in Germany providing early measures of children’s
cognitive, sensorimotor, and temperamental development, partly
stemming from direct observations and partly from mothers’ ratings. At
the same time, the survey supplies rich information on mothers’ labor
market behavior and attitudes and the household setting. To answer our
research questions, we apply event history models for discrete time to
estimate the hazard of mothers’ returns to employment through the
fourth year after childbirth. While the goal of our research is to inves­
tigate causal relations, we cannot fully exclude the possibility that our
results are affected by problems of endogeneity and reverse causality,
since we use observational data. We therefore refrain from causal con­
clusions and discuss data limitation when reporting and interpreting our
results.
2. Previous research
Interrelations between maternal employment biographies and early
child development are characterized by complex mutual influences that
might reinforce each other and, therefore, are not easy to disentangle
(Brooks-Gunn, Han, & Waldfogel, 2002). Most previous research
devoted to these interrelations has examined whether and how mothers’
employment participation affects early child development (Huerta et al.,
2011; Lucas-Thompson, Goldberg, & Prause, 2010). The majority of
studies have not found clear effects, and if they have, effect sizes have
typically been small. The reverse causal direction – the role of child
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Advances in Life Course Research 47 (2021) 100378
characteristics and early development in mothers’ return-to-work de­
cisions – has received less attention.
In particular, health studies, mostly focusing on Anglo-American
countries, have provided evidence for the assumption that children’s
characteristics influence maternal employment behavior. Most studies
have shown that mothers of unhealthy or impaired children remain at
home or work reduced hours to care for their children (Powers, 2001;
Spiess & Dunkelberg, 2009; Wasi, van den Berg, & Buchmueller, 2011;
Wolfe & Hill, 1995). Alternatively, some authors have considered the
possibility that mothers must work to generate financial resources
required to finance special care and health services for their sick or
impaired children (e.g., Porterfield, 2002). This hypothesis has found
little direct empirical evidence. Nevertheless, this necessity might be the
reason why studies that have directly focused on maternal decisions
related to using institutional childcare mostly showed no effects of child
health (Lombardi & Coley, 2014; Melhuish, Moss, Mooney, & Martin,
1991; Volling & Belsky, 1993).
Few studies have been concerned with the effects of early child
development beyond serious health problems, impairments or diag­
nosed mental problems. Most of these studies covered the age span from
3 years old until early adolescence. Two studies in Norway (Nes et al.,
2014) and the US (Richard et al., 2014) found negative effects of sub­
jective parental assessments of children’s socioemotional and behav­
ioral problems on mothers’ employment probability and work hours.
Similarly, Coley et al. (2011) showed in three US cities that adolescents’
psychological distress and delinquency inhibit the labor market success
of disadvantaged mothers. Frijters et al. (2009) found evidence of a
causal positive impact of cognitive development, assessed by parents
and teachers when children were 4–5 years old, on maternal labor force
participation based on Australian data.
Evidence on the effects of child development on mothers’ work
behavior at a very young age is extremely rare. Leach et al. (2006)
investigated mother’s decisions and feelings about employment and
nonmaternal care for children younger than six months old in a quali­
tative study in the UK. Here, only a minority of women mentioned the
characteristics of their infant as influencing their decisions about
employment and childcare. The few mothers who stated temperamental
issues linked them to the infant’s age, stage of development, and
invariably stressed positive characteristics that had made it easier for
them to return to work. Brown et al. (2011) examined in a small-scale US
study how child temperament is related to the amount of time parents
spent with their two-year-old children. The findings indicated that
mothers spend more time with temperamentally challenging children on
workdays, and mothers’ work hours moderate this relation.
In sum, there is a considerable research deficit surrounding the
question of whether and how early-age child development influences
mothers’ return to the labor market. Most of the few studies available
have found a positive relationship between child characteristics, such as
health, behavioral and cognitive development, and maternal work
behavior, but these studies have usually looked at later ages and have
concentrated on noncognitive child characteristics measured via
parental perceptions. The heterogeneous effects of child development on
different social groups have not been well examined. Some studies have
shown that the effects of child characteristics on maternal labor supply
vary by family status because single mothers cannot rely on a partner
(see, e.g., Gould, 2004; Porterfield, 2002; Richard et al., 2014). As we
will discuss below, the effects of child development might also be ex­
pected to differ by mothers’ educational attainment, but this source of
potential heterogeneity has not yet been studied. We assess these deficits
by examining child development and mothers’ return to employment in
the first three years of the children’s lives, by focusing on cognitive and
noncognitive skills and by taking possible effect heterogeneities into
account.
I. Hondralis and C. Kleinert
3. Theoretical considerations
3.1. General microlevel mechanisms
One of the central assumptions of the linked lives paradigm (Elder
et al., 2003) is that life course events, behavior and development of
family members are tightly connected. This implies that individual de­
cisions concerning one family member, such as mothers’ employment
decisions in our case, are not made alone, but depend on other actors,
such as the partner and most important for our research question, the
children. Previous research has shown that the intergenerational
transmission of inequality is filtered through intra-familial dynamics, in
particular parenting practices. Not only the mothers’, but also the fa­
thers’ childcare involvement as well as other family members’ (e.g.
grandparents’) engagement seems to benefit children (Cabrera, Shan­
non, & Tamis-LeMonda, 2007; Gracia, 2014; Keizer, van Lissa, Tiemeier,
& Lucassen, 2020), and in consequence, educational homogamy leads to
cumulative advantages for children of privileged background.
More generally speaking, parental and enlarged family members’
behavior and child development are associated with each other by
complex mutual interrelations: parents (and the enlarged family) in­
fluence their children and vice versa. In the following, we concentrate
on one particular causal pathway in this complex interrelation,
assuming that children might influence their parents’ behavior early on.
More precisely, we expect that, all other things being equal, children’s
cognitive and socioemotional development affect the timing of their
mothers’ return to employment after birth.
Arguments for this hypothesis are found in rational-choice theories,
as well as in norm-based approaches. Based on the economic theory of
labor supply, it can be argued that the opportunity costs for maternal
employment increase when children need more care, which is the case
when they lag behind in their cognitive development or have a
demanding temperament. In this case, the advantages of household
specialization, with one partner completely concentrating on wage work
and the other concentrating completely on care work, should increase
(Becker, 1981). This makes a quick return to the labor market less likely
for mothers with less developed children, especially when institutional
childcare does not adequately address their children’s needs. Similarly,
if children show cognitive impairments or temperamental difficulties,
norms related to “being a good mother” (Hays, 1998) might be partic­
ularly formative for maternal decisions because mothers might then feel
obliged to stay at home to provide the best possible care and support for
their child. Both processes, rational decisions and norm-based behavior,
might then result in a prolongation of maternal employment in­
terruptions after childbirth.
We do not assume that children affect their fathers’ employment
decisions in the same way as mothers. In most countries, the distribution
of unpaid household and care work is still very unequal when children
are young, with fathers increasing their work effort and mothers inter­
rupting and/or reducing employment (Craig & Mullan, 2010). In
German context, these inequalities are reinforced by family policy (see
Section 3.3 for details). But of course we have to bear in mind that
mothers’ employment decisions are not only influenced by their chil­
dren, but by the presence of a potential partner in the household, his
employment integration and the division of labor in the household
(Busch, Bröckel, & Golsch, 2014) as well as by informal childcare sup­
port by other family members, foremost grandparents.
This brings us to a discussion of endogeneity. While it is easy to
theorize on effects of child characteristics on mothers’ employment
decisions alone, the mutual interrelations between mothers, fathers,
other family members and children are hard to disentangle in reality. A
large amount of literature has shown that children’s development de­
pends on parenting behavior, and therefore it might be affected by
earlier parental employment decisions as well as anticipated employ­
ment behavior (Huerta et al., 2011; Lucas-Thompson et al., 2010). While
time engagement in employment (or childcare) alone does not seem to
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Advances in Life Course Research 47 (2021) 100378
affect child development causally—in other words, spending more time
with a child does not automatically benefit the child (Booth,
Clarke-Stewart, Vandell, McCartney, & Tresch Owen, 2002), maternal
employment preferences and anticipated return behavior are more
relevant. Mothers who intend to return to employment quickly might
have a different parenting behavior than mothers who intend to stay at
home, for example they might be more impatient or try to invest more in
parenting early on. In the same vein, it is plausible to assume that
mothers develop particular beliefs about their children’s characteristics
when caring for them, which are partly based on their values and as­
pirations regarding work, family and parenting (Jacobs & Eccles, 1992).
These values might filter the assessment of their children’s character­
istics and this way influence their own employment decisions. In the
empirical analysis, these complex interrelations cause endogeneity is­
sues which we have to consider.
3.2. Heterogeneous effects
These general considerations bring us to the question of whether all
parents react similarly to their children or whether their reactions differ
by educational attainment, the facet of social background that is
particularly relevant for child development and not affected by breaks in
employment careers. Three aspects may play a role in explaining such
heterogeneous effects: resources, information, and parenting styles.
On the one hand, highly educated families have more available re­
sources to compensate for developmental deficits in their children.
Time-use studies have shown that highly educated mothers make up for
the loss of time with their children by spending relatively more time on
high-quality activities with their children, such as reading to their
children (Booth et al., 2002; Guryan, Hurst, & Kearney, 2008; Hallberg
& Klevmarken, 2003; Hsin & Felfe, 2014). In addition to that, particu­
larly high educated fathers adopt childcare responsibilities and partici­
pate in playful activities with the child and in teaching and cognitive
engagement (Gracia, 2014; Keizer et al., 2020). Furthermore, highly
educated families usually have more monetary resources to pay for
high-quality childcare that caters to the special needs of their children.
Hence, on a purely rational basis, highly educated mothers might react
less to developmental differences than low-educated mothers because
they have the means to make up for these differences when returning to
employment.
On the other hand, highly educated parents have to invest more in
their children to ensure status maintenance than low-educated parents
do. Mothers hence try to support and promote their children in the best
way possible, which implies being better informed about child devel­
opment and observing their children more closely than low-educated
mothers (Augustine, Cavanagh, & Crosnoe, 2009; Guryan et al., 2008;
Kalil, Ryan, & Corey, 2012; Sayer, Gauthier, & Furstenberg, 2004).
Cultural capital theory (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) first described how
the cultural resources that upper-class families possess translate into
later-life success in school and social positions, albeit in vague terms.
Lareau’s (2003) concept of concerted cultivation describes the strategies
by which parents foster skills and motivation that are recognized in
school and high-qualified work in the US context. Working-class parents
rely more on the “natural growth” of their children, often following the
notion that children will develop well as soon as their basic needs, such
as comfort, food, and shelter, are addressed. In contrast, middle-class
families more often engage in “concerted cultivation”, i.e., they try to
promote their children’s particular skills by enrolling them in manifold
organized activities, stressing language use and promoting the devel­
opment of reasoning (for empirical evidence, see, e.g., Carolan & Was­
serman, 2015; Cheadle & Amato, 2011). A prerequisite for these
activities is the early observation of their children’s skills and charac­
teristics, as well as the early adaptation of parenting behavior to their
(perceived) needs. According to these considerations, highly educated
mothers might react more strongly to developmental differences in
children than low-educated mothers.
I. Hondralis and C. Kleinert
Regarding all the discussed mechanisms, one has to bear in mind that
educational homogamy is pronounced in all modern societies (e.g.
Smits, 2003) and therefore effects of resources, information and
parenting behavior often cumulate. In our empirical study, we can only
take mothers educational attainment into account. However, this im­
plies that in many cases fathers or partners in the household have an
equal or higher educational attainment and thus contribute to potential
heterogeneous effects of education.
3.3. The German context
Thus far, we have only discussed mechanisms at the micro level of
families to predict how child characteristics, maternal preferences and
social stratification interact to explain the timing of employment re-
entries among mothers. These associations are also influenced by op­
portunity structures, particularly parental leave regulations, childcare
availability and childcare costs, which may affect social groups differ­
ently. However, as we discuss in detail below, in the German context,
these factors are controlled for and have not explicitly been considered
in our empirical design.
Germany provides a well-suited country case for our research ques­
tions for two reasons. First, a universal health care system and well-
developed pediatric care allows parents of all socioeconomic groups to
accumulate information on their child’s development on a range of
measures, also relative to other children (for an overview on system and
usage, c.f. Schmidtke, Kuntz, Starker, & Lampert, 2018). Second, in the
time under review in the study, parents were entitled to generous paid
leave of up to 14 months after childbirth and unpaid leave of 36
months.1 This regulation allows parents to spend a prolonged period out
of the labor market while primarily caring for a child before returning to
their previous job. Mostly mothers make use of this right: on average,
fathers of children born in 2010 used only three months of paid leave,
whereas mothers used it for nearly 12 months (Statistisches Bundesamt,
2014) and stayed at home for approximately 18 months in total (Geyer,
Haan, Spieß, & Wrohlich, 2013). Accordingly, mothers in Germany
might gain a solid perception of how their child is developing during
parental leave.
Childcare costs are comparatively low in Germany, as their provision
is strongly subsidized by the state (Wrohlich, 2011). Since the
mid-2000s, places for children under three have been strongly extended,
and shortly after the children observed in our study were born, a legal
entitlement for a place was introduced. Despite these reforms, childcare
availability for children under three years old was still limited in 2012,
at least in many urban regions in West Germany (Bundesministerium für
Familie, Senioren und Frauen und Jugend, 2015). In addition to this
barrier, spouse income splitting for taxation increases the monetary
returns of household specialization compared to individual taxation
systems with both partners earning similar incomes (Dingeldey, 2001),
and due to the comparatively large gender pay gap returns to maternal
employment are often low (O’Reilly, Smith, Deakin, & Burchell, 2015).
Regarding the resulting pattern of couples’ employment participation,
Germany has been described as a male-breadwinner/female part-time
caregiver model (Pfau-Effinger, 2004). The labor market participation
rates of mothers have been constantly growing in recent years, but the
increases are mostly due to part-time employment (Wanger, 2015).
1
In the time under view, parents had the right to split their parental leave
into two periods (or into more when the employer agreed). Furthermore, it was
possible to prolong or shorten one’s leave time after initial application, but in
most cases the employer had to agree to this (a detailed overview over the
regulations in German language can be found here: https://familienportal.de
/familienportal/familienleistungen/elternzeit/faq). Thus flexibility to adapt
one’s parental leave to the needs of the child was limited. There are no official
statistics available how many parents made use of changes after initial
application.
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Advances in Life Course Research 47 (2021) 100378
Additionally, educational differences regarding childcare usage and
maternal employment have been increasing. Low-educated mothers
tend to enroll their children in childcare at older ages than highly
educated mothers (Kreyenfeld & Krapf, 2013) and have much lower
employment rates, particularly full-time (Drasch, 2013).2 Despite these
trends, more educated parents devote more time to their children than
less educated parents and parental time with children has increased
overall, as in many other countries. The time of fathers with children is
low in international comparison (Dotti Sani & Treas, 2016).
Culturally, norms of “being a good mother” are widespread, partic­
ularly in western Germany (Borck, 2014). This norm implies the idea
that children under three need their mothers’ care (Hennig & Pfau-Ef­
finger, 2012; for recent evidence, cf. Grunow et al., 2018). These cul­
tural imprints have been widely absent in eastern Germany. In the
former GDR, mothers were strongly urged by the socialist state to work
full-time, and full-day childcare was provided extensively. Since reuni­
fication, attendance patterns in early childcare and maternal employ­
ment patterns have slowly converged (Hofacker, Stoilova, & Riebling,
2013).
In sum, the specific mix of institutional and cultural conditions in
Germany at the time of our study should result in a higher variation
among maternal return patterns compared to earlier times when
maternal care and work patterns were more uniform and compared to
less-regulated countries where the economic necessity for engaging in
paid work plays a larger role. Consequently, we assume the German
context to reinforce maternal reactions to the cognitive and noncogni­
tive skills of their children. As restrictions in childcare prices are less
important than in many other countries and restrictions in childcare
availability matter to all social groups, we assume differences in infor­
mation and preferences among mothers to be more important than
differences in material resources.
3.4. Hypotheses
Based on the general theoretical expectations and on the peculiarities
of the German context, we have three hypotheses. First, we expect that
the less difficult mothers perceive their children’s socioemotional
development to be and the better cognitively developed their children
are, the earlier and more likely they will be to return to employment
(H1).
Additionally, we expect that mothers’ perceptions of developmental
differences depend on their work orientations and anticipated return-to-
work behavior. The more mothers value work and anticipate a return to
employment, the more positive they will assess their children’s behav­
ioral characteristics to be and the earlier and more likely they will be to
return to employment (H2).
Finally, we expect that the effects of child development differ by
maternal educational attainment. Considering the strong state support
of institutional childcare, long parental leave, and marital division of
work in Germany, we do not assume that heterogeneous effects are as
strongly driven by parental monetary resources as in countries with a
private market of early childcare. Instead, we start from the premise that
similar to the US case described by Lareau (2003), parenting behavior
differs by education in Germany (for evidence, see Moll & Betz, 2014).
At children’s early age, concerted cultivation might imply that highly
educated mothers are better informed about differences in early child
development and engage more strongly in observing their children’s
skills and catering to their individual needs. Hence, we expect that
highly educated mothers react more strongly to developmental differ­
ences in their children than low-educated mothers (H3).
2
For a conceptual framework on the intersections between these educational
and gender inequalities in paid and unpaid work and the historical trends in
Germany in international comparison, cf. Cooke (2011).
I. Hondralis and C. Kleinert Advances in Life Course Research 47 (2021) 100378

4. Data and methods

4.1. Data

To test our hypotheses, we use data from the first four waves of the
National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), Starting Cohort 1 (SC1)
(Hachul et al., 2019).3 The NEPS was introduced to generate reliable,
large-scale longitudinal data for Germany related to educational de­
cisions, competence development, learning environments, and returns
to education over the whole life span. To this end, six parallel panel
surveys, the so-called starting cohorts, were set up, covering different
phases of the life course, from newborn to adulthood. NEPS-SC1 consists
of a register-based probability sample of 3,481 babies born between
February and July 2012 (Weinert, Linberg, Attig, Freund, & Linberg, Fig. 1. Maternal Returns to Employment in NEPS-SC 1.
2016). The first wave of the survey took place when the children were Note: Data from NEPS SC1 (doi:10.5157/NEPS:SC1:4.0.0).
between six and eight months old to derive valid and comparable
assume that the mechanisms influencing the decision to return to work
measurements of infant development. The second wave took place at the
are different for these groups. To avoid problems of reverse causality, we
age of 12–17 months, the third wave at the age of 25–27 months, and the
exclude mothers who worked in the period after birth and before the
fourth wave, in which 2,324 children and 2,478 parents still took part, at
first NEPS interview, when child development was measured for the first
the age of 37–39 months. In the first and third waves of the survey,
time (N = 244). Due to missing information, we had to disregard target
mostly female interviewers who had been specially trained for the study
persons who had only participated in wave 1 but not in further waves of
visited the homes of the selected families and conducted video-based
the survey (N = 571), as well as persons for whom we were not able to
observations of sensorimotor development, habituation-dishabituation
impute missing data (N = 6) due to too many missing values in the
paradigm, and parent-child-interaction. Additionally, one parent (usu­
auxiliary variables of the imputation model. As employment entries
ally the mother) in every family was surveyed by computer-assisted
were recorded in NEPS-SC1 as panel information without exact date
personal interviews. In the second wave, parents were interviewed by
information, our analysis data set is in person-year format and contains
telephone, and direct measures at the children’s homes were only
at least one and at most three observations per mother. Overall, the
assessed for half of the sample. From the third wave onwards, parents
analysis data set consists of 5,458 yearly observations of 2,548 mother-
could choose between a personal and a telephone interview. In the
child couples (Fig. 1).
fourth wave, direct computer-based tests of vocabulary, categorization,
delayed gratification and digit span were conducted with the children.
From these data, we built an analysis data set that maps the process 4.2. Analytical strategy
from the first survey wave, when the target children were between six
and eight months old and their development was measured for the first To test our hypotheses on the effect of child development on
time, until the point in time when the mothers entered or re-entered mothers’ transitions from home to employment, we apply event history
employment.4 We observe every mother in our analysis sample until a models (Allison, 1982; Rabe-Hesketh & Skrondal, 2008). These models
positive outcome, i.e., the first labor market entry happens, as opposed estimate the hazard of returning to employment conditional on not
to nonemployment or being only marginally employed with fewer than having returned to work yet. Simultaneously, they allow the flexible
15 h a week.5 Alternatively, observations are right censored when a modeling of the duration dependency of the data, controlling for
mother gave birth to another child, when she still stayed at home in numerous time-varying covariates and handling right-censored obser­
wave 4, or when she dropped out of the survey before a return to the vations. More precisely, we use event history models for discrete times
labor market was observed. Additionally, we distinguished the risk of with a logistic link function because this type of model is well suited to
returning to full-time versus part-time employment. processes that are measured discretely or are discrete by nature (Allison,
Our risk set includes all mothers who were not employed when 2010, p. 416; Singer & Willett, 2003, p. 416). As our data are only
observing child development for the first time in the survey, i.e., in the available at yearly intervals, the process of returning to work is observed
first panel wave. We exclude male respondents, even when they only roughly, making event history models for discrete time feasible.
answered as being the main care-taker (N = 107), and teenage preg­ Child development and mother’s employment behavior are likely to
nancies where mothers were younger than 18 years old (N = 5), as we be correlated with unobserved characteristics, which may cause issues of
endogeneity. Furthermore, maternal employment could equally affect
child development; therefore, reverse causality must be taken into ac­
3
This paper uses data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS):
count. To address these issues, we take advantage of some features of the
Starting Cohort Newborns, doi:10.5157/NEPS:SC1:4.0.0. From 2008 to 2013, NEPS Starting Cohort 1 data to identify the potential association be­
NEPS data was collected as part of the Framework Program for the Promotion tween child development and maternal employment. First, the longi­
of Empirical Educational Research funded by the German Federal Ministry of tudinal nature of the data allows us to model the sequence of events over
Education and Research (BMBF). As of 2014, NEPS is carried out by the Leibniz time. Therefore, we exclude mothers who worked before child devel­
Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) at the University of Bamberg in opment was measured for the first time from our analysis sample, we
cooperation with a nationwide network. control for changes in household composition and resources that took
4
We included mothers irrespective of their employment status before birth; place before mothers’ re-entry into employment, and we lag all time-
however, the large majority (73%) has worked before family formation. For this changing information in our data by one year to ensure that changes
reason, we use the terms “re-entering” and “returning” to employment for all
occurred before mothers’ employment re-entry. Second, the rich set of
the employment entries we find in our sample.
5 child development measures we use (for details, see the next section)
We chose this rather conservative measure of employment to reflect high-
stake choices of mothers, i.e. employment which requires to use external was recorded relatively shortly after childbirth, when children were six
childcare or changes in the household division of labor. In Germany there are to eight months old. Negative affectivity was measured yearly. We lag
less strict regulations for marginal than for regular employment, which makes this variable by one year to reduce the potential correlation with
this form of work very attractive for employers, but has serious disadvantages parental attitudes and defacto employment. Third, we are able to take
for employees in terms of social security and wages. important third-variable influences into account, namely, educational

5
I. Hondralis and C. Kleinert Advances in Life Course Research 47 (2021) 100378

attainment, maternal values and aspirations, and test to what extent Table 1
perceived developmental differences are mediated by these factors (see Descriptive statistics for the analytical sample (N = 2,548).
H2 and H3). We address these problems by using the rich information in M SD Min Max
our dataset, including only control variables that we assume to affect
Child characteristics
both child development and mothers’ work decisions. What we cannot Negative affectivity (centred)* − 0.22 1.21 − 3.90 2.10
exclude is the possibility that child development may be affected by Regulatory capacity (centred) 0.01 0.71 − 4.49 1.11
other unobserved variables that influence maternal return-to-work Sensorimotor skills (centred) − 0.01 1.44 − 6.68 3.71
behavior at the same time or that unobserved effects differ in partic­ Habituation (centred) − 0.01 3.31 − 17.28 4.89
Medical problems 0.07 0.26 0.00 1.00
ular subgroups, e.g. among low- and high-educated. Second or later child in household* 0.53 0.50 0.00 1.00

4.3. Variables Mother characteristics

Mother’s age at birth of child 32.49 4.99 18.00 54.00
Vocational degree 0.46 0.50 0.00 1.00
To test our hypotheses on the effects of developmental differences,
Tertiary degree 0.37 0.48 0.00 1.00
we distinguish four indicators of children’s cognitive and affective Migration background 0.21 0.40 0.00 1.00
development. Mental problems (centred)* − 0.01 0.74 − 1.73 2.64
We include two direct indicators of early cognitive functioning, which
were measured differently in NEPS than in traditional child lab studies. Aspirations and parenting style
Aspired childcare age (in months) − 0.36 9.52 − 28.76 31.24
First, we use the child’s sensorimotor skills, i.e., appropriate movement re­
Work orientation 3.07 0.74 0.00 5.30
sponses to information gathered through the sensory system in daily tasks.
These skills are regarded as early predictors of later cognitive competencies Household characteristics
and are typically measured by the Bayley scales (Bayley, 2006). Here, Number of children* 0.78 0.96 0.00 7.00
sensorimotor skills are tested with the support of a standardized set of ob­ Married and cohabiting* 0.94 0.24 0.00 1.00
Partner in employment* 0.88 0.32 0.00 1.00
jects and toys in a laboratory situation. The test requires children to perform
Ln household income (in €)* 8.00 0.50 5.70 11.51
specific tasks with the objects such as reaching for them or transferring Living in East Germany 0.23 0.42 0.00 1.00
them from hand to hand. Trained examiners observe and score the chil­
Note. * Time-varying control variables at the beginning of the observation period
dren’s reactions. In the first wave of NEPS-SC1, this measurement was
(wave 2).
transferred to large-scale assessment by videotaping standardized tasks
Source. NEPS SC1 (doi:10.5157/NEPS:SC1:4.0.0).
with the children in their homes and afterwards scoring for every task
whether the children showed this behavior or not (Weinert et al., 2016; Low values indicate that children show an advanced habituation
Weinert, Attig, & Rossbach, 2017). Due to limited interview time and costs, behavior, processing the information quickly. For a sensitivity check, we
the number of tasks had to be cut down sharply, compared to the usual used habituation strength, i.e. the extent of decline of viewing times over
implementation of the Bayley scales. Of the 16 assessed tasks in total, 14 several rounds of pictures (for details on calculation and a discussion of
were used to generate a WLE estimator, which takes task difficulty into both measures, cf. Pahnke, 2007). We calculated this measure by
account (for a complete list of items and domains, see Table A1 in the comparing the total of the first three and the last three viewing times.
Appendix A). For this reason, we cannot directly compare the values of the Aspects of the children’s noncognitive development were measured
WLE estimator with the age distribution of the regular Bayley scales. indirectly by asking their mothers item sets on two different aspects of
Children with a minimum on this scale typically showed none of the be­ child temperament, regulatory capacity (i.e., the speed of calming down
haviors listed in Table A1, children with a maximum showed all of them. after experiencing comforting behavior) and negative affectivity (i.e.,
Children with mean sensorimotor skills according to the WLE estimator feelings of anger when not getting what he or she wants), which can be
showed 57 % of all the behaviors that could be scored in total, 79 % of the understood as an aspect of the child’s socioemotional development.7 To
motor tasks, 61 % of the cognitive tasks and only 11 % of the language tasks, this end, a short version of the Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ-R) on
which gives an impression of the task difficulty in the different domains.6 a scale from 0 (not at all) to 6 (always) was used (Gartstein & Rothbart,
Second, we include habituation, which is defined as “the reduction of 2003). We used five items, including three items of the IBQ-R, to
attention to a continuously presented stimulus (e.g., pictures) that is not construct two sum indices for regulatory capacity and negative affec­
based simply on fatigue of the sensory receptors” (Schlesiger, Lorenz, tivity (Bayer, Wohlkinger, Freund, Ditton, & Weinert, 2015). For our
Weinert, Schneider, & Roßbach, 2011). Habituation is usually tested by analysis, we z-standardized both sum indexes.
presenting pictures to children and measuring the number of trials in In our models, we only control for factors that we assume to affect both
which children fix on the stimulus before the fixation time drops child development and maternal re-entry into employment. Regarding
significantly. The resulting measures indicate the speed of information child features, we include birth order by distinguishing second and later
processing, which is an important aspect of fluid intelligence. In children in the household from first-borns and include a dummy variable
NEPS-SC1, habituation was measured by presenting the children a set of for the existence of early medical problems, measured in wave 2. Further­
9 images (Weinert et al., 2016, 2017). Total viewing time for each pic­ more, we control for specific maternal characteristics. To capture social
ture was fixed at 10 s. For measuring the habituation paradigm, we differences between mothers, we include their age (in years), migration
calculated the total viewing time, by summing up the logarithm of the background (whether they were born in Germany), region of living (in East
total viewing times across all 9 images presented during the habituation vs. West Germany) and educational attainment (we distinguish three
test, only counting viewing times above 250 milliseconds and children groups: persons with high school education only and school drop-outs,
with valid viewing times for at least 5 pictures. The minimum on this persons with a higher secondary vocational degree, and persons with ter­
scale indicates a total viewing time of 8 s; on average the children tiary education). Mothers’ mental problems are measured by constructing
fixated the pictures for 59 s. We opted for this measure, because it shows an index based on how depressed the mother felt in the last four weeks and
the greatest reliability over time among the different measures used in how unsatisfied and drained she felt in her role as a mother (Linberg,
the literature and stable inter-individual differences (Pahnke, 2007).

6 7
Additional analyses based on the whole NEPS-SC1 wave 1 sample. Children Factor analyses support the view that regulatory capacity and negative
for whom no behaviors could be scored were excluded. Percentages weighted affectivity are two different dimensions of child temperament (Bayer et al.,
by the number of behaviors that could be scored successfully. 2015).

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I. Hondralis and C. Kleinert Advances in Life Course Research 47 (2021) 100378

Table 2 Table 3
Transition to employment after childbirth, logistic regressions, AME. Transition to part-time or full-time employment after childbirth in comparison
Child development + Controls (M1) + Orientations
to not returning, multinomial logistic regression, AME.
(M0) (M2) No return Full-time work Part-time work
Negative − .007 (.005) .000 (.005) .000 (.005) Negative − .000 (.005) .003 (.003) − .002 (.005)
affectivity affectivity
Regulatory − .025*** (.008) − .013+ (.007) − .014+ (.007) Regulatory .014+ (.007) − .002 (.005) − .012 (.007)
capacity capacity
Sensorimotor .006 (.004) .007+ (.004) .008* (.004) Sensorimotor − .008* (.004) .000 (.002) .008* (.004)
skills skills
Habituation − .002 (.002) − .002 (.002) − .002 (.002) Habituation .002 (.002) .000 (.001) − .002 (.002)
Work .105*** (.007) Work − .109*** (.007) .034*** (.006) .071*** (.007)
orientation orientation
Aspired − .001* (.001) Aspired .001* (.001) − .001+ (.000) − .000 (.001)
childcare age childcare age
Period dummies ✓ ✓ ✓ Period dummies ✓ ✓ ✓
Controls ✓ ✓ Controls ✓ ✓ ✓
Observations 5458 5458 5458 Observations 5458 5458 5458
Persons 2548 2548 2548 Persons 2548 2548 2548
Events 1541 1541 1541 Events 1007 360 1181

Note. Models M1 and M2 include birth order, child’s medical problems, mother’s
education, age, migration background, and mental problems, as well as number
of children, marital status, partner’s employment status, ln household income,
and region of living. Robust standard errors in parentheses; + p < .10, * p < .05,
** p < .01, *** p < .001.
Source. NEPS SC1 (doi:10.5157/NEPS:SC1:4.0.0).
Note. The models include birth order, child’s medical problems, mother’s edu­
cation, age, migration background, and mental problems, as well as number of
children, marital status, partner’s employment status, ln household income, and
region of living. Robust standard errors in parentheses; + p < .10, * p < .05, **
p < .01, *** p < .001.
Source. NEPS SC1 (doi:10.5157/NEPS:SC1:4.0.0).

Freund, & Mann, 2017). To capture the influence of mothers’ beliefs and
aspirations regarding work, family and parenting, we include the mother’s
realistic aspiration for the age the child should attend a childcare institution
(measured in wave 1). Furthermore, we construct an index for work-family
orientations consisting of how important the mother rates her own
employment, how beneficial she thinks childcare attendance is for her
employment and how beneficial she thinks it is for the child’s development
(Cronbach’s α = 0.54; all items measured in wave 1). Finally, household
factors are included in the models. We control for the number of children,
family status (marriage, cohabitation or single), whether the partner is
employed, and log household income (to address the skewness of income
distribution). Missing information in the control variables is filled by means
of multiple imputation with chained equations (MICE), imputing in a
cross-sectional manner (for more information, see Author, 2018). Table 1
presents the distribution of the covariates used in the models.
5. Results
5.1. Early child development and mothers’ employment re-entry
Table 2 presents the results for the subjective and objective measures
of child development on mothers’ hazard of entering the labor market
after a birth-induced break from a discrete event-history model with a
logistic link function, reporting average marginal effects (AME). In all
three models presented in Table 2, we examine the effect of cognitive
and noncognitive development on the hazard of returning to employ­
ment with 15 h per week or more. Model 0 does not include any control
variables. Model 1 includes all relevant individual, household and child
characteristics shown in Table 1. Finally, in Model 2, we include
mothers’ own values and aspirations regarding work, family and
parenting to test how they shaped their beliefs about their children and
whether they rated their children accordingly, which, in turn, might
influence their return-to-work behavior (H2).
Our results consistently do not show a statistically significant asso­
ciation between mothers’ return to work and children’s negative affec­
tivity, which is a dimension of children’s temperament, based on
mothers’ ratings. In Model 0 we find that children’s regulatory capacity,
which is another dimension of temperament, is significantly associated
with a lower hazard of returning to the labor market after childbirth.
Once individual, household, and child-specific controls are included in
Model 1, the effect of regulatory capacity is halved in size and becomes
only marginally significant. High (versus low) values of regulatory ca­
pacity imply that mothers report their children to always (never) enjoy
when being rhythmically rocked, cuddled, or held in one’s arm and to
always (never) calm down instantly when being sung or spoken to. The
effect of -0.013 indicates that when regulatory capacity increases by one
unit (measured on a 6-point scale), the hazard of (re-)entering
employment decreases on average by 1.4 percentage points.8 In sub­
stantive terms, this is a rather small effect. Model 2 shows that mothers’
work orientation and realistic aspirations of when the child should
attend a childcare institution significantly affect their employment
behavior. Despite the significance of mothers’ preferences, the effects of
both affective child characteristics do not change further when we
additionally control for them. This result speaks against hypothesis 2.
Regarding cognitive aspects of child development, both measures,
habituation and sensorimotor skills, show no statistical association with
mothers’ employment take-up in model 0. The zero effect of habituation
does not change when further controls are included. In contrast, we find a
relatively small, statistically significant association between the child’s
sensorimotor development and the mothers’ hazard of returning to
employment when including controls (Table 2, M1 and M2). The effect of
sensorimotor development only becomes statistically significant at the 5-
percent level in Model 2, when mothers’ work-family orientation and
realistic aspirations for when the child should attend a childcare institution
are additionally controlled. The scale for sensorimotor skills indicates the
share of age-typical motor tasks the assessed children could perform in the
standardized video sequence, such as visually attending to a source of noise
or to objects, reaching for objects, exploring and playing with them,
transferring them from hand to hand, or using the pincher grip. The WLE
estimator takes values between -6.7 and 3.7. Hence the effect in Model 2
indicates that when a child’s sensorimotor skills increase by one unit, the
hazard of (re-) entering employment increases on average by 0.8 percent­
age points, which is again a rather small effect in substantive terms.
To refine these results, we distinguished transitions to full-time
versus part-time employment, both compared to remaining inactive,
to test how children’s cognitive and noncognitive development influ­
ence the intensity of employment attachment. To analyze this, we
turned to a competing risks model, estimated by a multinomial logistic
8
It is important to keep in mind that this measure only reports an average
effect which allows for an intuitive interpretation, but ignores the non-linear
shape of the probability curve (Best & Wolf, 2012).

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I. Hondralis and C. Kleinert Advances in Life Course Research 47 (2021) 100378

Table 4 regardless of the objective or perceived developmental differences in

Transition to employment after childbirth for different educational groups, lo­ their children. Second, mothers with a vocational degree seem to
gistic regressions, AME. respond to children’s differences more than either highly or low-
No vocational Vocational degree Tertiary degree educated mothers. Only in this group did we find a positive and statis­
degree tically significant effect of the child’s sensorimotor development and a
Negative .004 (.009) − .003 (.007) .003 (.008) negative and significant effect of regulatory capacity on the hazard of
affectivity returning to employment.9 This result contradicts hypothesis 3.
Regulatory − .010 (.014) − .021* (.010) − .008 (.013)
capacity
Sensorimotor − .003 (.008) .013* (.005) .008 (.006) 5.3. Sensitivity checks
skills
Habituation − .003 (.004) − .002 (.003) − .001 (.003) We ran several sensitivity checks that reinforce our findings. First, we
Work orientation .063*** (.016) .114*** (.011) .112*** (.012)
replicated all models by including only one measure of child develop­
Aspired childcare − .000 (.001) − .002** (.001) − .000 (.001)
age ment at a time. Additionally, we used an alternative estimator of habit­
Period dummies ✓ ✓ ✓ uation, namely the strength of viewing time instead of total viewing time.
Controls ✓ ✓ ✓ Second, we re-estimated our models using a broader measure of
Observations 902 2572 1984 employment as the dependent variable, which also includes marginal
Persons 426 1184 938
Events 119 724 698
employment (defined by a maximum monthly income of 400 euros, or
450 euros after 2013, and no social insurance contributions). Third, we
Note. Models include birth order, child’s medical problems, mother’s education, additionally controlled for pre-birth maternal employment and fathers’
age, migration background, and mental problems, as well as number of children,
educational attainment. Finally, we tested the stability of the models
marital status, partner’s employment status, ln household income, and region of
using linear probability models, as well as logit and probit models, to
living. Robust standard errors in parentheses; + p < .10, * p < .05, ** p < .01,
*** p < .001.
assess the probability of return separately for each survey wave. In sum,
Source. NEPS SC1 (doi:10.5157/NEPS:SC1:4.0.0). all sensitivity analyses showed similar patterns and, therefore, confirmed
our previous findings (available upon request). Finally, we regressed all
regression. The results are presented in Table 3, and the coefficients are variables in the models on panel dropout in order to check whether any of
again reported as AME. For the full model, see Table A3 in the Appendix the variables predicted panel dropout. This was not the case; therefore we
A. refrained from using longitudinal weights.
The results demonstrate that children’s cognitive and emotional
development had different effects on the return to full-time versus part-time 6. Conclusions and discussion
employment after childbirth. We found a statistically significant positive
effect for children’s sensorimotor development only for the transition to Focusing on children’s cognitive and noncognitive characteristics,
part-time employment after giving birth, but not for the transition to full- this study provides evidence for how child development in the first years
time employment. A similar but nonsignificant effect pattern showed up after birth might influence mothers’ return-to-work behavior. With
for regulatory capacity. This pattern of results indicates that children’s newly available data from the large-scale panel study NEPS SC1, which
cognitive and noncognitive development did not affect mothers’ decisions is the first study in Germany to provide early measures of child devel­
to return to full-time employment after childbirth, whereas return to part- opment, originating from direct observations gathered during the survey
time employment in contrast to staying at home seemed to be more and ratings of mothers, our findings show a more differentiated pattern
dependent on aspects and perceptions of child development. than we had expected theoretically. Only single aspects of early non-
Taken together, our results provide a nuanced picture of the effects of cognitive and cognitive child development seem to affect mothers’
early child development on maternal employment behavior. Mothers hazard of returning to employment. Even these effects are weak and
seemed to react slightly to their children’s sensorimotor skills, but not to small in size, and in part they do not show the sign we theoretically
habituation, with faster returns to employment. Mothers reacted margin­ expected. Hence our first hypothesis is not supported. Second, our
ally to their children’s regulatory capacity, but not to their negative affec­ models show no evidence that child development depends on mothers’
tivity, with slower returns to employment. Both effects were visible only for work-family orientations. These results do not support hypothesis 2.
mothers who return to part-time employment, but not to mothers who enter Third, when distinguishing between mothers with different educational
full-time employment. In sum, these results do not provide evidence for attainment, the above mentioned effects of child development were
hypothesis 1 suggesting that mothers would generally react to better child visible only in the medium educated group of mothers with upper sec­
development with faster returns to the labor market. ondary vocational degrees, but not for low or tertiary educated mothers.
This result again contradicts our theoretical expectations (H3).
These results provoke a discussion. First of all, we have to ask why
5.2. Heterogeneous effects the overall effects are small and partly not visible, despite the fact that
we argued that Germany is a good case study for observing them. The
To test whether the effect of children’s cognitive and noncognitive first answer might be that flexibility of changing one’s initial plans was
development varies by mother’s educational background (H3), we limited at the time under view. Parents usually needed the approval of
estimated separate models for different education groups while also the employer to change their initial parental leave duration, and
including all control variables from Model 2 shown in Table 2. Table 4 therefore may not have to been able to adapt their return to work to their
illustrates how mothers with a different educational background (dis­ children’s development. Another potential reason might be that mothers
tinguishing high school only, upper secondary vocational degrees and have difficulty assessing their child’s developmental skills at a young
tertiary education) reacted to objective or perceived developmental age, which were objectively measured in NEPS-SC1. This regards in
differences in their children.
First, the distribution of events in Table 4 confirms the strong dif­
ferences among low- and highly educated differences in terms of 9
Chi2 tests showed that the effects of sensorimotor skills differed significantly
maternal employment participation. These differences also show up in from each other in the two groups of mothers with no degree and vocational
the effects of educational attainment in Table A2, Models 2 and 3 in the degree (Chi2 = 3.04*), but not for any of the remaining contrasts or any other
appendix. Mothers with a tertiary degree returned to employment child characteristics. The same result was found when performing a joint model
earlier and more often than mothers with a lower level of education, with interaction effects.

8
I. Hondralis and C. Kleinert
particular the habituation paradigm. If children have not been medically
diagnosed with health problems or cognitive deficits, mothers may be
unable to recognize developmental lags or leads in this domain. Even if
they observe deviations from the average, they might attribute them to
“normal” differences in developmental speed that disappear at a later
stage (Leach et al., 2006). Sensorimotor skills might be more obvious to
mothers than habituation, as they are directly observable through, for
example, children’s ability to reach out for things or to be attentive to
sounds. Beyond this, the cognitive dimensions of child development
were measured via video-taping and coding for the first time in a
large-scale survey. Therefore, we do not yet know whether these inno­
vative measures suffer from limited precision or how predictive they are
of children’s later cognitive skills.
In contrast, children’s non-cognitive development was measured in
NEPS more conventionally via mothers’ ratings of two facets of their
temperament, negative affectivity and regulatory capacity. It has to be
kept in mind that these ratings might partly reflect mothers’ evaluations
of their own parenting behavior. In this view, the negative effect of
regulatory capacity on mothers’ returns to employment might imply
that mothers who rate their children as being comforted quickly are
those ones who rate themselves as very good mothers, who devote much
attention to their children and hence are less likely to re-enter
employment. On the other hand, our models show no evidence that
the child development effects stemming from mothers’ ratings change
when mothers’ work-family orientations are taken into account. Overall,
we conclude that the interplay between maternal assessments of child
development and return behavior is more complex than we theoretically
expected. Earlier studies (Hastings & Rubin, 1999) suggest that both
factors might depend on more underlying predictors, such as maternal
personality, which we could not consider in our models.
Finally, our findings provide evidence for heterogeneous effects of
child characteristics by maternal educational attainment. Interestingly,
our results show that the work behavior of mothers with medium levels
of education is the most volatile. In a similar vein, transitions to part-
time employment are more volatile than transitions to full-time
employment. Low-educated mothers in Germany interrupt their
employment the longest and most often do not return to work in the first
years of their children’s lives, whereas highly educated mothers show
the fastest return behavior and most often return to full-time work. In
sum, the effect heterogeneities we found suggest that different groups of
mothers might exist in our sample with regard to their preferences: on
the one hand, there are work-oriented or family-oriented women who
make their choices independent from their children (or have no choice
at all) and, on the other hand, there are women who adapt their return
behavior to their children’s needs, who are often medium educated and
return to part-time work after an employment interruption. To test this
assumption more formally would, however, require a stable (at best,
collected pre-birth) measure of work-family orientations of the mothers.
A final limitation of our study is the fact that due to the nonexperimental
nature of our study we were only able to test for associations among vari­
ables, and causal conclusions are thus limited. Although exploiting a wide
range of individual, household, and child developmental controls, there are
still data restrictions, and the risk of biased estimates remains. On the one
hand, our data provide only rough panel information on maternal returns to
employment. Therefore, it does not allow us to make use of the full variety
in return patterns that are realized during the time under review. This also
regards women who took up employment very early after birth. We had to
exclude this small group due to the lack of child development measures
earlier than their returns to employment. Excluding these women might
lead to an overestimation of effects because this group is probably less
susceptible to developmental problems and success of their children than
others. On the other hand, some important covariates that may be influ­
encing the associations found are missing from the study, for example,
certain maternal personality traits or more detailed information about fa­
thers and partners in the household, the extended family, and their shares in
parenting and household division of labor.
9
Advances in Life Course Research 47 (2021) 100378
Despite these shortcomings, our study provides initial evidence on
how child development, in addition to well-researched institutional,
individual and household characteristics, might influence mothers’
employment interruption and return to employment, especially to part-
time employment. In sum, we learnt that gendered processes of maternal
employment across the life course are heavily affected by childbirth in
Germany today, but apparently less so by child development thereafter.
One reason for this might be the fact that structural constraints for
mothers’ employment in early years were still strong at the time of the
study, despite political reforms and increased investments in early
childcare. Another possible reason lies in the low grade of flexibility that
parental leave regulations offered after children were born, as
mentioned above. Finally, strong cultural norms regarding parenting
responsibilities and maternal employment, which are strongly bound to
educational groups, seem to offer flexibility to adapt to children’s needs
only for some groups of mothers, not for others. Our study could,
however, not look fully into the black box of parental norms and their
reactions to their children’s needs.
Future research may continue this work by analyzing the decisions that
mothers and fathers make and their considerations regarding their chil­
dren’s skills, temperament and needs directly. In our view, four avenues of
research might be particular fruitful to shed more light on the general
question how parents respond to their children’s early needs: First, it would
be good to explore the effects of early child development as well as skills in
later ages, when they are more easily to decipher by parents, including
other skill domains and non-linear effects. Second, fathers and partners in
the household, their role in parenting and the household division of labor
before and after the birth of a child should be considered in future research,
since fathers increasingly participate in parental leave. Connected to this, it
would be worthwhile to explore the role that the work-family orientations
not only of mothers, but of couples play in explaining how parents react to
their children. Third, the case of Germany offers the opportunity to examine
the influence of different structural conditions in childcare as well as
different cultural norms towards work and children by comparing parents
and children in East and West Germany. And finally, future research might
also look ahead from the point in parents’ life courses when they start
working again after birth of a child and examine the dynamics of their work
trajectories, for example by looking at salaries, positions and promotions,
and indicators of security and insecurity.
Appendix A
Table A1
Sensorimotor skills – list of scored child behaviors in NEPS-SC1.
Domain Item no. Behavior
Cognition 1 Directing visual attention to source of noise
2 Object focused visual attention for 3 s
3 Object focused visual attention for 5 s
4 Persistent reaching behavior
5 Object exploration
6 Beats on the table / drums
7 Plays with object (string)
8 Means – end: pulls string to get the attached object
9 Visual search for fallen object
15 Carries object to mouth (not part of WLE)
Motor skills 10 Reaches for object
11 Object transfer between hands
12 Thumb-finger grasp
Language 13 Uses gestures
14 Expressive vocalization
16 Vocalizes mood (not part of WLE)
Source. NEPS SC1 (doi:10.5157/NEPS:SC1:4.0.0).
I. Hondralis and C. Kleinert Advances in Life Course Research 47 (2021) 100378

Table A2
Transition to employment after childbirth, full models.
Child development (M0) + Controls + Orientations
(M1) (M2)

Child Negative affectivity − .007 (.005) .001 (.005) .000 (.005)

Regulatory capacity − .025*** (.008) − .013+ (.007) − .013+ (.007)
Sensorimotor skills .006 (.004) .007+ (.004) .008* (.004)
Habituation − .002 (.002) − .002 (.002) − .002 (.002)
Second/later child .079*** (.015) .087*** (.015)
Medical problems .005 (.022) .007 (.021)

Household Number of children − .086*** (.011) − .079*** (.011)

Married and cohabiting − .042 (.028) − .014 (.029)
Partner employed .047* (.021) .040+ (.021)
Ln income (in €) .038* (.013) .025+ (.012)
Living in East Germany .069*** (.012) .032** (.011)

Mother Vocational degree .122*** (.019) .117*** (.019)

Tertiary degree .160*** (.019) .133*** (.020)
Migration background .016 (.016) .008 (.016)
Age at birth of child .004** (.001) .004*** (.001)
Mental problems − .011 (.007) − .014* (.007)
Work orientation .105*** (.007)
Aspired childcare age − .001* (.001)

Time Period dummies ✓ ✓ ✓

Observations 5458 5458 5458
Persons 2548 2548 2548
Events 1541 1541 1541

Note. Robust standard errors in parentheses; + p < .10, * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001.
Source. NEPS SC1 (doi:10.5157/NEPS:SC1:4.0.0).

Table A3
Transition to employment after childbirth for different educational groups, full competing risks model.
No return Full-time work Part-time work

Child Negative affectivity − .000 (.005) .003 (.003) − .002 (.005)

Regulatory capacity .014+ (.007) − .002 (.005) − .012 (.007)
Sensorimotor skills − .008* (.004) .000 (.002) .008* (.004)
Habituation .002 (.002) .000 (.001) − .002 (.002)
Second or later child − .086*** (.015) .000 (.011) .086*** (.014)
Medical problems − .009 (.021) .012 (.012) − .003 (.020)

Household Number of children .078*** (.011) − .014+ (.008) − .064*** (.010)

Married and cohabiting .012 (.029) − .018 (.017) .005 (.030)
Partner employed − .042* (.021) − .015 (.013) .057** (.022)
Ln income (in €) − .022+ (.012) .021** (.008) .001 (.012)
Living in East Germany − .312** (.012) .0.33*** (.007) − .002 (.012)

Mother Vocational degree − .112*** (.017) .007 (.012) .105*** (.015)

Tertiary degree − .128*** (.018) .003 (.012) .125*** (.016)
Migration background − .001 (.016) .008 (.010) − .007 (.015)
Age at birth of child − .004*** (.001) − .000 (.001) .005*** (.001)
Mental problems .014* (.007) − .009+ (.005) − .005 (.007)
Work orientation − .109*** (.007) .038*** (.006) .071*** (.007)
Aspired childcare age .001* (.001) − .001+ (.000) − .000 (.001)

Time Period dummies ✓ ✓ ✓

Observations 5458 5458 5458
Persons 2548 2548 2548
Events 360 1181

Note. Robust standard errors in parentheses; + p < .10, * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001.
Source. NEPS SC1 (doi:10.5157/NEPS:SC1:4.0.0).

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