SDSU STUDY FINDS PUBLIC SUPPORTS WORKING MOMS

East County News Service

July 17, 2015 (San Diego’s East County) - The American public’s attitude toward working Moms is changing. A study by San Diego State University and University of Georgia researchers published in Psychology of Women found that the overwhelming majority of Americans support working mothers.

They found that millennials are significantly more accepting of working mothers than previous generations were at the same age. Only 22 percent of 12th graders in the 2010s believed that a preschool-aged child would suffer if their mother worked, down from 34 percent in the 1990s and 59 percent in the 1970s.

“This goes against the popular belief that millennials want to ‘turn back the clock,’ or that they are less supportive of working moms because their own mothers worked. Instead they are more supportive,” said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at SDSU and a lead author of the study.

But despite the fact that most mothers with young children are working in the U.S., Twenge says, “among industrialized nations, we don't compare very well in terms of the support we give working families for daycare and preschool."

The U.S. is among only a handful of nations that do not mandate paid maternity leave- along with Lesotho, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea. Most countries of the world provide at least 3 months of maternity leave for mothers and many offer some benefits for fathers, too, the International Labor Organization reports.

Some states have passed family leave measures.  California passed a law requiring businesses to give time off to new parents and caregivers 10 years ago. Despite objections from the business sector, which predicted such leave would increase costs of business, in fact evidence points to the contrary.  Almost 90 percent of California businesses reported no cost increases due to the law, according to one survey. In fact, 43 percent of businesses in the state reported a cost savings, because they were able to hold on to more workers, decreasing training costs and reducing spending on benefits, Huffington Post reports. Companies such as Google have found that increasing paid leave boosts employee retention.  Moreover in New Jersey, women who took paid leave were 40% less likely to get public benefits such as welfare or food stamps according to a Rutgers study

Despite such progress, only 13 percent of employers in the U.S. offer paid leave to full-time workers who are parents of young children, according to the most recent data from the Labor Department—and that burden falls hardest on women with low-paying jobs. 

Another approach to help these working parents is to offer universal preschool for all young children in the nation – a proposal that’s backed by Hillary Clinton, bringing the needs of working parents and their children into the limelight on the presidential campaign trail.