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Article Excerpt
By pursuing more education, do mothers set their children on better academic courses? Or do such pursuits do little to alter children's achievement trajectories? Children of more highly educated parents enter school with higher levels of academic skills and continue to perform better than other children (Entwisle & Alexander, 1993; Lee & Burkham, 2002). Social scientists often attribute this achievement gap to the mix of biological, economic, and social advantages afforded by higher levels of parental education, but debate continues regarding the extent to which parental education is causally associated with children's achievement (Sobel, 1998).
Researchers have studied parental education largely as if it were static. Reflecting a broader trend of diverging life course patterns, it has become common for adults to accrue education in a discontinuous fashion and to attend school well into adulthood (Astone, Schoeni, Ensminger, & Rothert, 2000; Jacobs & Stoner-Eby, 1998). Nationally, more than 20% of adult women pursue some type of education (Rich & Kim, 1999), and about 27% of female college students are over age 25 (Shin, 2005). Economically disadvantaged mothers are especially likely to return to school; close to 50% of low-income mothers attend school after the birth of their children (Love et al., 2002; McGroder, Zaslow, Moore, & LeMenestrel, 2000; Rich & Kim, 1999).
Nearly 20 years ago Furstenberg, Brooks-Gunn, and Morgan (1987) found that some children born to poor, urban, adolescent mothers seemed to flourish despite experiencing the same adverse early environments as peers who did not fare so well. More than 50% of mothers in their study had attended school after the birth of their children, and Furstenberg and colleagues argued that this additional education contributed to children's subsequent scholastic success. This was a compelling yet speculative hypothesis. They could not conclude that it was the mothers' education per se that mattered rather than other characteristics that were correlated with mothers' schooling.
Understanding whether changes in mothers' education affects children's developmental trajectories is important not only because such changes are common but also because it may illuminate whether parental education, more generally, influences children. One key difficulty in this research is that maternal education completed before the birth of children is likely to be confounded with other important mother, child, and family characteristics that are difficult to untangle. For example, isolating the effects of a mother's schooling from that of her intellectual ability or academic motivation is challenging. If a mother's education is already completed, it is likely that her educational attainment reflects these factors and also that these factors independently affect her child's achievement. Thus, researchers end up in the position of having to overcontrol or undercontrol for individual and family characteristics (Newcombe, 2003).
When a mother's education improves after the birth of her children, this provides an opportunity to estimate the association between maternal education and children's development with fewer concerns about confounding factors. Although unobserved characteristics may differentiate mothers who return to school from those who do not, if the associations between these unobserved characteristics and child outcomes are constant over time, then lagged dependent variable regression analyses provide a way to reduce omitted variable bias (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network & Duncan, 2003). As with all nonexperimental research, omitted variable biases may remain if the effects of unobserved characteristics on child development vary over time.
Existing theory and research on how levels of maternal education affect young children provide some suggestions about how increments in maternal education may matter. To the extent that a mother's additional schooling provides her with positive learning experiences as well as increases in basic skills, knowledge, and higher-order thinking, it may shape her expectations for her children's education and enable her to create better home learning environments for her children (Alexander, Entwisle, & Bedinger, 1994; Corwyn & Bradley, 2003; Davis-Kean, 2005). Parents with higher levels of education engage their children in more learning-related activities both in the home (e.g., reading books) and out of the home (e.g., music or art lessons) (Davis-Kean, 2005). Parents' educational expectations and opportunities for children to engage in learning activities have been linked to children's cognitive development and their academic skills (Taylor, Clayton, & Rowley, 2004).
Of particular importance for young children may be the quality of mother-child interactions and mothers' verbal responsiveness, which are important for the emergent language and cognitive skills (Raviv, Kessenich, & Morrison, 2004). More highly educated mothers are more verbally responsive to their young children and tend to use teaching strategies with their children that mimic formal instructional techniques, such as asking questions and offering feedback, rather than issuing directives (Richman, Miller, & LeVine, 1992; Tracey & Young, 2002). Hoff-Ginsberg's (1998) research with mothers of 2-year-old children found that compared with high school-educated mothers, college-educated mothers talked more, asked more questions, and used fewer directives and more contingent responses. Although these specific observed differences in learning activities and speech patterns have not been directly linked to children's language development, there is evidence that socioeconomic status (SES) differences in maternal speech explain SES differences in children's language development (Hoff, 2003; Huttenlocher, Vasilyeva, Cymerman, & Levine, 2002).
If maternal education is an important determinant of the quality of the child's verbal interactions and learning environment, incremental improvements in maternal education may influence children's development by creating positive changes in children's developmental niches (Bronfenbrenner, 1986). Yet the extent to which children's environments, particularly mothers' parenting, change as a result of their mothers' continued education may depend on several additional factors, especially their ability to successfully combine their caregiving and student roles, changes in child care patterns, and their prior level of educational attainment.
Mothers who attend school after the birth of their children face competing roles, which may elevate their levels of stress and reduce the time they spend in both areas (Carney-Crompton & Tan, 2002). Compared with women of similar age without children who enroll in college, mothers of young children who enroll in college are less likely to complete a degree, pointing to the possible conflict that attending school and caring for children creates (Jacobs & King, 2002). Although some studies find that stress is elevated by increases in roles, demands, and time conflicts, others find that mothers in postsecondary institutions do not exhibit higher levels of psychological distress than traditional students (Carney-Crompton & Tan, 2002). Indeed, being a student may be psychologically beneficial because it provides mothers with an adult community and identity independent of their children as well as a sense of accomplishment (Schuller, Brassett-Grundy, Green, Hammond, & Preston, 2002). If, however, attending school increases mothers' distress, then additional education may not result in improved mother-child interactions or higher-quality learning environments.
As a result of returning to school, mothers may be less available to care for their children, which may increase the use of nonmaternal child care and change family routines. If so, increases in child care might be a possible mechanism by which maternal schooling affects children. Whether and how nonmaternal child care influences child development depends largely on the type, hours, and quality of the child care (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2000, 2004). Unfortunately, prior research provides little guidance on whether maternal schooling is associated with changes in child care.
Finally, mothers who return to school have diverse backgrounds. Mothers with lower levels of education are often seeking to catch up with their more credentialed peers, and school provides them with an avenue to a better life (Zachry, 2005). More educated and advantaged mothers, in contrast, may undertake additional schooling to enter specialized professions or to further an already established career. The effects of additional schooling on home environments and child outcomes are likely to differ across these groups. Additional education may matter more for children of disadvantaged mothers, who in the absence of completing additional education would be likely to provide lower-quality home environments and fewer positive opportunities outside of the home (Magnuson, 2007).
In an effort to understand the association between a mother's further education and child well-being, assessments of children's academic and social skills were included in three experimental evaluations of large education and job training interventions for poor mothers (Maynard, Nicholson, & Rangarajan, 1993; McGroder et al., 2000; Quint, Bos, & Polit, 1997). In all three, mothers assigned to the control group attended educational programs almost as frequently as those in the experimental group; thus, the interventions did not boost educational levels by much. In the absence of substantial effects on mothers' education, it is not surprising that these programs did not produce significant effects on children's school readiness or intellectual development.
Quasi-experimental studies have proven more informative, suggesting that increases in maternal education may improve young children's academic skills. These effects are concentrated among particularly disadvantaged populations and have been measured primarily among school-age children. An analysis of education mandated as part of a large welfare-to-work intervention suggests that mothers' participation in adult basic education improved children's school readiness even when mothers' earnings did not increase (Magnuson, 2003). About eight months of participation in educational activities when children were between ages 4 and 6 boosted school readiness by about a quarter of a standard deviation. Using data from the Maternal and Child Supplement to the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), Rosenzweig and Wolpin (1994) found that maternal education completed during the first three years of a child's life improved his or her later vocabulary and academic skills. In a more recent study also using the NLSY data, a mother's enrollment in education during the first three years of her child's life was associated with higher math and reading achievement by age 6 (Moore & Schmidt, 2007). Finally, Magnuson (2007) demonstrated that maternal education obtained when children were between the ages of 6 and 12 predicted children's academic skills but only among children with young and educationally disadvantaged parents. Positive associations were more pronounced for reading skills than for math skills and were concentrated among younger children.
Although there is empirical support for the hypothesis that incremental changes in maternal education improve children's academic outcomes, there is little or no evidence documenting the possible pathways by which these changes occur. Two studies have found positive associations between increments in maternal education and global indicators of the quality of children's home environments (Magnuson, 2003, 2007). Such findings suggest that changes in home environments are likely pathways of influence, but analyses have not determined whether such improvements explain improved language or academic skills.
Evidence that improvements in maternal education may benefit children's academic and language skills is accumulating, but the research literature is still quite sparse. Children's early language skills are important precursors to later school readiness and reading skills and vary substantially among young children (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2005; Raviv et al., 2004). Prior research has focused primarily on whether maternal schooling influences school-age children's academic skills and has relied heavily on results from one study, the NLSY. The present study extends prior research in four important ways. First, using rigorous methods, we seek to replicate the general pattern of associations between increases in maternal education and child academic-related skills found in the NLSY with another large longitudinal study, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (NICHD SECCYD). Second, this study focuses on children's emergent language skills, which are important precursors to later reading skills but have not been previously considered. We hypothesize that maternal education will be linked to higher levels of school readiness and improved language skills and that this...
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