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Study Shows Kids of Working and Stay-At-Home Moms Fare the Same
Tuesday, June 25, 2013

A working mother's guilt isn't new and isn't rare. No parent with small children wants to leave them to spend the majority of their days on the clock. But they know that without putting in the hours, putting food on the table will be difficult, especially in this slowly recovering job market.

According to new research from the Academy of Social Sciences in the U.K., kids' learning and behavioral skills are not impaired if their mother is working for their first years of life.

The study, which reflects changes over the last 40 years based on 40,000 children, shows that their growth is neither affected by whether the mom works or stays at home.

Traditionally, many new moms tend to be concerned that going back to work leads to sacrificing the full potential of the child's development. These days, the luxury foregoing a job to stay home with the kids isn't one that many of them can afford. As the number of mothers in the workforce goes up, researchers are seeing that any impact it has on children is dwindling.

In 2011 there were about 5 million stay-at-home moms, less than the 5.1 million two years before, according to the United States Census. The census also revealed that most stay-at-home moms are younger than 35 with children under 5 years old.

While no evidence has been found to support notion that a working mother has a negative or positive effect on the child, that doesn't rule out the possibility of there being any effects at all. Other research has shown that mothers with the resources to harmonize their work and family life, they would.

One thing the study noted was that the apparent lack of family-friendly jobs and affordable childcare available. This can make it especially tough for single mothers to find a balance between work and home duties.

Options for a more flexible work schedule such as telecommuting or working on weekends, when fathers might be available, are suggested considerations. Though, companies like Yahoo! are making efforts to accommodate new parents by extending maternal and paternal leave. As the modern day moms continue to persevere with their multi hat wearing abilities, the good news is that kids aren't paying the price for their parents need to get paid, despite the common concern.

Changes In Supply and Demand Causing Standstill In Job Market Improvement
Saturday, June 01, 2013

 
By Joy Peters
June 1, 2013 
 
Despite gradual improvements in the U.S.'s economy, the job market remains weak. Among the various hindrances hungry job seekers face, the supply and demand ratio of job seekers to positions available is creating an imbalance too disparate for job seekers to reconcile on their own.

The 2008 recession caused workers to go from comfortably providing to barely surviving. Although the unemployment rate has gone down since then, the numbers are a reflection of an improving market, rather job seekers have ceased their search or have yet to begin.

One statistic makes an eye-opening point: Only 58.6 percent of Americans 16 and older had job in April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This ratio is actually lower than the 2007-2009 recession's ratio of employment-to-population. The trouble with fixing a problem that has lingered for half a decade is that resolutions proposed on Capitol Hill aren't getting through as bi-partisan tensions run high.

Issues that have arisen are often linked back to there being jobs that remain open because of a lack of qualified applicants. The BLS reported on May 7 that there were more than 3.8 million available job positions in the U.S. at end of March. There were 11 million people actively seeking work at that same time.

This leads many to the obvious solution that higher education will cure any mismatching issues between job applicants and job requirements. Schooling has, in fact, proven to have a remedying effect. The unemployment rate in April for college graduates was only 3.9 percent whereas the rate for those with less than a high school education was at 11.6 percent.

According to Jon Miller, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, there is a great return on investment for educated people. Miller, whose parents were both manual laborers, ensured that his own children would be more educationally advanced than his parents. His son now holds a job as an astrophysicist and his daughter is a neurobiologist with a law degree.

As much as education matters, however, job seekers will still be out of luck if the economy is running too slowly to generate jobs. For the Fed, accelerating economic growth through monetary policy is the first priority. But those in Congress feel that faster growth comes second to the issue of trying to decrease the federal budget deficit, which led to the January tax increases and the March sequester, both of which weigh on growth. If the U.S. economy were to produce at full potential, it would generate  about $950 billion to annual gross domestic product and accelerate efforts to put people back to work.