Desta, C.G. (2017) āDo young children prohibit mothers from working? A study in the Amhara Region, Ethiopia,ā International Journal of Population Studies, 3(2), p. 29.Ā
The paper examines the effect of the number of children on maternal hours of work using two stage least squares regressions analysis. It focuses on examining the extent to which fertility affects the financial stability of Ethiopian households. It is anticipated that mothers work fewer hours, if any, with an increasing number of young children and work more when children are adults because young children require more childcare at home than adult children. Data were collected from a sample of 254 rural and urban households from married women with at least two living children and the study uses the Two-Stage Least Squares model to examine how the number of children affects the number of maternal work hours.
The results of this paper vary by household lifecycle and rural-urban location and the finding from the study revealed that maternal hours of work decrease with an increase in the number of young children, and increases when children become more adult. The prevalence of household enterprises and the traditional nature of farming in rural areas of poor economies means that more rural women have to work longer compared to urban women.Ā Results indicate that Ethiopian mothers with many young children typically work longer hours in productive activities, which appears to be contrary to conventional theory. Although it is asserted that the contribution of children to a rural mother’s participation in hours of work is typically viewed positively, the results indicate that this may have been achieved at the expense of poor child care services, low school enrollment and education of low quality, and increased reliance on child domestic labour, all of which are likely to have significant health, social, and economic implications.Ā
Regardless, Ā households put in a lot of manual labour per unit, and as a result, it is likely that women will work on farms, especially if they have other children at home to care for young children. Given the nature of the economy and the mother’s need to support the family, children may not be seen as a significant obstacle to the mother’s work in such situations, despite the negative health effects that this is likely to have on the young children.
According to the other finding,Ā young childrenās possible contribution to domestic chores allows the mother to work away from home. The paper went on to state that the national development plans identify that ensuring maternal labour market participation is essential for achieving the planned development and that one major strategy to achieve this, as suggested by the plan documents, is to ensure balanced population and economic growth, for instance by reducing fertility.