Kids of Stay-at-Home Mothers are Better at Basically Everything Else
Photo: freeimages.com/Crissy Pauley
The Institute of Thanks for the Bone, but No Thanks just completed work on a follow-up study to Harvard Business School's Kathleen McGinn's findings that sons of working mothers are more helpful around the house and their daughters are more successful workers. New research reveals that children with a stay-at-home parent are better at pretty much everything else.
Findings suggest that adults who grew up in a household in which one parent stayed at home are better able and willing to dress themselves, unlike those raised by working parents -- who report that they regularly wait in bed for somebody to bust the door open and frantically shove them into their clothes while they scream various things about making that person late.
The study also shows that people who had a stay-at-home mother or father are both healthy and educated. Research subjects whose parents both worked point to their mother having to choose to use the two hours she had by the time she picked everybody up from school and got home from work to either, a) cook a dinner that didn't come out of a box or a can and have the term "O's" in it or, b) to help them with their homework or, c) to help them get to bed at an hour that would provide adequate sleep. Many survey respondents said their mothers usually just said, "screw it--it's finally 'me time'", didn't choose anything, and had a glass of wine and left them to their own devices.
Research further indicates that adult children of at least one stay-at-home parent have more successful relationships. Evidence points to their having been raised in an environment in which parents had time to talk with each other about things other than how each parent has to do everything and ends up sucking at it all.
So, while existing data collected by McGinn proves that having a working mother is better for children in 2 to 3 key areas, children with a stay-at-home parent fare better in 276 other areas, or -- life in general.
