Good news for multitasking moms: children whose mothers work outside of the home are on par with their peers who have stay-at-home moms in social and intellectual development, new research reports.

Investigators at the University of Texas in Austin found that when mothers worked, their children had similar language skills, fared as well in intelligence tests, and developed similar relationships with their parents and peers as the children of stay-at-home moms.

Women who worked spent less time with their infants, but compensated by spending more time with their children on weekends and in the evenings.

“Employed mothers do a lot of compensating,” study author Dr. Aletha C. Huston told Reuters Health.

And, surprisingly, how much time mothers spent with their children appeared to have little influence on children’s development. Rather, children appeared more sensitive to the nature of their home environment and the quality of their relationship with their mothers, Huston said.

“Just the amount of time mothers spend with their babies certainly doesn’t predict their child’s development,” she said in an interview. “It’s what she’s doing when she’s with the child” that’s important, Huston added.

In the study, which appears in the journal Child Development, Huston and her co-author, Stacey Rosenkrantz Aronson, now with Bridges Consulting, reviewed the 24-hour diaries of 1,053 mothers of infants less than one year old, and observed interactions between mothers and children.

Huston and Aronson also asked mothers to complete psychological tests, and gave children a series of standardized tests designed to measure their social and intellectual development, which included tests of memory, words and concepts such as time and space.

They found that children tended to fare better developmentally if they had a more stimulating home environment - with a myriad of books, toys and play materials - and if their mothers made a point of interacting with their children, taking them out of the house and talking to them.

Children also were developmentally boosted if their mothers were very sensitive and responsive to their needs, Huston noted.

The amount of time mothers spent with children appeared to have little effect on children’s development, regardless of whether mothers worked.

SOURCE: Child Development, March/April 2005.