You can stop worrying. A Harvard researcher studied the happiness of kids of working moms compared to stay-at-home moms. She found they end up just as happy as adults as the children of moms who stayed home.
Kids of stay-at-home moms grow up to be happy, too. All told, it's not better or worse for your child's eventual happiness if you work or not.
"People still have this belief that when moms are employed, it's somehow detrimental to their children," says Harvard Business School Professor Kathleen McGinn, who led the groundbreaking study. "So our finding that maternal employment doesn't affect kids' happiness in adulthood is really important."
These recent results are part of a larger study that McGinn has been conducting about how working motherhood affects children. McGinn and her research team compared two international surveys that were conducted over the course of 10 years. 100,000 men and women across 29 countries participated and answered questions about the effects of working moms on their adult children.
In 2015, she released the first wave of results that found daughters of working moms tend to make more money as adults. McGinn's survey found daughters of employed moms earned an average of $1,880 more per year than daughters of full-time work-from-home moms.