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Do young children prohibit mothers from working in Ethiopia?

.... My eldest son has now passed 24 and has obtained two children. My second child is male and my
third child is female. Both are married and have one child each. My fifth child [the fourth was dead]
is male and is a grade 11 student living far away from us, and my youngest child is female and is a
grade 8 student. .... Despite our land’s being not big enough, we gave a small plot to our eldest son,
but the kebele (a local equivalent for village administration) said he will not be given ownership
certificate since no more land sub-division is allowed. As to our second son, we convinced him to
farm with us and share the harvest. Our son and his wife and my husband as well took care of the
farm work, and I stayed home preparing food for them and doing other activities. Meanwhile, our
son left for ketema (a local equivalent for urban area) and now works there as gimbegna (a local
equivalent for construction worker). Initially, his wife was still with us and was of great assistance
working in the farms. Later on, however, he took her (along with her child) and I had to come back
to farm work. This was difficult for me and my husband. We have grown these children, and are
now getting old that we are not as strong to work in the farms as before. We also do not have money
to pay for yeqen-serategna (a local equivalent for daily wage laborer) as our rich neighbors do. But,
Egziabher yimesgen (a local equivalent for thanks to God), our eldest son agreed to work with us
instead since the plot of land we gave him was too small, and so we merged the farm plots. Once
again, my activity was confined to housework. Occasionally, especially during periods of peak farm
activity, our son from ketema also sends us money to hire yeqen-serategna.

5 Conclusions
This paper used data from a household survey of rural and urban married women to test the theoretical prediction that
labor market participation decreases for mothers with large number of young children and increases when children are
adults.
Results show that, when all households are considered, children seem to have positive effects on the probability of the
mother’s work both for the full sample and also when the full sample is split into the rural and urban sub-samples.
However, when household lifecycle differences are considered, coefficients are negative for households with large
number of young children and positive for those households with more adult children for the urban sub-sample, roughly
suggesting consistency with the lifecycle hypothesis and previous research evidence for other countries. Whereas for the
rural sub-sample, coefficients signs are reversed, suggesting inconsistency with the theory.
While inconsistency of results among many previous studies has been acknowledged in the literature, the lack of
statistical significance of ivprobit results in many of the cases in the present paper, suggests the difficulty of drawing a
valid conclusion from the quantitative results alone in this particular case. At this point, at least two limitations of the
present paper are noteworthy as potential causes for the weak statistical results. The first is potential problems in data
quality including small sample size. The second is the attempt to capture lifecycle variations by categorizing women by
their children’s average age groups. Lifecycle effects are well studied using panel data which offer a unique opportunity
for tracking the changes in the effect for a given household over a period of time. Cross-sectional data used in the present
study do not have that capability and are thus inappropriate. The qualitative data and the reviews of context-relevant
literature appear to have offered possible explanations for this inconsistent though, in many cases, not statistically
significant result.

Conflict of Interest
No conflict of interest has been reported by the authors.
Ethics Approval
No ethics approval was required for this study.

Funding
The author has received financial support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the two reviewers for their helpful comments. The author is also grateful to the William
and Flora Hewlett Foundation who funded part of the research.

International Journal of Population Studies | 2017, Volume 3, Issue 2 37