Kumulative Dissertation, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, 2026

In recent decades, early childhood shifted more and more into focus as a critical period for long-term child development that mainly happens within the family. Family dynamics have undergone profound transformations in response to the demographic shift and social policy reforms, which both changed traditional family structures and parental roles, particularly for mothers, albeit in socially selective ways. Notably, mothers increased their labor market participation – thereby changing their resource endowment – used more widespread and earlier external childcare, and are more and more left with the challenge to manage the reconciliation of work and family life. Consequently, children’s early experiences and learning environments are increasingly diverse regarding childcare arrangements, maternal employment, and other maternal resources, raising important questions about how these changing conditions contribute to differences in maternal characteristics and early heterogeneities in learning environments and, thus, result in disparate developmental outcomes.
Against the backdrop of these contemporary societal changes, including increased maternal employment, external childcare usage, and older maternal age at birth, this dissertation investigates the overarching research question asking how maternal characteristics, i.e., employment, occupational skills, and life-course timing, as well as early home and institutional learning environments contribute to heterogeneities in children’s developmental outcomes in Germany? In four articles, this thesis examines how maternal employment shapes early heterogeneities through decisions about learning environments of alternative caregivers using multichannel sequence and cluster analysis; how institutional learning environments affect child development using a conditional instrumental variable approach; and how maternal characteristics themselves (occupational skills, age at birth) affect children’s cognitive and non-cognitive development using OLS regressions, thereby identifying driving mechanisms of learning environments. The basis of this thesis is the NEPS under consideration of different starting cohorts, i.e., the newborn sample, also in combination with administrative employment records, as well as the samples of fifth and ninth graders.