Parent Talk / May 2006
Family Time Trouble
For some families, night and weekend shifts may strain the well-being of both parents and children. In the current issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family, researchers examined the 24-hour US economy and the effect of its need for workers 24-hours a day, seven days a week.
They found that unsociable work times-hours during evenings, weekends, or nights-are associated with poorer mental health in parents and more social and emotional difficulties in children. Compared with families where both parents work standard daytime hours, families where fathers work nonstandard hours show worse family functioning and more hostile and ineffective parenting. When it is mothers who work these hours, there is also worse family functioning, more hostile and ineffective parenting, and more parent distress. The most problematic family environments occur when both parents work nonstandard hours.
The study compared more than 4,000 dual-earner households with children between 2 and 11 years old. The authors measured child difficulties, like the inability to concentrate or hostility to their peers, family functioning represented by emotional involvement and problem solving, parent depressive symptoms, and ineffective parenting. The effects were similar whether the mother or father worked non-standard hours, but the associations were stronger in households with preschool-aged children compared to those homes with school-aged children. In the past, nonstandard work schedules had been viewed as part of job flexibility that was potentially family friendly. The findings from this research pose a challenge to that assumption. “Work in the evenings, nights, and weekends can make it harder to maintain family rituals, routines, and social activities that are important for closeness,” according one of the study authors, Lyndall Strazdins, a research fellow with the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health whose research area is social environmental effects on health and wellbeing. Her emphasis is on work conditions and employee and child health.
This study is published in the May issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family.
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