As mothers have moved out of the home into paid employment, many have found themselves compelled to accept strange schedules, working nights, weekends, and rotating shifts. How have children adjusted to their mothers' strange hours? Not well, according to a study recently published in Social Science and Medicine by a team of researchers from the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health in Canberra, Australia.
Basing their investigation on nationally representative Canadian data collected between 1994 and 2001, the Australian scholars look carefully at children's well-being in homes in which both the father and the mother were employed outside the home. Their statistical analysis establishes a particularly elevated risk of emotional and behavioral problems among these children if their parents - particularly their mothers - work non-standard hours. Compared to children with two employed parents working standard shifts, "children with parents working non-standard schedules were more likely to have at least one emotional or behavioural difficulty, whether it was the father (O[dds] R[atio]: 1.36 ... p = 0.004), the mother (O[dds] R[atio]: 1.51 ... p < 0.001), or both parents working non-traditional schedules (O[dds] R[atio]: 1.53 ... p < 0.001)."
The researchers then examine the data a second time using a statistical model that accounts for "several confounding factors, including socioeconomic status, parent part-time or full-time work, and childcare use." In this second analysis the negative effects of mothers' working non-standard hours appear especially pronounced, as the adjusted odds ratio for children's emotional or behavioral difficulties was just 1.22 when fathers worked non-standard shifts, not even reaching the threshold of statistical significance (p < 0.145), but was 1.60 and well over the line of statistical significance (p < 0.001) when mothers worked non-standard hours. Though they document some elevation of the Odds Ratio for children's emotional and behavioral problems when mothers work weekends or evening shifts, they see the Odds Ratio climb to an astounding 2.41 (p < 0.001) when mothers work night shifts.
The authors of the new study plausibly suggest that in these two-employed-worker homes, "the erosion of the marital relationship could be a key factor in the link to the children." But it is not surprising that the researchers' data also draw their attention to the possible effects of "non-parent childcare," with Odds Ratios for children's emotional and behavioral problems running "slightly stronger in the sub-sample who used non-parent childcare, compared with the whole sample."
In interpreting their worrisome findings, the Australian researchers focus-astonishingly-not on the psychological distress they have uncovered among children, but rather on their own fear that in the wrong "political and ideological contexts, [their] research could provoke strong reactions of guilt and blame, feeding the policy search for an easy answer (mothers at home)." In the view of the authors of the study, it is deeply unfortunate that at a time when "few families can ... afford to have a parent at home full-time to shoulder the domestic work, to restore, nurture, and buffer feelings, and to manage routines while the other parent is at work," many people still wonder "whether mothers 'should' work or not," and still "often prescrib[e] a return to gender-based separation of (male) work and (female) family life."
The right policies could help restore the type of family wage that once made it possible for one parent (almost always the mother) to be at home. But progress in moving toward such policies will probably be very slow so long as social scientists devote more energy to waging war against traditional gender roles than they do to securing the well-being of children.
