A recently launched parliamentary inquiry questions whether policy needs to be changed to deal with the personal impact of night or shift work. So how do antisocial working hours affect parents? Afshin Zhelanawala of the University of Southampton and Ann McMoon of the ESRC International Center for Life Path Studies at University College London discuss research that has found that shift work, which works non-standard schedules (nights, evenings and weekends), can negatively affect the mindset of parents. Health – although it also enables them to spend more time on parenting.
Five years ago, Taylor’s review of work practices identified work-life balance as one of the main foundations of good work. He also highlighted the benefits of flexible working and said this enabled people to agree on working patterns that fit around family life and other care obligations.
Now Parliament The Business, Energy and Industry Strategies Committee has launched an inquiry into the UK labor market – and after five years of review it will ask what the government should do to address the issues raised in its report: “Are certain types of work, for example, night work or work shift system, what warrants further study regarding the impact of this work on workers?”
We believe that the research we conducted as part of a large-scale project looking at the health effects of shift work for parents and children can help answer this question. So why should we care about unsocial working hours?
In the past half century, global economies have faced remarkable shifts in their labor markets, such as demand for services outside of daylight hours and an increase in the service sector. These changes mean that more parents are working a non-standard schedule (ie outside the hours of 8 am to 6 pm) and these work schedules can have important implications for parents, their children and their family lives.
Using data from the Millennium Study (MCS), which follows nearly 19,000 children born in the UK in the early 2000s, we looked at the problem from two angles: first, how unsocial working hours affected parents’ mental health and their relationships with parents. Their partners / spouses? And secondly, do parents treat their children differently if they work evenings, nights or weekends?
First, we wanted to get a better handle on whether parents’ mental health and relationship happiness were somehow related to their experiences of nonsocial working hours. Our goal here was to bring a new understanding of the role of the 24/7 economy in the lives of working families.
We had access to data collected over a number of years from MCS participants about the relationship happiness of about 11,500 parents. There was also information on the mental health of 12,600 mothers and 11,600 fathers.
Self-rated well-being
Parents were asked to self-assess their well-being using a set of nine questions covering affective disorders and associated physical symptoms. Couples report the happiness of their relationship using a score from 0 – very unhappy – to 6 – very happy.
Parents who reported being gainfully employed were asked if they regularly worked evenings, nights and/or weekends – collectively called “non-standard work schedules”. Four out of 10 working mothers report that they work non-standard hours, along with 57 percent of working fathers.
We can see that fathers who did this type of work tended to have higher household incomes than women who did it. Thirty-five percent of fathers work more than 45 hours a week, compared to just 4 percent of mothers
There was no significant effect on the mental health of mothers who worked non-social hours even though they had lower relationship happiness scores if they worked normal hours and their partners worked non-standard hours.
We found that fathers who commuted to work in the evening or on weekends had worse mental health, although non-standard fathers’ work schedules were not significantly associated with relationship happiness.
Incorporating the demands of work and family
Thus, one of our main findings is that there was no highly negative association between non-standard work schedules and maternal mental health. Non-standard work schedules may enable families to organize their lives in a way that integrates work with family requirements, as suggested by Taylor’s review. Therefore, mothers may use these work schedules as a deliberate strategy for balancing work with family needs – while other studies have suggested otherwise, they focused on the first two years of life while we were able to look through the first decade of a child’s life.
Our second major finding is that non-standard work is associated with worse mental health for fathers. This was particularly the case for those who worked evenings and weekends.
Why might results differ between parents? Some research has indicated that fathers are increasingly seen as caregivers and providers of income. For parents who work non-standard hours, this may be even more of the case, possibly exposing them to new forms of stress.
The role of parents
Our second study (see below) looked in more detail at the dual roles of fathers: How do their work schedules and those of their partners interact with parenting in early childhood and middle childhood? We were able to look at the time children spent in primary care when the children were nine months old and when they were seven years old, and we were also able to look at the time children spent in physical play or recreation with the seven-year-olds.
Parents of nine-month-old babies were asked how often they take care of them on their own, change diapers, breastfeed or get up at night. Parents of seven-year-olds were asked if they helped their children get ready for bed or looked after them on their own. They were also asked how often they read with their children, tell stories, do musical activities, draw, play physically active games, take the child to the park or playground, or play with toys or games indoors.
Parents tend to care more about seven-year-olds than they do with younger children. Those who worked in the evening provided less basic care than those who worked normal hours in infancy and into mid-childhood.
Those who worked nights provided more basic care when the children were infants and at age seven, while weekends were associated with lower levels of basic care and play.
Policy implications
Our findings have potential implications for both workplace policy and practice: premium payments for working outside standard hours, incentives for childcare facilities to remain open evenings and weekends, and predictable work schedules that enable families to maintain routines. It all helps.
In supportive workplaces, fathers can benefit more from paternity and parental leave. The pandemic has shown us how many jobs can be done flexibly. To ensure that flexible working is inclusive, employers can advertise job openings as flexible and reduce the qualification period — currently 26 weeks in a new job — before requesting flexible work schedules. They may also want to work to reduce the stigma around flexible work for men, and to ensure that policies are directed toward fathers and mothers. Finally, interventions can help parents manage the stress and challenges of non-standard work.
Our findings call for further understanding of the mechanisms that enable or constrain parenting activities when fathers work non-standard hours and how this varies between countries.
Making it work: Parents’ non-normative work schedules and parenting activities is research conducted by Afshin Zhilanawala and Anne McMoon and published in the Journal of Marriage and Family.
Non-standard work schedules in the UK: what are the implications for parents’ mental health and relationship happiness? It is research conducted by Afshin Zilanawala and Anne McMunn and published in Community, Work and Family.
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