Gain or Pain? Employment, Childcare Conflict, and the Mental Health of Low-Income Urban Women

• In Event: 397 - Section on Labor and Labor Movements Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 06. Changing Employment Structures and the Impacts on Workers

Abstract

Extant literature suggests that becoming employed promotes mental health. Although this body of work has made significant contributions to our understanding of socioeconomic variations in mental health, there may be conditions under which the usual mental health benefits of employment are attenuated or perhaps reversed. We ask two questions: Does becoming employed improve the mental health of low-income women with children? Is this relationship moderated or attenuated by employment conflicts with childcare arrangements? We find that low-income urban women with children who gained employment reported fewer symptoms of distress from baseline to follow-up than respondents who remained unemployed. We also find that respondents who gained employment that did not conflict with childcare also exhibited more favorable mental health changes than women who remained unemployed. Conversely, those who found employment that did conflict with childcare arrangements exhibited poorer mental health changes than those who remained unemployed. These findings suggest that valuing the benefits of paid work over unpaid work is an oversimplification, and that the emphasis of placing poor mothers into paid work might be misguided.

Authors

• Anna Weller Jacobs, Vanderbilt University

• Terrence D. Hill, University of Utah

• Daniel Tope, Florida State University