Parental Exposure to Routine Work Schedule Uncertainty and Child Behavior

• In Event: 1-161 - Public policy as macro-level context: The effects of local labor policies on family and child well-being

Integrative Statement

Motivation: Routine Schedule Uncertainty and Child Wellbeing
Environmental and contextual forces influence child health and wellbeing (Bronfrenbrenner, 1979). Of particular importance, parents’ employment affects children by shaping family processes and household economic security (Shonkoff and Phillips, 2000; Menaghan, 1991). However, since the 1970s, employment has become much more precarious (Kalleberg, 2009) and, recently, scholars and policy makers have identified a new form of employment precarity: unstable and unpredictable work schedules. Many retail and food service workers receive their schedules as little as a few days in advance, scheduled work hours and days may change substantially week-to-week, and shifts may be changed, cancelled, or added at the last minute (Golden, 2001; Lambert, 2008).

Such routine uncertainty in work schedules may affect children through several pathways. Children whose parents are exposed to such practices may experience more material deprivation and income instability, which is likely to negatively affect wellbeing (Duncan and Brooks-Gunn, 1997; Gennetian and Shafir, 2015). Parents who have unstable and unpredictable work schedules may also experience time-based conflicts (Greenhaus and Beutell, 1985) that affect parental investments of time in children (Conger and Donnellan, 2007). Finally, such scheduling practices may increase parental stress, which may diminish the quality of parent-child interactions (Conger and Elder, 1994; McLoyd, 1990).

Open Questions
While there is evidence that other dimensions of precarious work – such as stable, but non-standard hours – negatively affect child wellbeing (i.e. Li et al., 2014), evidence on the effects of unstable/unpredictable scheduling practices on child wellbeing is very limited. Data sources containing information on both parental work schedules and child outcomes are rare. Yet, deriving estimates of these associations is vitally important as policy-makers around the country have proposed and enacted local labor laws to regulate scheduling, often with the assumption that such ordinances will improve the wellbeing of children.

Data and Methods
We draw on a unique source of survey data we collected in 2017 from 2,769 parents of children 2-10 years of age. We surveyed employees of one of 80 large retail/fast-food firms, because these are precisely the types of workers who will be covered by recent legislation that regulates work schedules in four U.S. cities and in two states.

We first estimate the association between several indicators of schedule instability and three measures of child wellbeing: externalizing, internalizing, and attention problems. These models control for a rich set of workplace and household characteristics. We then assess if these associations are mediated by household economic insecurity, parental stress, and time-based strain. Our conceptual model and indicators for these constructs are described in Figure 1.

Preliminary Results
In Table 1, we present preliminary results from regressions of externalizing, internalizing, and attention problems on a summative scale of parental exposure to schedule instability as well as two more specific scheduling practices – “clopening” and “on-call” shifts. We find significant positive associations between schedule instability/unpredictability and all three measures of child behavior. The conference paper will extend these models, present the mediation analysis, and discuss implications for local labor laws.

Authors

• Daniel Schneider, University of California, Berkeley
  Presenting Author

• Kristen Harknett, University of California, San Francisco
  Non-Presenting Author