Abstract
We test whether infants living with employed, co-resident parents where at least one parent works a non-standard work shift exhibit significantly more behavior problems than children whose parents both work traditional day shifts. We use a sample of infants living with employed, co-resident parents and two waves of data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey, Birth Cohort (ECLSB) to test whether infants’ scores on the Infant-Toddler Symptom Checklist (ITSC) at the second wave (average age of 24.3 months) is affected by parents’ shift work at the baseline (average age 10.3 months). Infants with at least one parent who works nonstandard hours have significantly more behavior problems than do infants with parents who both work regular day shifts. This relationship is partly accounted for by shift work’s negative association with father–child interaction, marital quality, the frequency of shared family dinners, and parental health, including paternal depression. The results also indicate that shift work has larger effects on children’s behavior when mothers, rather than fathers, work nonstandard shifts, and when mothers’ day shifts regularly oppose fathers’ evenings/night shifts. Policy should focus on giving individuals more choice in their work shift as well as more flexibility in when they start and stop working for the day. Given the importance of mediating factors, we should also focus on ameliorating the negative impacts of shift work when they do arise. This includes addressing issues of employee health and stress, and relationship conflict within couples where one or both partners work a non-standard shift.
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Notes
The following births were not included in the sample: those born to women under age 15; those that died before the 9-month assessment; and those adopted before the age of 9 months.
Naturally, not all infants were precisely nine and 24 months of age at the assessments. For infants in the analytical sample, the mean age at the baseline assessment was 10.34 months (SD = 1.75; range 7.2–20.5) and that at the second wave was 24.27 months (SD = 0.91, range 20.1–37.7). The mean elapsed time between the two assessments was 13.92 months (SD = 1.74, range 4.2–28.8).
Limiting our focus to biological mothers was necessitated by skip patterns omitting non-biological mothers from a number of questions.
We follow the procedures outlined by Berk [19] in calculating this hazard. These predictors were chosen based on the assumption that a busy work life (i.e., long hours, working more than one job, etc.) would reduce the ability of resident fathers to complete the questionnaire. Equally significant, this model had to be based on fathers’ characteristics as reported by mothers, since there are no data for fathers who did not complete the RFQ. This requirement severely limited the range of possible predictors. This term does not correct for sample selectivity; statistical significance indicates the presence of bias, and the sign of the coefficient indicates the direction of bias.
Note that fathers’ job characteristics are used in creating the selectivity term.
Please note that the coefficient for the selectivity term is consistently positive and statistically significant across all models, indicating that the behavior of infants whose fathers did not participate in the second wave of data collection was significantly worse.
The coeffcients for this variable are not shown, but consistently emerge as not statistically significant.
It is possible that our models suffer from endogeneity arising from the interrelationships between joint work schedules, child care choice, and part- versus full-time work by mothers [25]. To assess the problem, we re-estimated all full models twice—once omitting the child care variables, and once omitting the part-time/full-time work dichotomy. Fortunately, all results were robust to the tests, indicating that endogeneity does not pose a serious problem.
Among all fathers who worked a nonstandard shift at the baseline and changed shifts by the follow up, just over 81 percent changed to a standard day shift.
This unexpected finding reflects the fact that this category of joint work schedules is statistically identical to the category of both days on all predictors except for father’s depression and father’s shift changes. When fathers work irregular hours (while mothers work days) they are significantly more depressed and significantly more likely to change their work hours by the second assessment (results not shown but available upon request). Thus, taking account of the higher level of depression and work instability among fathers who work irregular shifts while their partners work regular day shifts reveals the relative benefit for infants’ behavior for children in this category.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Wen-Jui Han, Matt Morey, Kyle Snow, and the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Rosenbaum, E., Morett, C.R. The Effect of Parents’ Joint Work Schedules on Infants’ Behavior Over the First Two Years of Life: Evidence from the ECLSB. Matern Child Health J 13, 732–744 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10995-009-0488-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10995-009-0488-8