Work outside of the typical 9-to-5, Monday-to-Friday window has become more common across the industrialized world, especially among less-educated workers. These atypical schedules pose challenges to job quality and security, child care arrangements, work-family balance, and parent-child interactions and can also negatively affect child behavior and development. Researchers have linked children’s behavioral functioning to their success in school and the labor force later in life.

Jia Wang at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University wanted to see if a mothers’ education levels might impact the child behavior issues tied to nonstandard work times. She examined data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS), a longitudinal survey following nearly 5,000 children born between 1998 and 2000 in 20 large U.S. cities.¹

In the study, behavioral problems included aggressive and rule-breaking behaviors such as conflict with others and social norm violations, as well as internalizing disorders like anxiety and depression.

Among Less Educated Moms, Working the Night Shift May Be the Most Detrimental to Children

Wang found a general “pattern of disadvantage” in the relationships between mothers’ work schedules and children’s behavior. Kids with less-educated mothers were more likely to have moms working nonstandard schedules—evenings, nights, weekends, or different times each week—and to experience worse impacts.

Among the children of the least-educated mothers (those without a high school degree), all types of nonstandard work schedules were associated with significantly more behavioral problems than other schedules. Within this group, mothers working nights saw the strongest effects. Parents working nights may:

• Have trouble finding space to spend quality time with children.
• Miss important activities like homework help, family dinners, bedtime routines, and social events.
• Face challenges arranging child care and establishing consistent family routines.

Regardless of mothers’ education level, children whose mothers worked nonstandard work schedules had worse behavior outcomes than children whose mothers were not working such schedules. When looking at impacts by education level, however, the children of the least educated mothers were the only group for whom this relationship remained significant.

Relative to highly educated mothers, “less-educated mothers have poorer health and fewer coping resources to protect themselves against potential drawbacks of working nonstandard schedules,” said Wang, “resulting in larger negative impacts of such schedules on their own health and well-being and their children’s development.”

This does not mean that children of these more-educated mothers are not affected by their mothers working alternative schedules. For example, Wang found that children with more-educated moms had worse behaviors when their mothers regularly worked weekends.

But nonstandard work schedules also enabled some highly educated moms to “enjoy more work-family flexibility,” by voluntarily working evenings or weekends to engage in “tag-team” parenting with their partners that allows them more time to parent during standard work hours.

Further research could investigate associations with other behaviors (including substance abuse, delinquency, and crime) and other important life outcomes (such as high school dropout and college attendance) at later ages.

An Intergenerational Disadvantage

These new findings show how challenges faced by mothers can be passed to their children, leading to an “intergenerational transmission of disadvantages across American families,” Wang said.

In addition, the finding that even highly educated mothers working unpredictable schedules face behavior challenges in their children highlights the difficulties that all mothers experience in balancing work and family commitments in a 24/7 economy.

Programs that encourage child care support and flexible family-friendly work schedules, particularly those that support less educated mothers, can reduce inequalities in the next generation and help all children thrive, Wang suggested.

This article was produced under a grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). The work of researchers from the NICHD-funded Population Dynamics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was highlighted.