Chia Liu, Associate Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, uses the Millennium Cohort Study to investigate whether mothers working nonstandard hours affects young children’s socioemotional development.
Nine years ago, I defended my PhD dissertation while heavily pregnant and gave birth just a few weeks later. The demands of early-career academic life and early child-rearing arrived all at once.
As academics, we live with both the privilege of being able to shift work around our personal schedules and the challenge of having poorly defined boundaries between professional and personal time.
Toddlers can be a lot. At times, it’s hard to tell whether they seem especially difficult because of my hectic schedule, or whether they are simply being—a toddler.
This naturally raises a question: do maternal work hours influence young children’s development? More specifically, if a mother works nonstandard hours—such as evenings, nights, or weekends—do children experience negative effects as a result?
Millennium Cohort Study
Coming from a family demography background and having mostly worked with census data, I began looking for the right dataset to answer these curiosities while identifying the right collaborators for the project.
The Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) is a clear choice, given its large sample size—close to 19,000 children born in the UK around the turn of the century—but also the extensive, repeated interviews of their main caretaker, usually their mother.
This gives researchers not only details on the children’s developmental characteristics but also their mother’s wellbeing, work schedule, etc.
What we did
A rich volume of literature already exists on the relationship between maternal nonstandard work hours and child development, but fewer studies examine how the former might influence the latter.
Taking advantage of the longitudinal structure of MCS, we were able to examine whether schedule changes by itself, regardless of individual mothers’ characteristics, impact children aged three to seven.
We further test whether mother’s work schedules reported in one wave led to disruptions of children’s mealtimes and bedtime routines, which in turn jeopardises maternal wellbeing and contributes to increased socioemotional difficulties in children observed in subsequent waves.
What we found
In our study, we found that maternal nonstandard work hours is linked to children’s socioemotional difficulties in the UK.
However, when we control for stable characteristics of households, we found that children did not experience poorer outcomes during periods when their mothers worked nonstandard hours.
This suggests that the challenges children face may be more closely tied to the broader circumstances attached to their family rather than to the work schedule itself.
Moreover, maternal depressive symptoms are more likely to account for some of the relationship between mother’s work hours and children’s development, rather than disruption to children’s routines.
Why it matters
Mothers’ well-being is closely tied to children’s well-being.
We could plausibly make the assertion that compared to sticking to a fixed schedule for dinner or bedtime, a mother feeling good about her life is much more essential for raising a socioemotionally resilient child.
Studies in the US have pointed to the fact that nonstandard work hours are often more harmful to the mental health of workers in disadvantaged socioeconomic positions.
So, although the starting point and the inspiration of the project comes from my experience as a working mother in academia, the real story is that of younger mothers, and mothers who work lower wage jobs, are in more difficult circumstances.
Policymakers should consider this study, along with the wealth of additional evidence available, in devising policies that support mothers who work unsociable hours, particularly investing in those who are in precarious circumstances.
Investing in women is often an investment in the wider community—including, but not limited to, children.
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