The 24/7 economy and the health and wellbeing of family and children in Germany
Final Report Abstract
Our project has demonstrated that mothers’ and fathers’ nonstandard work schedules in evenings or nights have a negative impact on children’s social and emotional health. Adverse parenting behaviours on the part of mother and also fathers, such as inconsistent parenting, strict or psychological control, in part mediate this effect. Fathers’ parenting behavior appeared to have a larger mediation effect than that of mothers’ parenting style. Similarly, both parents’ long work hours are associated with increased risk for overweight/obesity in preschool children: mothers long work hours (> 35 hours per week) have a more direct effect on child body weight, whereas fathers’ long work hours indirectly influence the outcome whereby the effect of maternal work hours strengthens when fathers work very long hours (> 50 hours per week). These finding highlight the importance of fathers in child health and development. The findings of the project also reveal that parenting behaviors plays an important role in intergenerational transmission of social inequality in children’s social and emotional wellbeing and academic performance. Our findings provide new insights into the complex process of intergenerational transmission of social inequality. We have incorporated psychological and child developmental concepts into this enduring sociological inquiry and have shown that parenting style and child behavioural problems play a role in transferring parents’ social and economic advantage into better school outcomes for their children. Our study demonstrates the benefits of bringing other disciplinary perspectives into sociological inquiries, and it calls for wider crossdisciplinary research on intergenerational transmission of status attainment. The project has two methodological innovations. By analyzing how mothers’ adverse parenting mediates the effect of mothers’ evening and night work on child wellbeing reported by fathers, and vice versa, we were able to minimize the problem of endogeneity which is a common information bias and it has not been addressed in previous research. Additionally, we tested mediation formally by using a multi-level mediation approach and bootstrapping with bias-corrected confidence intervals. To our knowledge, these methods have not been utilized in any previous study on this topic.
Publications
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(2016): Fathers' commute to work and children's social and emotional well-being in Germany. Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 37(3): 488-501
Jianghong Li and Mathias Pollmann-Schult
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(2016): Long hours and longings: Australian children’s views of fathers’ work-family time. Journal of Marriage and Family, 79(4), 965-982
Lyndall Strazdins, Jennifer Baxter, Jianghong Li
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(2017). Poverty and child behavioural problems – the mediating role of parenting and parental well-being. The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 14(9): 981
Till Kaiser, Jianghong Li, Matthias Pollmann-Schult, Anne Song
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(2017): Non-linear relationship between maternal work hours and child body weight: Evidence from the Western Australian Pregnancy Cohort (Raine) Study. Social Science & Medicine, 186: 52-60
Jianghong Li, Plamen Akaliyski, Jakob Schäfer, Garth Kendall, Wendy H. Oddy, Fiona Stanley, Lyndall Strazdins
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(2018). The reproduction of educational inequalities: do parenting and child behavioural problems matter? Acta Sociologica
Till Kaiser, Jianghong Li, and Matthias Pollmann-Schult
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(2019). Evening and night work schedules and children’s social and emotional well-being. Community, Work & Family, 22 (2), 167-182
Till Kaiser, Jianghong Li, Matthias Pollmann-Schult
