Maternal employment, maternal job characteristics and child wellbeing

Abstract

The Australian labour market has transformed in important ways over the last five decades. Changes include the emergence of new employment forms characterised by non-standard schedules, job insecurity, long work hours, and underemployment, as well as increases in women's involvement in paid work -particularly amongst mothers. These changes have had implications for the organisation of childcare and the resources available to parents to facilitate child development, which raises questions about potential flow-on impacts on child wellbeing. In this thesis I investigate how maternal employment and a set of maternal job characteristics (work hours, job flexibility and job security) are associated with children's socio-emotional functioning in contemporary Australia. In doing so, I contribute to current knowledge in several ways. First, I expand the scant body of research devoted to analysing whether and how maternal job characteristics, as opposed to maternal employment, influence children's socio-emotional outcomes. Second, I move beyond previous studies of overall children's socio-emotional functioning by considering two distinct components: internalising problems and externalising problems. Third, I provide new findings for the Australian context that complements the evidence base for countries such as the UK and the US. Fourth, I deploy panel regression methods to better understand the relationships of interest, superseding previous cross-sectional attempts. Fifth, I am the first to use the family resources framework to theorise the mechanisms linking maternal job characteristics and children's socio-emotional outcomes. My empirical analyses rely on longitudinal data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, a biannual cohort study which tracks a national sample of Australian children between the years 2004 and 2014. I draw two different analytical samples. The first encompasses children living with two biological parents (20,215 observations, 6,402 children) and is used to examine the impact of maternal employment. The second is restricted to children living in dual-earner households (13,472 observations, 5,018 children) and is used to examine the impact of maternal job characteristics. Children's socio-emotional outcomes are operationalised using different measures based on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. The data are analysed by means of bivariate techniques (t tests and ANOVA tests) and random-effect panel regression models. My findings indicate that, in contemporary Australia, children of employed mothers display better overall socio-emotional functioning than children of non-employed mothers, as well as lower rates of internalising and externalising problems. However, there is variation in social-emotional functioning according to differences in work hours. Mothers who work full time hours or who have long hours of part time employment have children with poorer socio-emotional functioning than mothers who are employed for a shorter number of hours each week. Nevertheless, longer maternal work hours were only associated with higher rates of externalising (but not of internalising) child problem behaviours. Maternal job flexibility showed a weak positive association with children's socio-emotional functioning overall, and with externalising (but not internalising) problem behaviours. Job insecurity, however, was strongly associated with poorer outcomes across all three dimensions, and particularly with internalising problems. Most of the statistically significant effects were also large in magnitude, and therefore substantially significant. While factors capturing parental resources such as parental mental health, parenting practices and household income were found to influence children's socio-emotional outcomes, these failed to mediate the associations between maternal employment and job characteristics and children's socio-emotional outcomes. This suggests that other mechanisms are at play. These findings have important implications for policy and practice. For example, they can be used to contextualise contemporary debates about maternal labour force participation and its likely impacts on children, work-family balance, or the intergenerational transmission of inequality. They also point to the need to consider job characteristics and the different components of socio-emotional outcomes in child research to gain a fuller and more nuanced picture of how parental work arrangements influence child development.