ERIC Number: EJ1050055
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2013-Oct
Pages: 12
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0012-1649
EISSN: N/A
Mothers' Night Work and Children's Behavior Problems
Dunifon, Rachel; Kalil, Ariel; Crosby, Danielle A.; Su, Jessica Houston
Developmental Psychology, v49 n10 p1874-1885 Oct 2013
Many mothers work in jobs with nonstandard schedules (i.e., schedules that involve work outside of the traditional 9-5, Monday through Friday schedule); this is particularly true for economically disadvantaged mothers. In the present article, we used longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey (n = 2,367 mothers of children ages 3-5 years) to examine the associations between maternal nonstandard work and children's behavior problems, with a particular focus on mothers' night shift work. We employed 3 analytic strategies with various approaches to adjusting for observed and unobserved selection factors; these approaches provided an upper and lower bound on the true relationship between night shift work and children's behavior. Taken together, the results provide suggestive evidence for modest associations between exposure to maternal night shift work and higher levels of aggressive and anxious or depressed behavior in children compared with children whose mothers who are not working, those whose mothers work other types of nonstandard shifts, and, for aggressive behavior, those whose mothers work standard shifts.
Descriptors: Employed Parents, Parent Child Relationship, Scheduling, Well Being, Mothers, Sleep, Correlation, Family Work Relationship, Young Children, Longitudinal Studies, Disadvantaged, Aggression, Child Behavior, Comparative Analysis, Behavior Problems, Surveys, Control Groups, Anxiety, Depression (Psychology)
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) (NIH)
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: R01 HD057952