Article - Parents and jobs. WDYT?

[hanabi]

Found at: http://blogs.abc.net.au/lifeat2/2007...s-and-job.html I am loving the balance of information presented at this site.


Parents and jobs–what does family friendly really mean?


Let’s start with some well known facts:

A good job helps to make a happy adult.
A happy parent helps to make a happy child.

It follows that the happiness and wellbeing of the children in the family can depend on whether mum or dad has a good or a bad job.

This is the premise of some groundbreaking research which challenges conventional thinking about what, in the context of the overall well being of the entire family, constitutes a good, or family friendly, job.

Working with data from parents of children in the longitudinal study - Growing Up in Australia (LSAC) - Lyndall Strazdins and her colleagues at ANU found that mothers and fathers working in poor quality jobs do have the poorest mental health and, importantly, so do their children.

What’s more they reveal that full time work can sometimes be more family friendly than part time work, a significant finding given that three quarters of the LSAC mothers are in part time work.

How did they reach these conclusions?

The traditional benchmark of a family friendly job is one that offers flexible working hours, paid maternity or paternity leave and time off to care for sick children, the emphasis being on relieving time pressures on family life and family relationships.

The ANU team developed a new model of job classification, which included these factors, but added job insecurity and lack of control into the mix.

Previous research shows that when people are anxious about losing their jobs, and have no control over what tasks they are assigned and how they should do them, their health suffers. Heart disease, depression, anxiety and a general feeling of poor health are all documented symptoms. Other research shows that children of depressed parents may be more distressed, possibly because their parents are finding it harder to manage. While part time jobs usually offer relief from time pressures, full time jobs are less stressful when control and job security are taken into consideration.

The jobs of about 2000 mothers and 2400 fathers in LSAC were classified against the new model - the best jobs were the ones that included all four highly rated working conditions: paid parental leave, flexible work hours, job security and control. The poor quality jobs were the ones with none or only one of these conditions.

Most fathers were in fulltime work, and they were more likely to have high quality jobs than the mothers. Both fathers and mothers had poorer quality jobs if employed casually or part time, probably one of the reasons that so many dads do not take them up. Mothers with post graduate qualifications were at a particular disadvantage; they were frequently making a trade off between more time for the family and worse working conditions, putting their own wellbeing at risk.

Traditionally mothers have chosen to work part time in order to spend more time with the family, but it’s the part time jobs that have poor pay and conditions and are more likely to be casual or insecure.

This begs the question whether part time jobs should be considered family friendly at all, unless they also meet acceptable quality criteria.

However, part time jobs don’t look so bad when job overload is added into the equation. Overload (not having enough time to do all your tasks) is the scourge of the modern workplace, and is most common amongst mothers and fathers in full time work, though it does affect part timers too. Jobs that include overload increase the likelihood of strain on parents’ mental health.

In 2005 the OECD warned that if society cannot forge a better balance between work and family commitments, we face the long term erosion of family wellbeing or else people will have fewer children, or withdraw from the work force indefinitely. All these scenarios have consequences for the social and economic health and prosperity of the whole nation.

Creating workplaces that maximize job quality for parents may appear expensive to government and to employers in the short term, but may avoid greater costs to society down the track. This new job evaluation index is a first step in that direction.

Dr Lyndall Strazdins is a clinical psychologist, with expertise in population mental health of adults and children, work and family, and the time impacts of policies. She has developed an innovative research agenda, publishing two of the first studies to have tested intergenerational linkages between parents’ work and children’s well-being, a model now being extended to the intergenerational impacts of climate change. She is currently a Fellow at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health and is the team leader of the Work, Families and Health research program.

[jezza]

I found this interesting. I have been working casually for over a year now, and have a lot of flexibility and control over my work. However, I do want a permanent job. I've stayed casual for this long because I vowed not to take another permanent position until I found something interesting, challenging, sufficiently well-paid and meeting my definition of family friendly (that is, allowing me to purchase additional annual leave, work no more than 4 days a week and have the flexibility to take time off for school sports days, assemblies etc). Finding this job has been harder than I thought! I'm pretty hopeful that it will materialise early in the New Year.

Last year I had a great job that was promoted as family friendly when I took it. However, I ended up quitting after only six months, since it changed so drastically once I accepted it. It became almost impossible for me to manage the additional workload that kept getting added to in my previously agreed to 4-day week. But the biggest factor was the travel. I was told a couple of days at a time, two or three times a year. In six months I was away five times, mainly for 4 or 5 days at a time. So, it is difficult to predict what might happen once you take a job, as employers will often say what they think you want to hear when they are offering the job.

I find that there are still many challenges for parents in the workforce, but things are definitely getting better as the staff shortages are beginning to hit employers hard and they are forced to think of ways to attract and retain staff.

I will be very interested to hear about others' ways of negotiating the paid work/parenting juggling act.

J

[bunty]

Um. I know from my children that they beg me not to return to full time work . I work part time, and get paid what a full time engineer is paid, yet on an hourly rate. I fail to see how my children would be happier if I worked full time.

[hanabi]

The job security isn't an issue then Cherise? What do you do during school holidays or when the kids are sick?

I have worked for money barely a day here and there the whole time I've been mothering, but those jobs I could take my baby along for.

My husband's work is rather un-family-friendly, but it does have its perks that we have used to our family's advantage. He travels regularly for work, though not as often as he used to, and none of us like it when he's away. He has arranged his schedule so he can work from home one day a week but that's about the limits of it for us. But because he manages his own schedule, I suppose he could be free for things if he really needed to be but that just creates more pressure for him to catch up later.

He has been able to take paternity leave in the form of holidays with each baby but the previous job actually did have one month paternity leave for fathers in the contract. A lot of the same people have stayed on there because of the security and family-friendly nature of the organisation. Actually, it was for them that I did the occasional temp work with baby in tow.

[~twiddlebug~]

I've been fortunate in finding a part-time job with great family friendly practices. Paid Maternity leave, parental leave, flexible hours and permanency. I've been working for the same place for almost 5 years, and have spent 16 months of the last 2 years on maternity leave - and I'll be taking more Mat leave in April of next year

I've also been able to reduce my hours and take unpaid leave as needed.

That hasn't meant that being a working mum has been easy for me, but I've been able to prioritise my family. I seriously wouldn't be working if I was felt I was having to compromise my children's happiness or health

I can't quite get my head around the thought that full-time work for Mums could actually be better for families. The impact of the 'security' of full-time employment on the children would surely be in a major way eroded by the time away from Mum and Dad?

DP works a reasonably family friendly full time job - he's on flexi-time, so can be home early in the evenings, has great policies in place about family days and the ability to work from home occasionally. His previous position as a shift worker was even more flexible, he'd only work when I was home with the kids and was able to fit studies in as well. Financially it fricken sucked though

We're happier as a family now. The financial stress of shift work was hard.

[hanabi]

Oops, I've forgotten how to do multi-quote, sorry 'bout the cut and paste:

I fail to see how my children would be happier if I worked full time.

The impact of the 'security' of full-time employment on the children would surely be in a major way eroded by the time away from Mum and Dad?

Perhaps professional part time jobs have a very different policy to non-professional part time jobs? I chose the article because it was Australian and I wondered what the experiences of members here were with regard to work and family.

[Joey]

I work part time. In a non professional part time job.

I love it. I find it works really well for our family. It is hard when the kids are sick but my employers do not make it hard, I take time off, no pay but no negative stuff from work either Same for important school dates, sports days etc they are flexlible and I have never been unable to swap a day or take time off.. I work 2 days and 2 evenings a week, I earn extra cash, I am out of the house a couple of days a week which I was starting to need after being a sahm/student for almost 11 yrs.
I couldn't work full time at this stage- too hard, not enough hours in the day. And what about before and after school? Thats the hard part for me.