Recently in Work and Family Category

"Balancing the competing needs of work and family life is a challenge for most households, but the difficulties may be greatest for households with young children, defined here as newborns through age five. Parents in many of these families struggle to find sufficient time both to fulfill work responsibilities and provide the intensive care that young children require." The Future of Children: Work and Family

The first difficult and very important work and family decision a parent makes is who will care for the child while the parent is working. Choosing childcare is one of the largest stressors that a parent faces when returning to work.

A new study in the journal Child Development finds that high-quality early child care can have a significant impact on children's wellbeing, and is important for mothers as well. High-quality child care is not about drilling children in educational facts, but more about low student to teacher ratio, age appropriate books and toys, and teachers who are attentive to the children and their developmental needs.

"Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin looked at data from more than 1,300 children whose care settings were evaluated at various intervals from the time they were a month old until they turned 4 ½. Their mothers were interviewed too. Those moms whose kids were cared for early on in "high-quality non-parental care" settings--either in day care centers or in others' homes--were more likely than mothers who cared for their kids themselves or sent them to low-quality day care to be involved in their children's schools starting in kindergarten... Robert Crosnoe, a professor of sociology in the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin who led the study, notes that "children make a smoother transition to school when families and schools are strongly connected."

(Time Healthland- February 15, 2012)

 As noted in the Future of Children's Work and Family volume, formal (center- or school-based) early childhood education and care received immediately before kindergarten appears to promote school readiness. Children, particularly those who are disadvantaged, who attend prekindergarten in the year before formal schooling begin that formal schooling with better math and reading skills, although some of these gains may be transitory or offset by later compensatory education that targets less-prepared children. Head Start participation is also associated with better dental care and overall health as well as with reductions in obesity.

Despite these positive findings, however, the volume is careful to note that, when taken together, research findings related to early childhood care and education are ambiguous, due in part to the high variability in services provided and the difficulty of determining which outcomes are of key interest (for example, cognitive test scores at school entry versus long-term educational and developmental outcomes.)

The one finding that remains certain from the current research base is that quality of care matters. High-quality care mitigates any negative consequences of early childhood care and education and enhances its benefits.

For more on this issue, go to the Future of Children Work and Family chapter on "Policies to Assist Parents with Young Children."

Under pressure to balance their budgets, states are cutting government subsidies that help pay for child care as reported on December 13 in The New York Times. The reduction threatens the wellbeing of families by making it more difficult for parents to maintain their jobs while caring for their children. One option to offset the impact of such cuts may lie in increased provisions of workplace flexibility.

Research included in the Future of Children's Work and Family volume, released by Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School and the Brookings Institution, finds workplace flexibility is linked with engagement, satisfaction, retention, and better health for employees; and higher productivity and a better "bottom line" for employers. The volume also shows that providing short to moderate periods of paid parental leave - from three to twelve months - for all workers is unlikely to have negative repercussions in the labor market and is likely to have positive benefits for child and family wellbeing.

In a global comparison, the data presented in the volume suggest that guaranteeing paid parental leave as well as paid leave when a child is sick is feasible for the United States without jeopardizing its competitive economy or low unemployment rates in the future. And perhaps contrary to popular opinion, the volume shows that when employees are offered workplace flexibility, they tend to use it conservatively, minimizing costs to employers.

"Allowing employees more control over their hours and more flexibility to adjust hours or work location when family demands arise can lead to increased employee productivity, satisfaction, and retention," say issue editors Sara McLanahan of Princeton and Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University. "Far from representing a cost to employers, such policies, if well designed to take into account the needs of both employers and employees, can yield benefits."

Paid leave and workplace flexibility policies are particularly important for low-income workers, who are the least likely to have access to flexibility policies. For these families, taking care of their families can put their wages - and their jobs - at risk. Because current welfare policies encourage low-income parents to work, workplace policies that encourage job retention should follow.

In the face of unprecedented federal government budget strains, the volume recommends initiatives with minimal costs and maximum benefits. Namely, the volume recommends that state and local governments pass paid leave initiatives (Connecticut recently became the first state to require employers to provide paid sick leave); that employers implement workplace flexibility policies that encourage "right to request" and "compensatory time"; and that community organizations think carefully about the ways they can adjust their work to better accommodate working families by, for example, changing the hours they are open or providing better coordination of care.

The American Academy of Pediatrics once again urges parents of infants and toddlers to limit screen-time for their children, says The New York Times; and based on figures in Future of Children's Children and Electronic Media and reports from the Kaiser Foundation, the timing couldn't be better: more than three quarters of households with children age six and under have personal computers; nearly a third of children under age two have a television in their bedrooms. With the exception of sleeping, American youth of today spend more time with media than any other activity.

Young children's increasing media exposure could be catalyzed by other trends. The current economic crisis has pulled hundreds of American homes below the poverty line, and Future of Children's Work and Family reports that divorce rates, working mothers, and single-parent households are on the rise. In many households, both parents must work to make ends meet, limiting the amount of time parents can spend with their children. Low-wage working parents are the least likely to have the resources and flexible work schedules to be involved with their children.

Findings suggest that the children most affected by these economic changes could be the most at risk of high media exposure. A 2011 nationally representative study of over 1300 parents of children ages 0 to 8, found that children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds spend more time with media and are much more likely to have a TV in their bedroom. As many as 42% of these parents say they sometimes use media to occupy their children while they do chores. Similarly, the Kaiser Foundation found that many parents encourage their children to use media because it gives them a chance to get things done without having to worry about leaving them unsupervised.

What can be done to ensure more positive outcomes for children using new media?

The main lesson learned from the Future of Children's Children and Electronic Media volume can be captured in one phrase: content matters. Rather than focusing on the type of technology used or how much time is spent with media, parents and policymakers need to focus on what is being offered to children on the various media platforms. In addition, although more research is needed, parents' co-viewing and mediation can have positive effects on learning from educational media.

As media use plays an increasing role in children's lives, content selection and parental involvement will become increasingly important. It is critical that parents continue to educate themselves about good media use based on their children's developmental stages and monitor their children's media use to ensure that it is healthful and constructive. (See the Children and Electronic Media volume for more on this.)

Children and Electronic Media notes that children under age two benefit more from real-life experiences than they do from video and that too much screen time may lead to childhood obesity and other health problems. However, under appropriate circumstances, technology can be beneficial to children of older ages. Upcoming Future of Children volumes on Children with Disabilities (Spring 2012), Literacy of American Children (Fall 2012), and Postsecondary Education (Spring 2013) will further explore the role of media and technology in children's learning.

On October 21, the Center for American Progress hosted an event co-sponsored by Half in Ten and the National Partnership for Woman & Families focused on expanding paid sick days coverage.

The Future of Children's Work and Family volume, which was distributed to attendees at the event, recommends that a minimal amount of paid sick leave be provided to workers. The status quo, whereby the lowest-paid workers are least likely to have paid sick leave or other leave that enables them to take care of family responsibilities, forces working parents to choose between not taking care of their family or losing their wages (or losing their job altogether).

This past spring, Connecticut passed S.B. 913, the Paid Sick Leave bill, which made the state the country's first to pass a law requiring paid sick days for service employees. Although many salaried workers have paid sick days in their contract, the same does not apply to 80 percent of low-wage workers in Connecticut.

"This discussion is about hourly workers at the lower end of the scale who are the most vulnerable," said Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy.

Panelists argued that the law promotes increases in health, cuts business costs by reducing risks associated with employees coming to work while sick, garners bi-partisan support, and is not abused by employees.

For more information on the event at the Center for American Progress go to:
http://www.americanprogress.org/events/2011/10/paidsickdays.html

To read the Future of Children's Work and Family volume and policy brief go to: 
www.futureofchildren.org

Future of Children Work and Family volume author Kathleen Christensen, Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, writes about workplace flexibility in the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathleen-e-christensen/workplace-flexibility_b_1021717.html

Work-family policy is not a new concept in the U.S., but it has hardly kept up with the changing needs of the worker and the family as noted in the Future of Children's recent volume, Work and Family. The safeguards that are currently in place for the American worker were created at a time  when  mothers were typically at home to care for children, aging or ill family members, and do the household chores. Today, the vast majority of families do not have a stay at home parent but still have child care, and increasingly, elder care responsibilities.

In 1935, the government addressed the need for income support when workers could not be at work with the Social Security Act, which established Old Age and Survivors Insurance, unemployment insurance, and income assistance to mothers and children. This law was built on the dynamic that men were the bread winners and women, the caregivers. But that leaves many gaps for today's families where both women and men are breadwinners and caregivers alike. Policy makers have since tried to fill many of these gaps, but inequalities that affect caregivers remain, perhaps most notably the failure of the law to cover caregiving leave. Today there are only two states, California and New Jersey, that provide state-level social insurance to workers for family leave.

In 1938 Congress enacted the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). FLSA regulated the nation's minimum wage and hours worked, particularly hours worked by women and children. This act was not designed to address work-family conflict but in limiting the hours worked, it did reserve time for workers to care for families. However, the act was based on the assumption that workers were employed full time - in that era, commonly ten to twelve hours each day - and did not deal with, or encourage, workplace flexibility.

Times have changed greatly since these safeguards from the 1930's were enacted, and policies need to be updated to reflect the modern workforce. Work-family policies, that fit our time, involve initiatives that give caregivers flex and leave options that allow them the flexibility to meet their family needs without compromising their productivity. For professional workers and those subject to mandatory overtime, the problem is most often too much work; for low-wage workers it is more often too few hours and unpredictable schedules.

 A growing body of empirical research suggests that workplace flexibility policies may enhance productivity by improving retention and reducing turnover. In 2010, the Council of Economic Advisers reviewed evidence on the economic value of adopting workplace flexibility and concluded that the "costs to firms of adopting these kinds of management practices can also be outweighed by reduced absenteeism, lower turnover, healthier workers, and increased productivity." Additional research is needed to further substantiate these findings, but these initial claims are promising.

Given this, how do we update our nation's work-family policies to reflect the flexibility needs of our changing workforce?

Although there are no easy solutions to the work-family challenge, the evidence presented in our Work and Family volume provides useful insights into the types of work-family conflicts American employees are experiencing, as well as the types of employer, governmental, and community policies that might most effectively address them. For example, the costs of sick day benefits are minimal and can be borne by individual employers, who also stand to reap gains from not having workers with contagious diseases show up at work, make their colleagues ill, and reduce overall firm productivity. Paid sick days are now guaranteed by law in several U.S. localities including San Francisco, the District of Columbia, and Milwaukee, and are gaining momentum, even despite the current economic recession. In the past few months, paid sick days were enacted into law in the state of Connecticut, in the city of Seattle, and passed in the city of Philadelphia (although not yet signed by the mayor).

For more detailed information about local and state initiatives that have updated policies to ease work-family tensions and employers that have voluntarily implemented workplace flexibility initiatives, go to our Work and Family volume and policy brief.

This blog draws from Heather Boushey's article in the  Future of Children journal, "The Role of the Government in Work-Family Conflict."  

In conjunction with National Work and Family month, on Wednesday, October 5, Princeton-Brookings released a new volume of the Future of Children entitled Work and Family.

"The dilemma that we face is that parents act as the hub of service delivery for their children and elderly relatives. They provide direct care themselves, and they also coordinate other care that their family members receive...  But most parents and most elder caregivers are also employed, and that leads to work-family conflict," opened issue editor Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University at the Brookings Institution event.

Three demographic changes have increased work-family conflicts for both mothers and fathers: mothers' continued entry into the workforce, high divorce rates, and the growing elderly population. And unlike other nations with advanced economies, the U.S. has very modest government policies requiring employers to give their workers benefits such as paid family leave and child care. The United States federal government provides only unpaid leave - and only for some parents - to care for newborns or sick family members and most parents do not qualify for government child care programs.

Work and Family shows that providing short to moderate periods of paid parental leave (from three to twelve months) for all workers, is likely to have positive benefits for child and family wellbeing, and is unlikely to have negative repercussions in the labor market. It also explains the ways that increasing access to high-quality early childhood education and care could ease work-family conflicts and promote sizable gains in school readiness for disadvantaged children.

But, given the difficult state of the American economy and the large, growing federal deficit, what can we realistically expect from federal policy makers in this area?

Rather than focus on broad policy change, discussions at the Brookings Institution event focused on the role that state and local governments, as well as employers, might play in helping families deal with the demands of work, namely, by promoting workplace flexibility.

"Allowing employees more control over their hours and more flexibility to adjust hours or work location when family demands arise can lead to increased employee productivity, satisfaction, and retention. Far from representing a cost to employers, such policies, if well designed to take into account the needs of both employers and employees, can yield benefits," notes Work and Family, a finding which was echoed at Brookings by Ernst & Young's Flexibility Strategy Leader Maryella Gockel and volume author and Co-Founder and President of the Families and Work Institute Ellen Galinsky.

Unfortunately, as Galinsky, Waldfogel, and Brookings' Ron Haskins all mentioned, low-income employees, who often have the greatest need for workplace flexibility, generally have the least access to it.

Heather Boushey, volume author and Senior Economist at the Center for American Progress, took this point further, suggesting that workplace flexibility is the 'next step' in anti-poverty policy.

 "We did all that work on welfare reform in the 1990's," said Boushey, "that encouraged low income individuals, especially women, to work... and so [workplace flexibility] must be the next step, right? We want that single Mom in the workplace, but we have to make sure that she can stay in the workplace, that she can hold on to her job while taking care of her children." Employer flexibility policies that allow parents flexible time off when children are sick, paid sick leave when parents themselves are sick, and leave arrangements for the birth of a child can help low-income individuals maintain their income, and hopefully head off poverty. 

Employers can enact such policies voluntarily and relatively quickly. The Families and Work Institute provides guidelines that can help guide employers as they implement workplace flexibility: http://familiesandwork.org/site/work/workforce/main.html.

And there is also a role for local and state policy makers to play. Over the past few months, even in the depths of this recession, paid sick days were enacted into law in the state of Connecticut, in the city of Seattle, and passed in the city of Philadelphia (although not yet signed by the mayor).

For more information on the volume, go to: www.futureofchildren.org. Click here for a full transcript of the Brookings Institution event.

As indicated in the new Work and Family volume of Future of Children, American society's composition and family roles have changed dramatically since Leave It to Beaver, with the majority of American women employed outside the home, an explosion of single-parent families, and older Americans increasingly needing care from younger relatives. These changes greatly complicate the challenges of meeting family responsibilities while holding down a job, note journal editors Sara McLanahan of Princeton, Jane Waldfogel of Columbia, and Brookings senior fellow Ron Haskins.

As demographics have changed, so have workplaces, which may have negative consequences for children and families. Today, one out of five employed Americans works varying hours or works outside the standard hours of 8 to 4 more than half the time. Parents who work nonstandard hours spend less time with each other and with their children. Moreover, mothers' nonstandard hours are linked to lower cognitive scores among preschoolers.

Increasing workplace flexibility - the availability of work schedules that allow for balance between family and work - is one logical solution that employers can voluntarily implement to ease work-family tensions. Although some research has suggested that this may still impact parents' career growth, evidence of the benefits continues to mount. Researchers find that greater access to flexibility is linked to higher job satisfaction, engagement, and employee health. One example underscored by Work and Family is a Houston, Texas community effort. Through the promotion of workplace flexibility, the city reduced traffic congestion, lessened pollution, and helped employers increase productivity. 

The best workers may be attracted to family-friendly workplaces, and often that provides an incentive for change.  For example, The White House and National Science Foundation (NSF) recently announced the "NSF Career-Life Balance Initiative," a ten-year plan to support American scientists and their families. New workplace flexibility policies will allow researchers to postpone or suspend grants for up to one year for parental leave, childbirth, and adoption. The new policies will make it easier for women to pursue careers in engineering and science. NSF plans to support research on workplace flexibility policies and calls on other research institutes and universities to adopt similar policies.