Families That Work Children in a Changing World (1982) / Chapter Skim
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THE STATE OF KNOWLEDGE
THE STATE OF KNOWLEDGE
Pages 309-345
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PART III The State of Knowledge
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cannot be viewed as a single uniform condition experienced the same way by all parents with consistent effects on all children. It is instead the distinctive characteristics of work, such as the nature of the job, the workplace, work scheduling, earnings, work history, and the meaning of work, that determine how parents' employment affects the well-being of their children.
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It is therefore not work alone but the complex links between and among work, family, and community as they directly and indirectly influence children's daily experiences that determine whether parental employment -- mothers' or fathers' or both parents' -- will produce positive, negative, or neutral outcomes in children. Existing research paradigms are generally inadequate and inappropriate for understanding the complex effects of work on children and their families.
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In general, however, research has not explored the extent and ways in which the varying conditions and meaning of work for both mothers and fathers influence child outcomes as well as parents' perceptions of their children. Existing research has also largely failed to account for the fact that the consequences of the parental work experience may be different for parents and children.
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(Although the Census Bureau's measure of poverty does not include such noncash benefits as food stamps, most of these children would still be living in poverty regardless of whether their families received such benefits.) Economic well-being is not necessarily correlated with positive child outcomes nor does it necessarily maximize the well-being of all family members.
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School-age children are spending more of their nonschool time in a variety of settings (e.g., recreation centers, extended day programs in schools, after-school care arrangements) about which there is little systematic information.
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Parents, for example, are making greater use of private preschool and nursery school programs, of commercial child care services, and of public- and privateschool extended day-care programs for child care. Working parents are also more frequently choosing private-school alternatives to public education, although it is unclear whether parents, in particular mothers, go to work in order to afford private education or whether having additional income leads them to choose private schools.
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Similarly, from 1971, when the concept of flexitime was first introduced by an American company, to 1977 the proportion of the labor force covered by this provision rose to 6 percent. It rose to an estimated 10 percent by 1980.
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Public and private day-care arrangements, for example, have developed rapidly. The number of children in federally funded day-care and preschool programs increased from about 300,000 in 1971 (200,000 in programs funded under the Social Security Act and 100,000 in Head Start)
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or indirectly through their parents (the workplace) do not address family and child outcomes in a systematic way, nor do they take account of work patterns and work status as significant variables.
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Much of the research on child outcomes ignores parental employment, or treats it as a global, uniform variable. Similarly, many of the studies we reviewed ignore the mediating role played by other institutions impinging on children and the other-than-family settings where children spend much of their time.
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Working families have been a dominant type in the black community for years and offer a much longer time frame in which to study the phenomenon, yet they have received little systematic analysis. The lower labor force participation rate of black single mothers compared to white mothers in the same situation raises a different set of questions that also has not been adequately addressed thus far.
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Finally, our review of the existing literature suggests that much of the research on single-parent families has failed to disentangle single-parent status and family income from the nature and characteristics of mother's work and the presence or absence of formal and informal external supports such as kin networks, neighborhood child-care facilities, and transportation arrangements. REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY Abt Associates (1978)
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(1979) Fifteen Thousand Hours: Secondary Schools and Their Effects on Children.
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Understanding the capacity of children and their families to cope with changing work patterns and work status requires more and better structural analyses (e.g., studies of changes in the nature of work, child-care patterns, policies, and 324
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In proposing further directions for future research that derive from this conceptualization, we would particularly stress the following: • Improving the existing data base on children and on the work situation and the work history of their parents • Obtaining insights and knowledge concerning the kinds of adaptations (successful and unsuccessful) now being made by working families, employers, schools, and other community institutions • Evaluating the direct and indirect outcomes of government policies, employment policies, and community services • Improving the state of knowledge about the effects of employment, unemployment, and welfare on children's well-being.
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Childhood Social Indicators At present, our knowledge of what is happening to children as a consequence of major social changes occurring in the society, including changing work patterns and related changes in family life-styles, is limited both by the inadequacy of existing research and the brevity of the time period in which these phenomena have taken place and received scholarly attention. Undoubtedly, many children will adapt to these changes as their parents make necessary adjustments in their daily lives.
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What is the role played by school, television, employers, and other formal and informal institutions in the shaping of children's views and behavior, and which are most significant, how are they significant, and why? At the very least we believe existing data series containing information of these types should be maintained and indeed enriched in order to provide data on family and institutional responses as well as child outcomes.
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Dependent variables would be child outcomes of various types, such as school achievement, the formation of values and attitudes toward work, education, family formation, peer interactions, and parent and sibling relationships. The intervening variables would include those support systems that influence children's socialization, such as schools, community social services, television, and the other media.
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By definition such methodology precludes any possibility of assessing long-term effects and changes over time. Since the long-term consequences of the major social changes we are highlighting cannot be discerned from a snapshot in time, existing research has not adequately explored (1)
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An alternative to launching new and expensive longitudinal studies might be to piggyback questions onto such existing studies as the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the National Longitudinal Survey and to do special studies on subpopulations, such as low-income single parents.
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Are these choices made because the parents prefer caring for their children themselves or because the alternative resources for child care are nonexistent or inadequate? What are the consequences of such patterns for the family system (e.g., spouse relations, parent-child relations)
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Are existing social service agencies designed to serve only those with identifiable problems? If so, where do families go who do not view themselves as having problems but want some help managing complicated routines, such as regular child care, care of a temporarily ill child, and care of a child when school is closed?
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Adaptations in Elementary and Secondary School Programs Clearly, there is need for a new approach to studying schools as community institutions. Ultimately, any study of schools as they are adapting to these changes must pay attention to the school as a community service facility and to the family and the community as major intervening variables in education, as centers of learning themselves.
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While there are promising beginnings, there is little systematic information on which aspects of the curriculum seem to be critical in bolstering student achievement and fostering other educational goals. Children spend more of their daily lives in school than they do in any other single institution other than their families.
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Despite the plethora of educational research studies done in the United States each year, there is no current survey program that provides a national picture of educational policies and practices broadly defined in a representative sample of schools. Such a survey, focusing on the whole range of school activities, not just narrowly defined academic curricula, could provide a systematic picture of the variety of extracurricular programs (including special programs provided in some schools linking parents and school, the workplace and the school, and local social service organizations and the school)
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includes data on parents, their employment status, and selected child outcomes. Research comparing selected outcomes for children in different countries could provide important insights into the consequences of alternative experiences for children, even though these would have to be placed in the context of the individual countries.
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State and local governments contribute to local social service agencies and often impose regulations and constraints on what they can do. More important, they are the major source of funding of primary and secondary school programs and the major enunciator of educational policies
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There is growing interest on the part of many state legislatures in linking schools to other institutions within the community, such as employers and social service agencies. What types of government policies might facilitate such linkages, for what kinds of children and families, with what consequences?
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Now there are those who view maternal employment, like paternal employment, as a positive force for the development of children, just as there are those who view maternal unemployment, like paternal unemployment, as a problem. As we have pointed out repeatedly, most existing research views paternal and maternal employment status as discrete and distinctive phenomena and most view employment as a single, undifferentiated variable.
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To provide answers to these questions, we need systematic studies of different types of families with different numbers of workers at different educational, occupational, and wage levels; with children of different ages at the time of parental unemployment; with different types of benefits entitlements for parents living in different kinds of communities; with different types of familial and nonfamilial supports available. TOWARD A POLICY AGENDA In response to the growing concern about how changing patterns of work and family structure affect the ways in which children develop, we have systematically reviewed the research on this subject and concluded that employment -- paid work -- has no single, overall, uniform effect except to add to family income and decrease the amount of time parents have available for family tasks.
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(1981) Child Care, Family Benefits, and Working Parents.
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