Friday, 14 January 2005 - 12:00 PM

This presentation is part of: Poster Session I

The Effects of Work Hours of Low-Income Single Mothers on Preschool Children's Development

Purpose: This study proposes to examine how children are affected by maternal employment and welfare transition following welfare reform. In particular, this study investigates the association between maternal employment hours and preschoolers' cognitive and behavioral outcomes in low-income single mother families. I hypothesize that maternal work hours and child outcomes are nonlinearly associated; child outcomes will be improve over a certain amount of work hours, after which they will deteriorate. I also hypothesize that the effects of maternal work hours on child outcomes will be mediated by changes in parenting practice and maternal psychological well-being that mothers experience from their work.

Method: This study used data from the Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study (Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio), Wave1, 1999. Of total 2,402 families in the data set, 355 single mothers who have a child ages 2-6 were selected. This study used a structural equation modeling (SEM) to assess direct, indirect, and total effects of maternal work hours on child outcomes, generated by the mediating factors. Particularly, a mixed model combining path analysis and multiple indicators and multiple causes (MIMIC) model was used to test the proposed hypotheses. To test the nonlinearity relationship between maternal work hours and children's developmental outcomes, a quadratic term of maternal work hours was used, which would not violate the linearity assumption in using the SEM.

Results: I found that increases in maternal work hours had a negative effect on both children's cognitive outcomes and behavioral outcomes. Also, the results showed that maternal work hours and child outcomes were nonlinearly related. More explicitly, increases in maternal work hours had a considerable negative effect on mothers' psychological well-being, rather than parenting practices, while maternal psychological well-being more positively affects children's behavioral outcomes. I concluded that increases in maternal work hours significantly lowered maternal psychological well-being, leading to increases in children's behavioral problems. For children's cognitive development, the parenting practices was a more statistically significant factor to mediate the association between maternal work hours and child outcomes. Although the results show increases in maternal work hours had a negative influence on, it was not statistically significant.

Implication for policy and practice: Policy makers have tried to increase the mandated work hours up to 40 hours per week without consideration on single mothers' needs regarding childrearing. This study informs the policy makers what the appropriate amount of work hours is for single mother families with younger children, and will improve the current welfare policy toward meeting welfare recipients' needs. Many single mothers juggle between work and childrearing. This study implies that communities need to provide working single mothers with social services to help improve their psychological well-being, parenting skills or life skills. Furthermore, this study suggests that states need to provide more accessible child care subsidies to support single mothers' work. Communities need to provide affordable child care services in diverse hours.

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