Parents' Flexible Work Arrangements and Developmental Parenting Time

Background

Over the past few decades, U.S. parents have faced mounting challenges balancing the demands of work and family. These challenges have been driven by lengthening work weeks and intensifying parenting norms that require parents to invest increasing amounts of time in their children. To help ameliorate such conflicts and promote greater time for parenting responsibilities, scholars and practitioners have argued that working parents need greater access to flexible work arrangements. However, limited attention has been paid to disparities in access to flexible work arrangements across household income and the associations between flexible work arrangements and parenting time. Our study explores how parents’ flexible work options are associated with their time in developmental parenting activities and whether gender and household structure and income moderate such associations.

Methods

Data came from the 2017-2018 American Time Use Surveys and Leave and Job Flexibilities Module. The analytic sample includes working-age parents who reside with a child under age 13 (N=3,641). We developed four measures of flexible work arrangements: (a) availability of flexible schedules (1 = yes, 0 = no), (b) frequency of flexible schedules (1 = never to 4 = frequently), (c) the availability of working from home (1 = yes, 0 = no), and (d) the frequency of only working from home (1 = never to 5 = 3 or more days a week). Parenting time was measured with time parents spent on four types of primary activities (basic care, play, teaching, and management) and a combined measure of total parenting time. We also assessed secondary child care time that parents spend looking after children while performing some other primary activities (e.g., preparing a meal). We generated binary measures of single-mother households (vs. two-parent households) in the mother sample and dual-earner households (vs. single-earner households) in the father sample. OLS regression models were estimated with rich demographic and employment characteristics. We conducted analyses separately by gender and employed interaction analysis to test a moderating role of household structure and income.

Results

Descriptively, low-income parents have lower access to flexible schedules and working from home compared to mid- and high-income parents. Multivariate results found that mothers with flexible schedules spent nearly 15 minutes more with their children, and this increased parenting time was devoted to basic care activities. Mothers’ working from home was not associated with primary care time, however, it was associated with 45 more minutes in secondary child care. For fathers, although flexible work was not associated with their parenting time, working from home was associated with seven more minutes in their basic care activities. In addition, single mothers who can work from home spent more time in basic care than mothers from two-parent households. These associations did not vary across household income.

Discussion

The findings suggest that flexible work arrangements have positive implications for parenting time and that such implications can vary across gender and household structure. The implications of recent policy efforts that aim to provide workers with greater flexibility in their work schedules and control will be discussed.