Are Parental Nonstandard Work Schedules a Barrier to Their School Involvement?

Background and Purpose: Parents’ work schedules shape how families spend their time and child and family wellbeing. Working during nonstandard times, particular evening and night shifts, and experiencing unstable and unpredictable schedules are associated with parents spending less time engaged with their children and with adverse child cognitive and socioemotional outcomes. Yet, less is known about how parental work schedules matter for parents’ involvement with children’s schools, a key predictor of children’s academic achievement and socioemotional wellbeing. In this study, we address this knowledge gap by estimating associations between mothers’ work schedules and their school involvement. Our measure of work schedules captures work during nonstandard times as well as flexibility and variability in schedules. We expect that, relative to a daytime shift, working a regular nonstandard shift or flexible variable schedule might facilitate parents’ participation in school activities, whereas working an inflexible variable schedule might impede participation.

Methods: We use data from the ECLS-K 2011, a nationally representative sample of kindergarteners in the 2010-2011 school year. Our sample includes children whose mothers were employed in the fall of kindergarten (N=6,549). Mothers’ work schedules include: regular day shift (83%), regular evening shift (5%), regular night shift (3%), a variable shift set by employer (5%), and a flexible variable shift determined by the mother (4%). Parental involvement includes a set of 4 binary variables for attendance in various school activities (e.g., back-to-school night) and volunteering in the classroom or school. We also examine the total number of events that parents attended during the school year and the number of parents from their child’s classroom with which they regularly communicate to capture connections with other parents. To examine work-related barriers, we look at whether parents report inconvenient meeting times or inability to get off work as barriers to participation. We use logit (for binary outcomes) and negative binomial (for count outcomes) regression models, controlling for mothers’ work hours and occupation and child and family sociodemographic characteristics (e.g., age, education). In subsequent analyses, we will examine heterogeneity by parents’ education, race, and family structure.

Results: Compared to mothers who worked a regular day shift, mothers who worked a flexible variable schedule were 7 percentage points more likely to volunteer in their children’s school, 8 percentage points more likely to regularly communicate with other parents, 9 percentage points less likely to say that inability to get off work is a barrier, and attended 2 more school events throughout the school year. We found no associations between other types of work schedules and parents’ involvement in school, with the exception that mothers who worked the night shift were less likely to say that inability to get off work is a barrier.

Conclusion and Implications: Working a regular nonstandard shift or variable shift does not appear to be a barrier to parental involvement in their child’s school. Working a flexible variable shift, however, appears to facilitate parents’ involvement in school, highlighting the importance of work schedule flexibility for parents’ ability to balance work and family demands.