How a Parent’s Experience at Work Impacts Their Kids

By Maureen Perry-Jenkins
Harvard Business Review| Originally published January 31, 2023

It’s no secret that our jobs can have a major impact on our lives outside of work. Financially, mentally, and physically, our workplace experiences can offer a welcome boost — or take a significant toll. But what many employers don’t realize is that the effects of work aren’t limited to workers’ individual personal lives. To the contrary, how employees spend their time at work can have substantial spillover effects on their friends, partners, and perhaps most critically, their children.

To explore the impact of parents’ work on their children’s development, my team and I conducted a longitudinal study that followed more than 370 low-wage, working-class families over more than ten years, from pregnancy through their first several years as parents. (We intentionally focused on low-wage families, as they generally receive far less attention in the work-family literature while facing some of the greatest challenges.) We complemented in-home interviews and first-hand observations of parent-child interactions with rigorous assessments and reports from parents and teachers, and through this comprehensive analysis, we found that the children’s developmental outcomes were directly and significantly affected by their parents’ work lives.

Specifically, the data showed that parents who experienced more autonomy on the job and who had more-supportive supervisors and coworkers were in turn warmer and more engaged when interacting with their infants. And this has major, long-term implications for those infants’ development, as a vast body of research has shown that warm and responsive parenting in a child’s first year of life boosts their level of attachment with their parents as well as their emotional regulation, social skills, and academic achievement. Indeed, when we checked back in with these families years later, we consistently saw that the children of employees who had had more-positive work experiences in their first years as parents had better reading and math skills, better social skills, and fewer behavioral problems in the first grade. Importantly, all of these results held for both mothers and fathers: Any parent’s experience in the workplace had a direct and measurable impact on their kids’ development through infancy and early childhood.

For example, one father in the study — Tyson — worked for a shipping company that mandated he use a monitor that let his boss track his every move as he delivered packages. Tyson felt a complete lack of trust from his company and reported feeling highly stressed, despite being a top performer. He described how he came home from work tired and frustrated and, as a result, he explained that “I just don’t have the energy for a needy baby.” Conversely, Sonya was a home health aide whose boss empowered her to manage her time independently and asked for her input on how best to support clients. Sonya felt respected by her supervisor, and this positivity spilled over into how she parented her first-grade daughter, Kaya: When Sonya returned home from work, she was hands-on, engaged, warm, and joyful in her interactions with Kaya.

So what does this mean for employers? From a corporate social responsibility standpoint, it’s clear that if work impacts employees’ children, employers have a responsibility to ensure that the impact is as positive as possible. And from a business standpoint, it’s also in companies’ best financial interests to pay attention to the effects of work on their employees’ families. After all, when workers face challenges with their partners or kids, this stress inevitably spills over into the workplace, leading to lower productivity, more sick days and personal time off, and an unhappier, less motivated workforce.

The good news is, providing working parents with the autonomy and supportive relationships that our research shows can have such a powerful, positive impact on children’s wellbeing is  easier than one might expect…[MORE]

+

To read the entire article by Maureen Perry-Jenkins at the Harvard Business Review website , visit: How a Parent’s Experience at Work Impacts Their Kids