ACF OPRE: National Study of Child Care of Low-Income Families

Chapter Seven: Work and Child Care: Stress and Flexibility for Parents

Parents’ lives are substantially affected by the extent to which work outside the home conflicts with the demands made on them by their families, and the extent to which their child care arrangements are flexible and dependable. This chapter explores the kinds of employment-related benefits that may help parents with young children, the extent to which parents are stressed by conflicting demands of work and family, and the sources of stress and flexibility in the parent’s life.

Employment-Related Benefits

At the beginning of the study, two-thirds of employed mothers had some paid holidays and 70 percent had some paid vacation. Just over half (53%) were allowed some paid time off when they are sick, and about one-quarter (28%) were allowed paid time off to care for a sick child. Only 5 percent of working parents received any direct assistance with child care from their employer (help in paying for care or on-site child care), although 16 percent reported that their employer provided information about child care, possibly through a local Resource and Referral agency. Responses varied little over time.

Balancing the Demands of Work and Family

Most parents (95%) reported that their child was able to get in touch with them at work if necessary, and a similarly high proportion (98%) said they were able to reach their child while they are at work. But more than half (55%) found it hard or very hard to take time off during the work day to take care of family matters. Also, more than half of the parents felt they had little or no control over or say in the scheduling of their work hours. Sixty percent of parents believed that employees who need time off for family reasons or try to arrange their work schedules or hours to meet family needs are less likely to get ahead in their jobs. By the end of the study, a slightly smaller proportion (54%) of employed mothers felt that their job could be threatened by requests for time off to address family needs.

Conflicts between Job and Family Demands

At the first interview, three-quarters of working parents reported some general level of conflict between the demands of their job and their family responsibilities, although only 19 percent felt "quite a bit" or "a great deal" of conflict. Over the course of the study, as children grew older, the proportion of employed parents who reported conflict between work and family diminished greatly. Almost two-thirds reported that there was little or no conflict between work and family responsibilities, compared with 25 percent earlier. Perhaps more revealing were the parents’ feelings about how their jobs affect their family lives (Exhibit 7-1). Only a small number of parents (less than 3%) agreed that job-related stress often makes them angry or irritable with their children. Asked about less serious conflicts between work and child-rearing, slightly more parents reported problems—between 16 percent and 18 percent reported that work made them impatient with their children or meant they had too little energy for their children at the end of the day.1 Overall, about a third of parents (32%) reported that a description of balancing work and family as "difficult" was somewhat or very true (Exhibit 7-2). Over time, the proportion of parents reporting these problems diminished slightly.

Exhibit 7-1: Balancing Work and Family
Percentage of Working Parents Reporting Different Levels of Stress at Home
Sample size (n=630)
	Never/ Rarely True %	Some-times True %	Often True %	Very Often True %
I don‘t have much energy for my child(ren) after work.	28.7	45.5	19.5	6.2
My job means I have little patience with my child(ren).	51.0	23.7	11.1	5.2
I have trouble putting work aside to focus on child(ren).	88.4	9.3	1.6	0.7
Work makes me angry or irritable with my child(ren).	86.0	11.4	1.6	0.9
After work, I am too tired to do much with my child(ren).	40.0	43.4	10.9	8.7

Source: Parent Interview

Exhibit 7-2: Flexibility of Jobs and Child Care
Percentage of Working Parents with Regularity of Work Schedule and Flexibility of Care
		%	%	%	%
		Not True At All	Not Usually True	Some-what True	Very True
Regularity of Work Schedule	My work schedule makes it hard to be on time.	55.1	32.6	4.3	8.0
	I work irregular hours.	60.0	16.4	4.8	18.7
	My work schedule keeps changing.	63.5	11.0	9.8	15.8
	My shift /work schedule causes stress for me, my child.	52.3	21.3	16.8	9.6
	At my work, it’s hard to deal with child care problems.	47.2	20.2	17.2	15.4
	My work schedule is not flexible to handle family needs.	35.8	41.8	10.7	11.8
Flexibility of Family Child Care Provider	I rely on my caregiver to be flexible about hours.	8.5	6.0	20.6	65.0
	My caregiver is willing to be flexible about my schedule.	2.8	2.5	14.2	80.5
	I have not had to change my schedule to keep my care.	11.6	7.4	4.6	76.4
Balancing Work and Family	I find it difficult to balance work and family.	45.0	23.3	20.5	11.2
Sample size (n=630)

Source: Parent Interview

Child Care Problems and Work

Child care arrangements themselves may be a source of disruption or stress. Child care can disrupt the parent’s work for a variety of reasons, such as when the provider is sick or goes on vacation and there is no backup, when the child is sick and cannot go to child care, or when there is a problem with the parent’s mode of transporting the child to care. Child care issues resulted in problems for working parents on an average of four days in the three months preceding the interview (or 10% of the time worked, given the average number of hours worked). This included one day of work missed because of child care needs, one day of work for which the parent was late or had to leave work early, and two days on which the parent had to make alternate child care arrangements. Some of these problems were slightly less common for mothers with another adult in the home. Overall, only 20 percent of parents rated child care as causing some or a lot of stress.

Over the course of the study, parents reported fewer days on which they had child care problems. At the last interview, parents reported an average of two days when they had to solve a child care problem either by missing work or making an alternative arrangement in the prior three months. It is also worth noting that almost half of the parents reported no child care problems in the same period.

Flexibility of Work and of Child Care

The parent’s work schedule, its irregularity and inflexibility, can contribute to the level of stress the parent feels in trying to balance work, family, and child care, particularly if the parents has irregular or changing hours which mean that their child care has to be flexible, too. The majority of parents in our sample reported that their work schedule was stable and regular (though it might be off-hours) and did not add to their stress (Exhibit 7-2). The aspect of work that the most parents reported as creating stress was their ability to deal with child care problems that arose during work hours—a third of parents reported difficulty with this aspect of their work.

On the other hand, family child care providers appeared to be a major source of flexibility for parents. Between 80 percent and 90 percent of parents agreed that they could rely on their child’s caregiver to be flexible about the child care schedule in order to match the mother’s working schedule (Exhibit 6-2). Other research has found that family child care providers, particularly informal providers, offered this kind of flexibility and support (Butler et al., 1991; Emlen et al., 1999: Fuller et al., 2000; Maleske-Samu, 1996).

Other Sources of Stress

In addition to stresses arising from the need to balance the demands of family and work, parents also experienced stress about other factors in their lives (Exhibit 7-3). The most common source of stress was worry about personal or family finances (81% reported "some" or "a lot of" stress)—hardly surprising in a low-income population. Over half of parents (59%) experienced stress because of their jobs. Forty-two percent of the mothers experienced stress because of health problems. There were only small differences in the level of stress reported by parents in different types of households or with different numbers of children under 18 living in the household.

Exhibit 7-3: Sources of Stress in the Family
Percentage of Parents at Each Level of Stress
	%	%	%	%
	No Stress	Hardly Any Stress	Some Stress	A Lot of Stress
Mother’s own health	39.0	18.7	27.4	14.9
Health of family members	40.4	21.0	29.2	9.5
Care of elderly/adult family membera	68.8	8.3	17.2	5.6
Personal or family finances	11.4	8.1	43.9	36.6
Mother’s job	20.0	20.2	43.4	16.4
Family relationships	30.7	26.7	31.2	11.4
Neighborhood safety	47.7	21.9	23.3	7.1
Sample size (n=640)

Source: Parent Interview
a For families with elderly or adult family member who needs special care (n=337)

Getting to the Caregiver’s Home

Getting the child to and from child care is, overwhelmingly, a task undertaken by the mother. A majority (68%) of mothers drove the child to and from the caregiver’s home. Other mothers took the child by public transportation (4%) or walked to the caregiver’s home (15%). For 5 percent of parents, the task of picking up and dropping off the child was assumed by the provider and, for a small number (3%) by a spouse or partner or the parent of another child. For the remaining 5 percent, transportation arrangements varied. For 14 percent of parents, transportation to child care was a problem and another 10 percent felt that the child care arrangement was too far away from home.

To understand the burden placed on parents by the transportation task, we asked the distance of the caregiver’s home from the child’s home and from the mother’s workplace, both in terms of actual miles and the time it takes to get there. On average, caregivers lived five miles away from the child’s home and 10 miles from the parent’s workplace. Ten percent of caregivers lived 10 or more miles from the child’s home and more than one-third (38%) were ten or more miles from where the mother worked. It took parents, on average, 14 minutes by car and 30 minutes by public transportation to reach the caregiver’s home. The mother then had to continue on to work, an average of 10 miles from the caregiver’s home. This trip took, on average, 22 minutes by car and 44 minutes by public transportation. The round trip, with two stops at the caregiver’s home, added more than an hour to the mother’s work day if she drove, and an hour and a half if she used public transportation.

For the 4 percent of parents who walk with their children to the caregiver’s home, the time added to the work day is considerably less. On average, the walk to the caregiver’s home takes four minutes and the parent spends an additional six minutes walking to her job. The round trip then takes about 20 minutes.

Summary of Findings

Employers were not generally seen as helpful or supportive about child care or problems with child care. A majority of parents felt they would be penalized if they needed time off or different schedules for family reasons.
Child care problems disrupted parents’ work schedule an average of two days over a three-month period but, on two additional days, alternative care arrangements were needed. Over the course of the study, the number of days for which parents reported problems with child care halved.
Family child care providers were a source of flexibility in parents’ lives, meeting their needs for child care schedules that matched work schedules.
Transporting a child to and from the child care provider before and after work added an hour to an hour and a half to the mother’s work day.

1 It is likely that parents find it easier to admit to "impatience" or unresponsiveness than to "anger." (back)

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