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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2025 Apr 1.
Published in final edited form as: Fam Relat. 2023 Jun 30;73(2):1159–1177. doi: 10.1111/fare.12917

Mothers’ work conditions, income, and parenting of young children

Kierra M P Sattler 1, Kate C Prickett 2, Robert Crosnoe 3
PMCID: PMC11068053  NIHMSID: NIHMS1939357  PMID: 38706987

Abstract

Objective:

In this study, we investigated the interplay of positive work conditions with parenting behaviors across children’s first 4 years.

Background:

Most mothers in the United States are employed in paid work during their children’s early years. Research typically has focused on the ways that such employment can conflict with the intensive demands of parenting, but it can also help mothers socially and psychologically during this important period of children’s development.

Method:

Integrating federal survey data on occupational conditions with parenting reports of job flexibility and parenting behaviors from 5,250 mothers in the nationally representative Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort, we estimated how work conditions were associated with stimulating and sensitive parenting and whether these associations were stronger for mothers with lower income.

Results:

Results of autoregressive modeling demonstrated that job flexibility, opportunities for mastery, and opportunities for connection were positively associated with a composite measure of stimulating and sensitive parenting. Significant interactions indicated that many associations were more pronounced for mothers with lower income.

Conclusion:

Our results build upon prior work, demonstrating that positive work conditions can support parenting during early childhood and that this is especially true for low-income households.

Implications:

These results bridge the work–family and parenting literatures with important policy implications, such as adopting family-friendly policies within companies.

Keywords: low income, maternal employment, parenting, work conditions

In just the past 4 decades, the proportion of women with young children working for pay in the United States has almost doubled to approximately two-thirds (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015). Although gender norms about family responsibilities have also evolved during this period, the reality is that mothers still carry the primary responsibility for child caregiving (Kotila et al., 2013). Consequently, concerns about how work conditions might influence mothers’ parenting have generated a great deal of research. Research in the work–family conflict tradition has focused on the ways that mothers’ participation in the paid labor force undermines their caregiving (Bianchi, 2000; Repetti et al., 2009), but a growing literature is focusing on the more positive spillover between women’s work conditions and their family lives (Greenhaus & Powell, 2006; Grzywacz & Butler, 2005). Identifying sources of positive spillover is especially important for mothers in more vulnerable circumstances, such as women with low income whose economic precarity and hardships add considerably to the already labor-intensive nature of rearing young children (Gassman-Pines, 2013; Raver, 2003).

To address this issue, this study integrates two theoretical perspectives—work–family facilitation and resource substitution—to conceptualize job flexibility and occupation-based opportunities to cultivate social and psychological resources that might enable mothers to engage more consistently in the kinds of stimulating and sensitive parenting behaviors that are foundational to children’s developmental trajectories (Gutman & Feinstein, 2010; Kalil et al., 2012; Landry et al., 2006; Smith, 2010). First, job flexibility includes the potential for workers to control their time or to perceive that they have such control, such as flextime and the ability to work from home. Second, opportunities for mastery refer to occupational positions with heightened odds of workers developing a sense of accomplishment (e.g., feelings of achievement, independence, and recognition). Third, opportunities for connection refer to occupational positions with heightened odds of workers engaging in socially and emotionally positive interactions (e.g., healthy work relationships, supportive management). Such opportunities are created and organized within occupational strata but are then transferrable into the home, generating a sense of efficacy, positive affect, and other resources in one context that can be deployed to cope with strains and stressors in the other (Prickett et al., 2017).

We focus on these three factors that represented distinct constructs that are more likely to support mothers’ sensitive and supportive parenting. That is, flexibility to manage time as a resource to facilitate engaged parenting activities, opportunities to build human capital that aligns with authoritative parenting, and connection that can build social capital and provide a buffer against work–family conflict stress that can spillover into parenting. Less often targeted by work–family policies, occupational opportunities for mastery and for connection are likely to be crucial components of “family-friendly” workplaces, which could be particularly important to the well-being of women with lower income. With fewer sources of support overall for handling challenges of raising young children than women with higher income, mothers experiencing economic disadvantage may derive greater benefit from any one source of support (Mirowsky & Ross, 2003). In other words, women with lower income may have less access to family-friendly jobs but gain more—in terms of parenting—when they are employed in such jobs.

The purpose of this study, therefore, is to test the hypothesis that job flexibility and occupational opportunities are associated with greater engagement in stimulating and sensitive parenting among mothers of young children and that these associations will increase in strength as mothers’ incomes decrease. This hypothesis-testing is conducted on family data from a nationally representative sample of mothers of young children in the United States (Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort [ECLS-B]) integrated with occupational data from a nationally representative sample of the U.S. workforce (Occupational Information Network, O*NET). The results may advance theorizing about work–family spillover among parents and inform policies aiming to reduce tensions between these two key ecological settings.

MATERNAL WORK CONDITIONS AND PARENTING OF YOUNG CHILDREN

Early childhood is an intensive period in which many parents invest a significant amount of time and resources to help children build foundational skills that will promote positive long-term development. A key investment that enhances young children’s cognitive and social development during this period involves parents’ sensitivity and responsiveness to children’s needs and their stimulation of children’s senses and thinking (Ainsworth, 1979; Landry et al., 2001, 2003). Yet engaging in consistently stimulating and sensitive parenting across early childhood can be challenging, especially in the face of economic constraints that create psychological strains, increase material hardship, and reduce practical supports for managing family life (Gershoff et al., 2007; Kalil et al., 2012).

Today, most U.S. mothers face such challenges of parenting young children while also participating in the paid labor force (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015; Waldfogel, 2006). Usually, discussions of maternal employment situate it as a risk factor that undermines stimulating and sensitive parenting of young children (Nomaguchi, 2006). The mechanisms for the risks of employment in general and for high-intensity employment and unstable employment in particular typically encompass work conditions that create competition between work and home or that allow negative work experiences to filter into the home—for example, employment creating time demands and other distractions that interfere with consistent parenting or generate extrafamilial stressors that undermine positive engagement with children (Bianchi & Milkie, 2010; Grzywacz & Butler, 2008; Repetti & Wang, 2014). Yet the interplay of work and family roles lies on a continuum of experiences from competition/interference (e.g., conservation of resources theory; Hobfoll et al., 2018) to support/synergy (e.g., work–family facilitation). This study moves across that continuum while also pushing beyond the economic and structural conditions of work to emphasize its social and psychological conditions.

Drawing on the first guiding theoretical model of this study, the work–family facilitation perspective emphasizes that some employment contexts offer women resources that they can use to better handle family responsibilities, including parenting (Greenhaus & Powell, 2006; Repetti & Wang, 2014). For example, some work conditions provide an example of behaviors that should be rewarded, which in turn shapes parenting values that influence parenting behaviors (Kohn, 1977; Parcel & Menaghan, 1994). This potential for conditions at work to facilitate stimulating and sensitive parenting at home warrants broader investigation, especially during the critical early childhood period. This study focuses on how job flexibility and occupational opportunities could facilitate such parenting during this period.

First, there are conditions of mothers’ actual jobs (i.e., their place of employment where they carry out their work responsibilities for pay) that might allow more control over their schedules in terms of time or location. Job flexibility includes flextime and the ability to work from home, which provide parents the opportunities to spend more physical time with their children or accommodate family responsibilities. Previous research has shown that mothers who have these options engage in higher quality parent–child interactions (Estes, 2004, 2005), report less work-to-family conflict (Behson, 2005), and report better work–life balance (Hill et al., 2003). Flexibility can often provide workers the opportunity to balance work and family time constraints (Lambert, 1999), but among low-wage workers, unpredictable schedules create higher work–family conflict (Henly & Lambert, 2014). Thus, employee-driven control of work flexibility seems to be more beneficial than employer-driven policies.

Second, there are occupational strata (i.e., the sector of the labor market in which they are employed for pay) in which, on average, more workers derive feelings of achievement, independence, recognition, and independence. These occupational strata represent opportunities for mastery, in that a person employed in them has statistically greater odds of experiences that produce such feelings. There are also occupational strata in which, on average, more workers engage in integrative social interactions, positive relationships with coworkers and consumers, and managerial support. These occupational strata represent opportunities for connection.

A mother who is exposed to opportunities for mastery and connection over time could be better positioned to engage consistently in stimulating and sensitive parenting of their young children through three main mechanisms: (a) greater feelings of self-efficacy, in which the sense that one is achieving goals at work might make parenting seem less daunting; (b) better mental health, enabling people to tackle challenges, cope with strains, and be less affected by the highs and lows of family life; and (c) more sociability, which can keep parents engaging in and prioritizing their relationships. Prior research provides evidence of these links between employment and parenting, such that work complexity predicts warmer and more responsive parenting (Greenberger et al., 1994), independence at work predicts more positive family relationships and better interpersonal functioning at home (Costigan et al., 2003; Grzywacz & Butler, 2005; Perry-Jenkins et al., 2000; Wang & Repetti, 2013), and more supportive and less conflictual relationships at work predicts lower work-to-family conflict and closer relationships with children (Behson, 2005; Byron, 2005; Costigan et al., 2003; Repetti, 1994).

The first aim of this study is to evaluate empirically the work–family facilitation perspective and related research that both job flexibility and occupational opportunities are relevant dimensions of maternal employment for understanding women’s parenting of young children. The hypothesis to be tested is that mothers with more job flexibility and in occupational strata with more opportunities for mastery and opportunities for connection will engage in more stimulating and sensitive parenting as their children develop from infancy to school entry.

INCOME, MATERNAL WORK CONDITIONS, AND PARENTING OF YOUNG CHILDREN

Just as work–family facilitation (or conflict) can differentially benefit (or hurt) women in diverse personal and structural circumstances, not all mothers will respond to work conditions in the same way (Perry-Jenkins & MacDermid, 2013). Some women may enjoy many advantages in life that buffer against the potential strains of parenting young children, and others may face numerous challenges that increase their need for help. Income is one way to capture this dynamic between advantages and challenges across ecological contexts. Lower income mothers of young children are less likely than other mothers to be in the kinds of occupations that provide flexibility and opportunities for mastery and connection (Coley & McPherran Lombardi, 2014; Waldfogel, 2006), but do women with lower income benefit more than other women from such occupations when they have them?

Drawing on the second guiding theoretical model of this study, the resource substitution perspective suggests that lower income mothers will benefit more from job flexibility and occupational opportunities if they have access to them (Mirowsky & Ross, 2003). This perspective contextualizes any one resource within the overall level of resources available to a person in need. If someone has multiple resources, any one resource is more redundant and less likely to make a significant difference. If resources are scarcer, the potential for any one resource to have a meaningful effect increases. In terms of income, work conditions, and mothering, higher income women can access many resources (e.g., additional childcare, mental health services, or household assistance), which means there is a greater likelihood that resources from having a specific job or being in a specific occupation will be redundant with other resources and have less of an effect on their parenting. In contrast, lower income women have fewer resources to manage the demands of work and family, so resources derived from positive work conditions may matter more to their parenting (Duncan et al., 2007; Kalil et al., 2012).

In line with resource substitution, some evidence suggests that income does moderate links between maternal employment and some family outcomes. For example, among lower income families, maternal employment is associated with more emotionally supportive home environments (Buehler et al., 2014; Vandell & Ramanan, 1992), supervisor recognition is associated with warmer mother–child interactions (Gassman-Pines, 2011), and a lack of positive work policies and conditions is associated with worse child and maternal health (Strazdins et al., 2010). Positive work conditions might also alleviate financial stress in lower income families and chip away at some of the disadvantages that they face in terms of practical supports for rearing children on a tight and unpredictable schedule (Wang & Repetti, 2013).

The second aim of this study, therefore, is to investigate how the associations between mothers’ job flexibility and occupational opportunities and their parenting behaviors vary by income. Following resource substitution, the hypothesis is that lower income mothers will derive more benefit—in terms of greater engagement in stimulating and sensitive parenting—from employment in occupations that provide more opportunities for mastery and connection or jobs with more flexibility.

METHODS

Data

ECLS-B is a nationally representative sample of approximately 10,700 children born in the United States in 2001. Data collection was sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to capture the home and education experiences of U.S. children through age 5. Following a multistage stratified sampling frame with some purposeful oversampling (e.g., twins, low birthweight children, American Indian children), data were collected when the child was 9 months, 2 years, 4 years, and 5 years old through in-home interviews with the mother. The analytical sample for this study (n = 5,250, rounded to the nearest 50 per NCES instructions) used data from the first three waves and excluded children who had mothers under 15 years at birth. Additionally, children must have had a valid longitudinal sampling weight, and the primary respondent must have been the biological mother at all waves. Lastly, the sample was limited to mothers who were employed for at least one wave of data. Occupational characteristics were drawn from O*NET and merged with ECLS-B interviews at the 9-month, 2-year, and 4-year assessments. This study was deemed exempt by the authors’ institutional review board.

Measures

Table 1 presents descriptive information on all controls, work conditions, and outcomes.

TABLE 1.

Weighted sample description (n = 5,250)

9 months 2 years 4 years
%/M %/M %/M
Flextime 0.41 0.41 0.48
Work from home 0.17 0.18 0.21
Achievement (1–7 scale) 3.77 1.02 3.70 1.05 3.83 1.07
Independence (1–7 scale) 3.95 0.23 3.93 0.26 3.92 0.29
Recognition (1–7 scale) 3.24 0.98 3.21 0.99 3.31 1.00
Relationships (1–7 scale) 5.11 0.69 5.08 0.68 5.12 0.67
Support (1–7 scale) 4.34 0.52 4.37 0.53 4.35 0.52
Stimulating and sensitive parenting (1–50 at 9 months, 1–7 at 2 and 4 years) 34.75 4.44 4.44 0.87 4.33 0.84
Income-to-needs 2.82 2.47 2.92 2.51
Number of siblings 0.89 1.04 1.00 1.07 1.27 1.05
Region
 Northeast 0.18 0.17 0.17
 Midwest 0.23 0.23 0.23
 South 0.37 0.37 0.37
 West 0.22 0.22 0.22
Family structure
 Married 0.66 0.67 0.67
 Other marital status 0.07 0.08 0.11
 Never married 0.27 0.25 0.22
Maternal employment
 Full time 0.35 0.38 0.42
 Part time 0.16 0.17 0.17
 Nonstandard shift work 0.21 0.19 0.21
 Not working in paid employment 0.29 0.26 0.20
Maternal depression 0.05 0.07 0.06
Maternal education
 No high school diploma/GED 0.17
 High school diploma/GED 0.33
 Some college/associate degree 0.26
 College degree or more 0.24
Maternal age (years) 27.39 6.11
Maternal race/ethnicity
 Non-Hispanic White 0.58
 Non-Hispanic Black 0.15
 Hispanic White 0.21
 Other race/ethnicity 0.05
Foreign-born 0.18
Child is female 0.48
Child born at low birthweight 0.06
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Note. Sample size rounded to nearest 50th per National Center for Education Statistics requirements. Standard deviation provided for means. GED = general education diploma.

Stimulating and sensitive parenting

The focal parenting outcome was measured by the Nursing Child Assessment Teaching Scale (NCATS; Summer & Spietz, 1994) at 9 months and the Two Bags Task at 2 and 4 years old (e.g., Cabrera et al., 2011, 2017). The NCATS involved in-home videotaped interactions and assessed parents’ responsiveness to infant cues. Interviewers instructed parents to select from a list of age-appropriate activities to teach children a new task. The scale included a sum of 50 dichotomous items about the presence of certain behaviors, such as “Caregiver positions child so child is safely supported” (for a complete list of items, see Summer & Spietz, 1994), with higher scores indicating more positive parenting (Nord et al., 2006). The interrater reliability for this scale was high (α = 0.87). For the 2- and 4-year assessments, the NCATS was replaced by the Two Bags Task (Nord et al., 2006), a modification of the Three Bags Task that was used in the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Child Care Research Network (Love et al., 2005; Owen et al., 1996). The Three Bags Task scale development and reliability was based on the Early Head Start population (further information can be found Andreassen et al., 2007; Brady-Smith et al., 1999; Love et al., 2002). The Two Bags Task is a semistructured activity in which parents were instructed to help children play with two different sets of toys in numbered bags while being videotaped. Trained coders scored their interactions on positive regard (2-year wave only, α = .97), sensitivity (2-year wave only, α = .94), emotional support (4-year wave only, α = .97), and stimulating cognitive development (both waves, 2-year α = .97 and 4-year α = .96) using a 7-point Likert scale with values of 1 (very low) to 7 (very high). Further information on staff training and reliabilities can be found in the report by Najarian et al. (2010). Composite measures of stimulating and sensitive parenting are provided in the dataset, which allows for the comparison of parenting across waves of assessment. The provided composite of stimulating and sensitive parenting averaged the sensitivity, positive regard, and stimulating cognitive development subscales at the 2-year interview and averaged the emotional support and stimulating cognitive development subscales at the 4-year interview (M = 4.44, α = .81 at 2-year wave and .74 at 4-year wave).

Maternal job flexibility

ECLS-B allowed operationalization of job flexibility with self-reported binary variables (at all assessments). For flexibility of work hours, employed mothers reported whether they were eligible for flexible hours or flextime (1 = yes; 0 = no). They also reported whether they could do any of their work from home (1 = yes; 0 = no).

Maternal occupational opportunities

The O*NET database was used to operationalize measures for the occupational-level conceptualization of opportunities for mastery and for connection (Cozzolino et al., 2018; Kuo & Raley, 2016; Raley et al., 2017). O*NET contains information on the qualities of approximately 900 occupational categories representative of the U.S. workforce (Alterman et al., 2008). Participants were surveyed on a rolling basis in a sampling frame organized by the broad corporate environment, business size and type, and the number of employed individuals with random sampling based on the proportion of the people in the labor market working at their establishment type (Dye & Silver, 1999). In line with those O*NET work–family studies cited earlier in the article, we averaged occupational characteristics across the 22 occupational codes (the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ major Standard Occupational Classification [SOC] code) available in ECLS-B. Although there are a limited number of occupational codes available in the dataset, the occupational opportunities we selected to tap the core dimensions of mastery and connection (discussed subsequently) demonstrated the greatest reliability, with less within-occupation variation compared with cross-occupation variance after collapsing values to match the major SOC codes. The weighted-average occupational variables were merged with ECLS-B at the three focal waves. The five O*NET variables were measured at all assessments on a scale of 1 to 7, with higher values indicating “better” work environments.

Specifically, opportunities for mastery included measures of achievement, independence, and recognition. Achievement measured the extent to which workers in this occupation felt a sense of accomplishment from their jobs. Independence measured if they felt they had the ability to make decisions on their own. Recognition tapped into whether they received recognition for their work. Opportunities for connection included relationships and support. Relationships assessed whether employees felt they could work with others in a non-competitive manner. Support measured whether they had supportive management. These O*NET scales were mean-centered for multivariate analyses; mothers without an occupational status, such as not working in paid employment, were assigned a scale score of zero. As explained in the next section on modeling these measures, model coefficients should be interpreted compared with the maternal work status and schedule dummy variables.

Income-to-needs

At all three assessments, household income was measured on a scale ranging from 1 ($5,000 or less) through 13 ($200,001 or more). This variable was recoded as the midpoint of each income category and then divided by the poverty thresholds based on the U.S. Census for different household sizes to measure income-to-needs.

Covariates

Time-varying variables at each wave helped to account for confounds in associations among work conditions, income, and parenting as well as sample diversity. Mothers’ employment status and schedule included four dummy variables: (a) full-time hours (35 hours per week or more), standard schedule (work conducted predominately between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m.); (b) part-time hours (less than 35 hours per week), standard schedule; (c) full-time or part-time hours, nonstandard schedule (work conducted predominately between 2 p.m. and 6 a.m.) or varying schedule (a split or rotating shift, that alternates night and daytime work); (d) unemployed, looking for work or not working, not looking for work. For readability, these categories will be referred to as (a) full-time work, (b) part-time work, (c) nonstandard shift work, and (d) not working in paid employment.

Maternal union status was assessed by dummy variables (married, other marital status, or never married). Maternal depression was dichotomized (1 = the mother reported clinical levels of depressive symptoms, 0 = any present symptoms did not reach clinical levels). For the 9-month and 4-year waves, clinical levels were based on the Center for Epidemiological Studies of Depression (C-ESD) scale (Radloff, 1977). Mothers responded to 12 questions related to depression, such as how often they felt blue during the past week (1 = rarely or never through 4 = most or all days); summed scores of 16 or more indicated depression (Feinberg et al., 2012). At 2 years, mothers completed the Composite International Diagnostic Interview—Short Form (CIDI-SF; Kessler et al., 1998). Clinical levels were indicated by affirmative answers to five or more questions, such as whether they felt sad or depressed for 2 or more weeks in a row (Feinberg et al., 2012). Number of siblings was a continuous variable. Families’ geographic region was measured by dummy variables (Northeast, Midwest, West, or South). Time-invariant controls from the 9-month interview included maternal race/ethnicity (dummy variables of non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, Hispanic, or some other race/ethnicity), maternal education (dummy variables for less than high school diploma/GED, high school diploma/GED, some college experience/associate degree, college degree or more), maternal age in years (continuous scale), nativity (0 = not born in United States, 1 = born in United States), child gender, and low birthweight status.

Analytical Strategy

All analyses proceeded in two stages using structural equation modeling in Mplus 7.4 (Muthén & Muthén, 2015). For a more stringent model of the associations between work conditions and parenting, we examined how prior work conditions predicted future parenting while controlling for prior parenting (see Figure 1). Compared with within-time analyses, which are only able to provide correlational associations, this modeling allowed for investigation of directionality between predictors and outcomes. To assess how work conditions were associated with later parenting, the first stage estimated a lagged panel model in which work conditions and parenting at age 2 years were simultaneously regressed on work conditions and parenting at 9 months while work conditions and parenting at 4 years were simultaneously regressed on work conditions and parenting at age 2 years. Of note, the cross-diagonal path from earlier parenting to later work conditions was not estimated because it was not the focus of the study. To assess whether the associations between work conditions and parenting varied based on income, the second stage included moderation analyses, in which the cross-diagonal path between work conditions at 9 months and parenting at 2 years was interacted with income-to-needs at 9 months and the cross-diagonal path between work conditions at 2 years and parenting at 4 years was interacted with income-to-needs at 2 years. To examine the unique “effect” of specific work conditions on parenting behaviors, each model focused on a single work condition while including all time points.

FIGURE 1.

FIGURE 1

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Complete analytical model

Full information maximum likelihood estimation (FIML) accounted for missing data. All analyses included longitudinal sampling weights to ensure that the analytical sample was representative of children born in the United States in 2001 as well as stratification and clustering variables to estimate standard errors more accurately in the presence of nesting in the sample. Model fit statistics were also estimated for each analysis. Fit criteria included chi-square test of model fit (good fit is a nonsignificant value), comparative fit index (CFI; good fit > .95), root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA; good fit < .05), and standardized root mean residual (SRMR; good fit < .08).

RESULTS

Referring back to Table 1, the mean family income-to-needs at 9 months in the sample was 2.82, indicating that the average family income was at 282% of the poverty threshold. At baseline, approximately 35% of mothers were employed full time, 16% were employed part time, 21% were employed in nonstandard shift work, and 29% were not in paid employment. The percentage of mothers in full-time and part-time employment increases at later waves. Approximately two thirds of mothers were married at each time point, and the sample was diverse in terms of education (17% had no high school degree and 24% had a college degree) and race/ethnicity (58% White, 15% Black, 21% Hispanic, 5% other race/ethnicity).

Linking work conditions to women’s parenting behaviors

The first aim of the study was to test the hypothesis that work conditions (job flexibility and occupational opportunities) would predict more stimulating and sensitive parenting over time. Table 2 presents the results of a series of models testing this hypothesis for each work condition (job flexibility, opportunity for mastery, and opportunity for connection), all of which included the full set of covariates and had good model fit.

TABLE 2.

Standardized coefficients from cross-lagged autoregressive models predicting sensitive and supportive parenting by work conditions (n = 5,250)

Independent variables at t – 1 Model 1: Flextime Model 2: Work from home
Parenting at
2 years		 Parenting at
4 years		 Parenting at
2 years		 Parenting at
4 years
Job flexibility 0.00 (.02) 0.04 (.02)* 0.05 (.02)** 0.04 (.02)*
Income-to-needs 0.09 (.02)*** 0.05 (.02)* 0.08 (.02)*** 0.06 (.02)*
R 2 0.22 0.23 0.22 0.23
Independent variables at t – 1 Model 3: Achievement Model 4: Independence Model 5: Recognition
Parenting at
2 years		 Parenting at
4 years		 Parenting at
2 years		 Parenting at
4 years		 Parenting at
2 years		 Parenting at
4 years
Opportunity for mastery 0.06 (.02)** 0.05 (.02)* 0.04 (.02)** 0.04 (.02)* 0.05 (.02)* 0.04 (0.02)
Income-to-needs 0.08 (.02)*** 0.06 (.02)* 0.08 (.02)*** 0.06 (.02)** 0.08 (.02)*** 0.06 (.02)*
R 2 0.22 0.23 0.22 0.23 0.22 0.23
Independent variables at t –
1		 Model 6: Relationships Model 7: Support
Parenting at
2 years		 Parenting at
4 years		 Parenting at
2 years		 Parenting at
4 years
Opportunity for connection 0.05 (.02)* 0.05 (.02)** −.02 (.02) −0.01 (0.02)
Income-to-needs 0.09 (.02)*** 0.07 (.02)** 0.09 (.02)*** 0.07 (.02)**
R 2 0.22 0.23 0.22 0.23
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Note. Weighted estimates. Ns rounded to nearest 50 per National Center for Education Statistics guidelines. All models controlled at t – 1 for mothers’ employment status, age, education level, race, country of origin, union status, child gender, low birth weight status, and region.

***

p < .001.

**

p < .01.

*

p < .05.

Each structural equation model (SEM) was estimated seven times, with each model including a different work condition. For example, Model 1 used flextime (the first indicator of job flexibility) as the measure of work conditions, but Model 2 replaced flextime with work from home as the measure of work conditions. Each pair of columns under the specified models (estimating 2-year and 4-year parenting), therefore, provides the main effects for a different work conditions variable, but all other aspects of the SEM remained the same. For Table 3, this process is repeated but also includes the interactions with income-to-needs.

TABLE 3.

Standardized coefficients from cross-lagged autoregressive models predicting sensitive and supportive parenting by work conditions (n = 5,250)

Independent variables at t – 1 Model 1: Flextime Model 2: Work from home
Parenting at
2 years		 Parenting at
4 years		 Parenting at
2 years		 Parenting at
4 years
Job flexibility × income-to-needs −.08 (.03)* −.06 (.04) −.04 (.03) −.04 (.03)
Job flexibility 0.05 (.03) 0.08 (.03)** 0.08 (.03)** 0.06 (.03)*
Income-to-needs 0.13 (.03)*** 0.08 (.03)** 0.09 (.02)*** 0.07 (.03)**
R 2 0.22 0.23 0.22 0.23
Independent variables at t – 1 Model 3: Achievement Model 4: Independence Model 5: Recognition
Parenting at
2 years		 Parenting at
4 years		 Parenting at
2 years		 Parenting at
4 years		 Parenting at
2 years		 Parenting at
4 years
Mastery × income-to-needs −.08 (.03)** −.07 (.03)* −.01 (.02) −.08 (.02)** −.09 (.03)** −.07 (.03)**
Opportunity for mastery 0.13 (.03)*** 0.10 (.03)** 0.05 (.02)* 0.09 (.03)*** 0.12 (.03)*** 0.10 (.03)**
Income-to-needs 0.10 (.02)*** 0.06 (.02)* 0.09 (.02)*** 0.08 (.02)** 0.10 (.02)*** 0.07 (.03)**
R 2 0.23 0.23 0.22 0.24 0.23 0.23
Independent variables at t – 1 Model 6: Relationships Model 7: Support
Parenting at
2 years		 Parenting at
4 years		 Parenting at
2 years		 Parenting at
4 years
Connection × income-to-needs −.04 (.03) −.06 (.03)* −.01 (.03) −.06 (.03)*
Opportunity for connection 0.08 (.03)* 0.09 (.03)*** −.01 (.03) 0.04 (0.03)
Income-to-needs 0.09 (.02)*** 0.07 (.02)** 0.09 (.02)*** 0.07 (.02)**
R 2 0.23 0.23 0.22 0.23
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Note. Weighted estimates. Ns rounded to nearest 50 per National Center for Education Statistics guidelines. All models controlled at t – 1 for mothers’ employment status, age, education level, race, country of origin, union status, child gender, low birth weight status, and region. Reference group is not working in paid employment.

***

p < .001.

**

p < .01.

*

p < .05.

Starting with job flexibility (Table 2), mothers’ flextime at 2 years was significantly associated with more stimulating and sensitive behaviors at 4 years (β = .04, p < .05; CFI = .959, RMSEA = .018, χ2 = 367.887/df =136, p < .001, SRMR = .007). Mother’s ability to work from home at 9 months (β = .05, p < .01) and at 2 years (β = .04, p < .05) were both associated with higher levels of sensitive and supportive parenting (CFI = .944, RMSEA = .020, χ2 = 413.935/df =136, p < .001, SRMR = .008).

For opportunities for mastery, opportunities for achievement in their jobs at 9 months was related to significantly more stimulating and sensitive parenting at 2 years (β = .06, p < .01; CFI = .948, RMSEA = .020, χ2 = 428.586/df =136, p < .001, SRMR =.008). At 2 years, achievement at work was also significantly associated with parenting behaviors at 4 years (β = .05, p < .05). Opportunities for independence at work was significantly related to more positive parenting behaviors in the 9-month to 2-year period (β = .04, p < .01; CFI = .956, RMSEA = .016, χ2 = 311.558/df = 136, p < .001, SRMR = .007) and the 2- to 4-year period (β = .04, p < .05). Opportunities for recognition at 9 months was significantly related to parenting at 2 years (β = .05, p < .05; CFI = .923, RMSEA = .025, χ2 = 570.668/df =136, p < .001, SRMR = .010).

For opportunities for connection, occupational opportunities for positive relationships at work were always related to more stimulating and sensitive parenting (β = .05, p < .05; CFI = .970, RMSEA = .014, χ2 = 275.259/df = 136, p < .001, SRMR = .006) for 9 months to 2 years; β = .05, p < .01 for 2 years to 4 years). Opportunities for support at 9 months and 2 years was not significantly related to positive parenting at 2 years and 4 years, respectively.

In sum, both types of job flexibility, all opportunities for mastery (achievement, independence, and recognition) and one opportunity for connection (relationships) were associated with more stimulating and sensitive parenting, despite small effect sizes. This pattern was most consistent for both waves of assessment; however, flextime was influential for parenting during preschool, and recognition was influential for parenting during toddlerhood.

Income-related variation between work conditions and mother’s parenting behaviors

The second aim of the study was to test the hypothesis that work conditions would be more strongly related to parenting among lower-income mothers than among other mothers. To test this hypothesized pattern of moderation, each model incorporated interactions between specific work conditions and income-to-needs at each time point, with simple slopes analyses of these associations at various levels of income-to-needs. For simple slopes analyses, “low” levels were one standard deviation below the mean for the occupational opportunity, and “high” levels were one standard deviation above the mean. Simple slopes were significant at each of these points unless otherwise noted. For job flexibility, these are dichotomous indictors and therefore, are whether the mother has access to flextime or work from home. Low-income was operationalized as an income-to-needs ratio of 1, with high-income at an income-to-needs ratio of 3. All significant models demonstrated adequate model fit: CFI = .867 to .963, RMSEA = .022 to .040, χ2 = 527.069 to 1376.314/df = 144, p < .001, SRMR = .010 to .024. Every occupational opportunity significantly interacted with income-to-needs for at least one wave (see Table 3).

For job flexibility (Table 3), income-to-needs significantly interacted with flextime at 9 months (β = −.08, p < .05). This interaction demonstrated that access to flextime was more strongly associated with stimulating and sensitive parenting for mothers with lower income. This interaction is illustrated in Supplemental Figure 1. Income-to-needs did not moderate the association between work from home and parenting at either time point.

For opportunities for mastery (Table 3), income-to-needs significantly interacted with mothers’ occupational opportunities for achievement at work at 9 months (β = −.08, p < .01) and at 2 years (β = −.07, p < .05). The interaction at 9 months is plotted in Supplemental Figure 2. At both time points, greater opportunities for achievement at work had stronger associations with stimulating and sensitive parenting at lower levels of income. Many of the remaining significant interactions followed similar patterns: (a) β = −.08, p < .01 for opportunities for independence × income-to-needs at 2 years (simple slopes not significant at income-to-needs level of (c); (b) β = −.09, p < .01 for opportunities for recognition × income-to-needs at 9 months; (c) β = −.07, p < .01 for opportunities for recognition × income-to-needs at 2 years. For opportunities for connection (Table 3), income-to-needs significantly interacted with occupational opportunities for relationships among at 2 years (β = −.06, p < .05). This general pattern suggested that low-income mothers benefited more than high-income mothers from occupational opportunities, especially with older children.

One significant interaction—for support among mothers 2 years (β = −.06, p < .05)—followed a slightly different pattern. Low-income mothers appeared to derive more benefit from this occupational opportunity, but these associations were slightly negative for women with high income. However, simple slopes analyses revealed that these differences were not significant at income-to-needs levels of 1 or 3. In other words, women with lower income still benefitted from this occupational opportunity, but women with higher income did not.

In sum, these moderation analyses supported the hypothesis that job flexibility, opportunities for mastery, and opportunities for connection might be more valuable for the parenting of mothers with low income, even if resulting in small effects. For mothers with younger children, flextime was more beneficial for parenting in the context of lower incomes. No matter the ages of their young children, two occupational opportunities (opportunities for achievement and recognition) were more strongly associated with stimulating and sensitive parenting among women with lower income. Occupational opportunities for independence, positive relationships, and a supportive environment followed this pattern only for women with low income whose children were older.

Sensitivity analyses

The analytical sample retained a more selective sample including only mothers who had ever participated in the workforce. As a robustness check, we reestimated all models with all mothers regardless of their employment statuses over time (n = 8,900). Overall, results remained remarkably similar for both direct effects and moderation analyses; however, we note three exceptions. For all models linking occupational opportunities to parenting behaviors, achievement at 2 years and independence at either time point did not reach standard levels of statistical significance. For models estimating the variability between occupational opportunities and parenting across income levels, between the 2- to 4-year period, the interaction between income-to-needs with flextime became statistically significant. Taken together, these sensitivity analyses reinforce the reliability of our results.

DISCUSSION

There is limited prior research on how maternal work conditions might positively influence early parenting. This study sought to address this gap by investigating how job flexibility and two opportunities for developing resources at the level of occupational strata—opportunities for mastery and for connection—were related to mothers’ stimulating and sensitive parenting behaviors across early childhood. Importantly, the study investigated multiple types of job flexibility and occupational opportunities—derived from an underutilized federal data source for studying the linkages among work conditions and family life—across multiple years of assessment with special attention to variability by income.

Summarizing the results, all work conditions (both job flexibility and occupational opportunities) were associated with more stimulating and sensitive behaviors depending on timing and income level. To review, job flexibility characterizes mothers’ reports of whether they have access to this benefit in their current job and occupational opportunities reflect resources that are more likely to be found in certain occupational sectors, such as achievement or recognition. Job flexibility was associated with stimulating and sensitive parenting, especially for mothers with older children. Occupational opportunities for mastery and for connection were consistently associated with stimulating and sensitive parenting across time—more specifically, achievement, independence, and relationships. The two occupational opportunities that were most consistently related to positive parenting for low-income mothers in particular (vs. higher income mothers) were achievement and recognition. Overall, job flexibility matter somewhat more consistently for all mothers when children were toddlers, whereas occupational opportunities mattered slightly more consistently for all mothers when children were infants. For mothers with lower incomes, job flexibility mattered more when children were infants and occupational opportunities mattered more when children were older. Thus, the type of occupational opportunities that mothers have access to and current job benefits are especially relevant for supporting their parenting behaviors.

One take-away is that positive work conditions, not just work strains, are relevant to understanding the parenting of young children, and such positive work conditions can come in several forms. A limited amount of prior research supports these findings that flexibility, the ability to work from home, and supportive relationships may be beneficial for family life (e.g., Behson, 2005; Costigan et al., 2003; Estes, 2005). We have extended this research by looking at how these work conditions were related to observations of stimulating and sensitive parenting across time. The ability to work from home, achievement, independence, and positive relationships were all important work conditions for parents across early childhood. The ability to work from home and positive relationships were likely important across early parenthood because they allow mothers to balance work and family demands and create a support system outside the home. Achievement and independence could be important for mothers because feeling a sense of achievement and independence might carry over positive feelings to the home environment, allowing mothers to engage more positively with their children. By extension, these positive feelings may carry over to their relationships with others in their home, like their child's father, influencing his parenting too. Future research should investigate how different kinds of positive occupational opportunities influence parenting, of both mothers and fathers, as young children develop. Further, researchers should consider how diverse family structures, such as nonresidential parents, might influence the association between occupational opportunities and parenting. These findings can then help to refine theory about the types of conditions beyond our attempt to delineate between opportunities for mastery and for connection.

Notably, the significance of different opportunities for mastery and for connection varied across time as children developed. Recognition—which had not been previously explored—was especially important for parents when children were infants, whereas flextime was especially important when children were toddlers. Although the ECLS-B and O*NET data cannot speak directly to mechanisms, there are several possible explanations. With infants, parents are still trying to navigate parenting, and opportunities for recognition may reaffirm mothers’ prior skills. Toddlerhood requires parents and children to renegotiate roles as children test independence, therefore flexibility at work might allow mothers to dictate whether to work on more or less challenging tasks after engaging in more or less challenging parenting at home.

Implications

Although mothers at all income levels appeared to benefit from positive work conditions, the evidence consistently showed that these benefits were more pronounced for low-income mothers, even though they are less likely to be in “family-friendly” occupations. These findings are in line with the resource substitution framework, in which opportunities for mastery and for connection would be less redundant and more beneficial for mothers with lower resources (i.e., women with low income). Thus, this study provides evidence that job flexibility and occupational opportunities may help mothers engage in sensitive parenting despite living in a financially stressful environment. In the sample studied here, some occupations among low-income mothers that included high levels of mastery and connection included management occupations and military occupations. Our findings suggest that other occupations should try to provide as many family-friendly policies as possible to support parents, which in turn may increase productivity. Additionally, flextime was particularly beneficial for mothers with lower income during their child’s infancy. Thus, our results suggest that when low-income mothers are able to control their own schedules, they are able to engage in more stimulating and sensitive parenting. Future research should consider how different indicators of disadvantage, such as low levels of education, might moderate the association between positive work conditions and parenting behaviors and whether the resources of work environments matter cumulatively.

Limitations

Several limitations should be considered when evaluating these results. First, although longitudinal, the data were collected at intervals that might not have adequately captured the immediate influences of positive work conditions on parenting. Future research should investigate how job flexibility and occupational opportunities influence parenting on a more temporal scale that better reflects the daily ins and outs of both work and family life. Second, this study only investigated one dimension of parenting (i.e., stimulating and sensitive parenting), but positive work conditions might influence other dimensions of parenting, such as discipline strategies or shared time. Future research should examine how specific work conditions relate to other dimensions of parent–child interactions. Third, despite a long list of controls and an autoregressive modeling strategy, this study could not establish causality. Future research could include more detailed information on parents’ work experiences in addition to observational measures of parenting behaviors, such as natural experiments to follow families as companies establish family-friendly work policies to examine how this influences parenting behaviors (e.g., Kelly et al., 2011).

Finally, although we used a novel approach to capture mothers’ occupational opportunities, the merged nationally representative data on occupational characteristics may not reflect the mothers’ lived work experiences. The opportunities for mastery and for connection referred to the average experiences in mothers’ occupational strata, tapping differences in odds of exposure. Some mothers could have been classified as having such opportunities for cultivating resources at the occupation level even when they did not enjoy the resources at the level of their actual jobs. Thus, we cannot say with confidence that null associations represent true nonsignificant association or instead simply reflect noisy measurement. Methodologically, we did find significant associations between such occupation-based work conditions and parenting behaviors as well as interactions between such conditions and income, which could reflect the reliability of these measures despite the limitations of using aggregated occupational data. More conceptually, we and others have argued that many work resources are developed at the occupational level, such as the psychological skills and rewards associated with types of work across occupations (Cozzolino et al., 2018; Ford et al., 2007; Kuo & Raley, 2016), so these measures reflect the likelihood of women in certain occupations being exposed to these rewards through their own experiences or their larger occupational networks. We also selected theoretically meaningful occupational opportunities that displayed less within-occupation variability compared with across-occupation variability (Raley et al., 2017). Lastly, we included measures of job flexibility that included mothers’ reports of their current jobs and also found direct and interactive benefits of job flexibility. This study makes an important first step in connecting an underused dataset to observations of parenting behaviors. In-depth examination of these issues will require future studies to ask more questions on women’s labor force experiences at multiple levels of analysis.

Conclusion

In the United States, many mothers are balancing the demands between paid employment and being a primary caregiver. The ways in which companies engage in family-friendly work policies, such as job flexibility and occupational opportunities for mastery and for connection, can help mothers during their children’s early years. This study provides evidence that job flexibility and occupational opportunities could potentially promote developmentally important parenting behaviors, particularly for low-income mothers who face many constraints on their time, energy, and emotional bandwidth. This is especially important in the U.S. context, where work is the primary way to support family financially, but increasingly, access to the jobs that provide these positive resources are more readily available to women who are advantaged in other ways (e.g., more education, partnered). These results provide evidence that should encourage companies to adopt a more family-friendly work environment and policies that promote nondiscriminatory and fair employment practices.

Supplementary Material

Supinfo

Funding information

The authors acknowledge the support of grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R21 HD083845, principal investigator [PI]: Robert Crosnoe; P2CHD042849, PI: Debra Umberson; T32 HD007081-35, PI: R. Kelly Raley; T32 HD049302, PI: Deborah Ehrenthal) and the National Science Foundation (1519686, co-PIs: Robert Crosnoe and Elizabeth Gershoff).

Data availability statement

The data cannot be made publicly available because the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Birth Cohort is a restricted use dataset from the National Center for Education Statistics.

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Associated Data

This section collects any data citations, data availability statements, or supplementary materials included in this article.

Supplementary Materials

Supinfo
NIHMS1939357-supplement-Supinfo.docx (21.6KB, docx)

Data Availability Statement

The data cannot be made publicly available because the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Birth Cohort is a restricted use dataset from the National Center for Education Statistics.

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