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BackgroundMost existing studies on maternal employment and childhood overweight/obesity are from the USA. They are predominantly cross-sectional and show a consistent linear association between the two. Less is known about the joint impact of fathers’ and mothers’ work hours on childhood overweight and obesity.ObjectivesTo examine the impact of maternal and paternal work hours on overweight/obesity among children aged 1–6 years in Germany using longitudinal data.MethodsChild body weight and height and their parents’ work hours were collected for 2413 children at ages 0–1, ages 2–3 and ages 5–6. Overweight and obesity was defined using the body mass index percentiles based on the Cole LMS-Method. Random effects model was conducted, adjusting for demographic, socioeconomic and health characteristics of parents and children.ResultsCompared with non-employment, when mothers worked 35 or more hours per week, the risk for child overweight and obesity increased among preschool children. When fathers worked 55 or more hours per week, this effect was strengthened and maternal part-time hours (24–34 per week) also became a risk for child overweight and obesity. The effect was mainly found in high-income families.ConclusionsBoth mothers’ and fathers’ long work hours matter to young children’s overweight status. Employment protection and work time regulation for both working parents during the first 6 years of the child’s life should be considered in future policy.

Objective This study examines the relationship between telecommuting and gender inequalities in parents' time use at home and on the job before and during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Background Telecommuting is a potential strategy for addressing the competing demands of work and home and the gendered ways in which they play out. Limited evidence is mixed, however, on the implications of telecommuting for mothers' and fathers' time in paid and unpaid work. The massive increase in telecommuting due to COVID‐19 underscores the critical need to address this gap in the literature. Method Data from the 2003–2018 American Time Use Survey (N = 12,519) and the 2020 Current Population Survey (N = 83,676) were used to estimate the relationship between telecommuting and gender gaps in parents' time in paid and unpaid work before and during the pandemic. Matching and quasi‐experimental methods better approximate causal relationships than prior studies. Results Before the pandemic, telecommuting was associated with larger gender gaps in housework and work disruptions but smaller gender gaps in childcare, particularly among couples with two full‐time earners. During the pandemic, telecommuting mothers maintained paid work to a greater extent than mothers working on‐site, whereas fathers' work hours did not differ by work location. Conclusion In the context of weak institutional support for parenting, telecommuting may offer mothers a mechanism for maintaining work hours and reducing gender gaps in childcare, while exacerbating inequalities in housework and disruptions to paid work.

In the second decade of the 21st century, research on work and family from multiple disciplines flourished. The goal of this review is to capture the scope of this work-family literature and to highlight both the valuable advances and problematic omissions. In synthesizing this literature, the authors show that numerous scholars conducted studies and refined theories that addressed gender, but far fewer examined racial and class heterogeneity. They argue that examining heterogeneity changes the understanding of work-family relations. After briefly introducing the broad social, political, and economic context in which diverse work-family connections developed, this review uses this context to address the following three main themes, each with subtopics: (a) unpaid work including housework, parenting as work, and kin work; (b) paid work including work timing and hours, money (i.e., motherhood penalty, fatherhood bonus, marriage bonus, kin care penalty), relationships (i.e., coworkers, supervisors), and work experiences (i.e., complexity, autonomy, urgency); and (c) work-family policies (i.e., scheduling and child care). Given the breadth of the work-family literature, this review is not exhaustive but, rather, the authors synthesize key findings on each topic followed by a critique, especially with regard to the analyses of differences and inequalities around gender, race, ethnicity, and social class.

The authors investigated gender differences in couple parents' subjective time pressure, using detailed Australian time use data (n=756 couples with minor children). They examined how family demand, employment hours, and non-standard work schedules of both partners relate to each spouse's non-employment time quality (\"pure\" leisure, \"contaminated\" leisure, multitasking housework, and child care) and subjective feelings of being rushed or pressed for time. Mothers averaged more contaminated leisure and less pure leisure and did much more unpaid work multitasking than fathers. These results suggest that these differences in time quality do partially account for mothers feeling more rushed than fathers. Weekend work was associated with mothers having less pure leisure, but not contaminated leisure. The opposite was found for fathers. Spousal work characteristics also related to time use and feeling rushed in gendered ways, with male long work hours positively associated with higher time pressure for mothers as well as the fathers who worked them.

Objective This study uses time diaries to examine how parents' work arrangements shaped their time use at home and work during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Background The pandemic transformed home and work life for parents, disrupting employment and childcare. The shift to work from home offered more flexibility to manage increased care burdens, but the lack of separation between work and family also likely contributed to more challenging work environments, especially among mothers. Method This study relies on the 2017–2020 American Time Use Survey and matching to estimate changes in time use among parents working from home and on site in the pandemic relative to comparable parents prior to the pandemic. Results Data showed no overall increases in primary childcare time among working parents. Parents working from home during the pandemic, however, spent more time in the presence of children and supervising children, much in combination with paid work. Mothers working from home increased their supervisory parenting while working for pay more than fathers, and they more often changed their paid work schedules. The study's main findings were robust to gendered unemployment and labor force exits. Conclusion Parents, especially mothers, working from home responded to childcare demands through multitasking and schedule changes with potential negative effects on work quality and stress. Parents working on site during the pandemic experienced smaller changes in time use. Implications The pandemic has generated new inequalities between those with and without the flexibility to work from home, and exacerbated gender inequalities among those working from home.

Research has associated parenthood with greater daily time commitments for fathers and mothers than for childless men and women, and with deeper gendered division of labor in households. How do these outcomes vary across countries with different average employment hours, family and social policies, and cultural attitudes to family care provision? Using nationally representative time-use data from the United States, Australia, Italy, France, and Denmark (N = 5,337), we compare the paid and unpaid work of childless partnered adults and parents of young children in each country. Couples were matched (except for the United States). We found parents have higher, less gender-equal workloads than nonparents in all five countries, but overall time commitments and the difference by parenthood status were most pronounced in the United States and Australia.

Using two waves of paired data from a population sample of 10- to 13-year-old Australian children (5,711 father–child observations), the authors consider how the hours, schedules, intensity, and flexibility of fathers' jobs are associated with children's views about fathers' work and family time. A third of the children studied considered that their father works too much, one eighth wished that he did not work at all, and one third wanted more time with him or did not enjoy time together. Logistic regression modeling revealed that working on weekends, being time pressured, being unable to vary start and stop times, and working long hours generated negative views in children about fathers' jobs and time together. The time dilemmas generated by fathers' work devotions and demands are salient to and subjectively shared by their children.

Although flexible work arrangements have the potential to reduce gender inequality and work-family conflict, the implications of requesting flexible work are poorly understood. In this paper, I argue that because flexwork arrangements in the United States are ambiguous and uncertain, people draw on cultural beliefs about gender to define flexwork and evaluate flexworkers. I conducted a controlled online experiment to examine the consequences of making a flexible work request and to examine how these consequences vary by accommodation type and by gender and parental status of the requester. Participants evaluated employees who requested flexible work more negatively than employees who did not request flexible work, and evaluated workers who requested telecommuting (or \"flexplace\") arrangements more negatively than workers who requested flextime arrangements. Men and women who requested flexible work for reasons related to childcare were evaluated more positively than those who requested flexible work for reasons unrelated to childcare. I also found evidence of a fatherhood bonus. Men who made flexplace requests to care for a child were significantly advantaged compared to men who made flexplace requests for reasons unrelated to childcare. They were also advantaged compared to women who made flexplace requests to care for a child.

Objective: The authors examined associations between resident and nonresident fathers' nonstandard work schedules, work hours, and their level of involvement with their young children in the United States. Background: Nonstandard work schedules may negatively impact father involvement either directly by reducing fathers' availability or indirectly by taking a toll on their well-being. Prior research on nonstandard schedules and father involvement has focused on two-parent households, yet nonstandard schedules may pose similar or greater challenges to nonresident fathers. Method: Using data on 1,598 resident and 759 nonresident fathers from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we estimated regression models to test associations between fathers' nonstandard work schedules, work hours, and fathers' involvement—accessibility, engagement, and responsibility—controlling for confounding factors and using residualized change models. For nonresident fathers only, we estimated associations between nonstandard schedules, work hours, and child support. Results: Among nonresident fathers, working evenings was associated with lower engagement relative to working standard hours only and other nonstandard schedules, and in some models, working a variable schedule was associated with greater responsibility relative to other nonstandard schedules. Among resident fathers, working any nonstandard schedule versus standard hours only was associated with greater responsibility, and total work hours were negatively associated with each measure of involvement. Conclusion: The findings suggest that fathers' work schedules may be an important factor in understanding resident and nonresident fathers' involvement with their young children.

This study estimates random effects and difference-in-difference-in-differences models to examine the initial impacts of COVID-19 on the employment and hours of unincorporated self-employed workers using monthly panel data from the Current Population Survey. For these workers, effects were visible in March as voluntary social distancing began, largest in April as complete shutdowns occurred, and slightly smaller in May as some restrictions were eased. We find differential effects by gender that favor men, by marital status and gender that favor married men over married women, and by gender, marital, and parental status that favor married fathers over married mothers. The evidence suggests that self-employed married mothers were forced out of the labor force to care for children presumably due to prescribed gender norms and the division and specialization of labor within households. Remote work and working in an essential industry mitigated some of the negative effects on employment and hours. Among the unincorporated self-employed, married mothers were less likely to be employed and worked fewer hours during the COVID-19 pandemic than married fathers. Effects were visible in March as voluntary social distancing began, largest in April as complete shutdowns occurred, and slightly smaller in May as some restrictions were eased. Our results suggest that COVID-19 forced self-employed women back into the home due to gender norms about who cares for children. However, having a plausibly remote job or being in an essential industry helped mitigate some of the negative effects on employment and hours worked. Besides providing evidence that married mothers’presence among the self-employed has been diminished by COVID-19, we find that the pandemic hurt the unincorporated self-employed more than other types of workers. This finding provides further evidence that it is important for researchers to distinguish between the incorporated and unincorporated self-employed when analyzing variation in self-employment at different points in the business cycle.