Parental Work Schedules and Child Overweight or Obesity: Does Family Structure Matter?

As the American economy continues to move toward a 24/7 workforce (Presser, 2003), non-standard employment (work that occurs outside traditional daytime hours) has increased. Recent reports indicate that at least a fifth of working Americans are engaged in nonstandard shift work, as is at least one adult in a third of dual-earner households (Alterman, Luckhaupt, Dahlhamer, Ward, & Calvert, 2013; Dunifon, Kalil, Crosby, Su, & DeLeire, 2013; McMenamin, 2007; Presser & Ward, 2011). Analyses of a cohort of youth age 14-21 in 1978 found that 9 out of 10 had worked at some type of nonstandard shift by age 39 (Presser & Ward, 2011). Although a growing literature has investigated the effects of nonstandard employment, its impacts on the health and well-being of children are not fully understood (Presser & Ward, 2011).Recently, a few studies have examined whether maternal nonstandard shift work is associated with child obesity (Champion et al., 2012; Miller & Han, 2008; Morrissey, Dunifon, & Kalil, 2011). Child obesity is one of the major public health problems of the modern era, and, like nonstandard employment, it became increasingly common in the last 25 years of the 20th century. Nearly one third of U.S. children and adolescents are currently overweight or obese, a rate that has remained essentially unchanged in the past 10 years (Ogden, Carroll, Kit, & Flegal, 2014). Obesity has serious implications for both concurrent and future health and is thus a major indicator of overall well-being.In this study, we examined the association between parental work schedules and child overweight or obesity. The study makes a number of contributions. First, we used detailed information on work schedules for both mothers and fathers as well as child overweight and obesity, using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS; http://www.fragilefamilies.princeton.edu/), a predominantly low-income sample. Second, we leveraged these longitudinal data to estimate the relationship between parental work schedules and child overweight or obesity in an effort to reconcile inconsistent conclusions from previous work. Finally, we examined whether the relationship between work schedules and overweight or obesity varies by family structure, an important contribution given increasing family complexity in the United States.BackgroundParental Employment and Child ObesityBeginning with the early and influential work of Anderson and colleagues (Anderson, Butcher, & Levine, 2003), a number of studies have examined the link between maternal working hours and child overweight or obesity. The majority of these studies has found that the duration or intensity of maternal employment is associated with increased risk for overweight or obesity, increased body mass index (BMI), or faster than average BMI growth as children age (Benson & Mokhtari, 2011; Coley & Lombardi, 2012; Phipps, Lethbridge, & Burton, 2006; Ruhm, 2008; Scholder, 2008).Both previous theory and research suggest a number of different mechanisms by which parental employment might affect obesity. Economic models of parental work and household routines suggest that parents make trade-offs among paid work in the marketplace, work in the home, and leisure time (Leibowitz, 2005). Each additional hour spent in paid employment thus reduces time in the home, with direct impacts on routines and behaviors that have salience for obesity. For example, parents who work longer hours may not be able to devote the necessary time to prepare meals at home and instead may favor quicker or more convenient options, such as dining out (Crepinsek & Burstein, 2004) or the use of preprepared meals, both of which are of poorer nutritional content than meals prepared from scratch at home (French, Story, & Jeffery, 2001). This effect may be more pronounced if working parents opt to spend leisure time with their children rather than in homemaking activities (Monna & Gauthier, 2008). …