Most American mothers and fathers have jobs outside the home. They work overtime, evenings and nights. And in 6 million families, parents hold down 2 jobs while still trying to raise their children.
At the same time, 4 of 5 parents say their biggest worry is that they don’t spend enough time with their children, a concern that is borne out by statistics showing that, on average, parents have cut the time they are with their kids by 22 hours a week since 1969.
These and other dramatic sociological changes may be a major reason for the declining educational achievements of many children, as well as the disturbing rise in children’s behavioral problems.
“We know as a nation that we have a lot of children who are failing and that an overwhelming amount of research says that parental involvement matters in kids’ outcomes,” said Dr. S. Jody Heyman of the Harvard University School of Public Health.
Heyman’s newest research shows that children whose mothers lack paid leave or flexible hours, which makes it hard to meet with teachers or deal with other school difficulties, are two to three times more likely to end up with reading, math and behavioral problems. Other studies show fathers’ schedules create similar problems.
“What hasn’t been done before is to look and ask, `do parents have the chance to help their kids?’ ” Heyman said.
“We talk about whether it’s the fault of the parents or the fault of the schools, but for some reason we have totally ignored whether all parents have the chance to meet the needs of their children, or if only the privileged parents do.”
The main problem is not the huge change in family dynamics, which has seen the vast majority of women enter the workforce between World War II and the 1990s. Children actually do better academically when their mothers have good jobs and the flexibility to take time off for their children’s needs.
Women have always worked, but in the past it was in the home and on the farm with their children nearby. Fathers first started leaving the home for paid jobs with the start of the Industrial Revolution 150 years ago, and mothers followed 100 years later. But most businesses still act as though every family has someone at home to take care of the children and do all the other household chores.
“Our workplace operates as if it were 1930 and the worker is a man who has . . . a wife at home taking care of these kinds of problems,” said Donna Lenhoff, vice president of the National Partnership for Women and Families.
The profound changes in the workforce include:
– Seventy-eight percent of mothers with children work, as do 95 percent of fathers.
– Forty percent of women and men work either evenings or some other non-standard shift.
– Fifty-five percent of non-poor working women and men lack paid leave at least some of the time, and for poor workers, such as those formerly on welfare, it’s 76 percent.
– People today work 10 hours more a week than they did a decade ago.
“The only way to keep families afloat these days is to become a hamster. You run harder and harder on a wheel but you still stay in the same place,” said Sylvia Ann Hewlett, head of the National Parenting Association.
Schools also have failed to keep up with the changing times. They still operate on turn-of-the-century schedules, with classes from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and three months off for summer vacation–this despite the fact that most parents work until 6 p.m. or later and we no longer are an agrarian society that needs children to help with the summer harvest.
The result of these conflicting forces is an overall time famine for parents.
“The lack of workplace flexibility and other out-of-date workplace policies are contributing in a major way to the problems that are occurring among children today,” Lenhoff said.
Some parents lose interest
The mismatch between work and school and parents also is contributing to the distressingly high percentage of parents who are losing interest in their children, said Laurence Steinberg, a Temple University psychologist.
In his study of more than 10,000 high school students, Steinberg found that between 25 percent and 33 percent of their parents had disengaged from their children.
“These parents did not know how their kids were doing in school. They never attended any school functions for parents. They didn’t know who their kids’ friends are . . . and they didn’t know where their kids went after school,” Steinberg said.
“Having parents who are involved in your life is probably the single most important factor in a kid’s psychological adjustment,” he added.
Children who are left alone at home after school, or whose parents do not closely monitor their activities, are the most likely to become involved with alcohol, drugs, delinquency and sex.
“This is a direct function of the lack of parental supervision,” Steinberg said.
“Employers need to be more sensitive to the needs of working parents to be involved in their kids’ schooling, and the fact that they are parents. . . . And schools need to acknowledge and accept the fact that their constituents, who are all families, have other things going on in their lives that make it difficult for them to be as engaged and as involved in schooling as they should be.”
Hewlett’s survey of parents found that more than 70 percent favored flexible adult work hours, paid leave, optional unpaid leave, keeping schools open longer, extending the academic year, affordable quality preschool and time off instead of pay for overtime.
“Our data show that 67 percent of parents can’t afford to take unpaid leave because they depend so completely on that paycheck coming in every week,” she said.
“It’s a huge problem,” Hewlett said.
“When we looked at men and women, black and white parents, blue-collar and professional parents, what we discovered is that 82 percent of all parents nationwide say that the time crunch, the time famine, the lack of enough hours to spend with their kids is their No. 1 problem,” Hewlett said.
When Harvard’s Heyman intently followed 870 working families for one week, she found that nearly 1 out of 3 parents had to cut back on at least one day during the five-day workweek to take care of school, child care or other family needs.
The burden falls most heavily on the working poor, who are least likely to have paid leave, she said. Fifty percent of the parents who had no paid sick or vacation leave did not stay home with sick children, while only 13 percent of parents with these benefits did the same.
Aware of the need for time off without the threat of being fired, Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act in 1993. But the act covers only about half of the nation’s workers. It provides for unpaid leave for births, adoptions and major illnesses.
What other nations offer
By contrast, 120 nations provide paid maternity leave, and many European countries provide paid parental leave, as well as government-supported universal preschool.
Heyman said that amending the Family and Medical Leave Act to include all parents and to provide three paid leave days for family needs could go a long way toward helping parents deal with school problems:
“Is that going to be enough to address the needs of the worst-off kids? No.
“But is that going to make a huge difference in whether the overwhelming majority of families could address the needs of their children? Yes.”
To reach her conclusions, Heyman used data from four studies–the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the National Longitudinal Survey of Labor Market Experience of Youth, the MacArthur Foundation study of midlife and a Harvard study of urban working families.
Nearly 30 percent of the children whose mothers lack paid leave or flexibility of hours are failing in math or have behavioral problems, three times the rate of children whose mothers have these benefits, the studies found.
For each hour that either parent works between 6 and 9 in the evening, their child is 17 percent more likely to do poorly in math, and for parents who work nights, their children are three times more likely to have been suspended from school, Heyman said.
When parents can’t attend parent-teacher conferences, or talk with education specialists about the problems their children are having, small problems can grow into big ones that jeopardize a child’s educational future, she said.
“It’s like a snowball rolling down hill,” Heyman said.
“In some families there’s a lot of help to stop that snowball when it’s small, when it’s medium, and even when it’s large, but not impossibly large. Other families don’t have that opportunity to intervene.
“Once kids are in trouble, they’re very unlikely to have a parent who can take the time off to help them,” Heyman said.
