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95 5 The Role of Nonstandard Work Hours in Maternal Caregiving In our analysis of mothers’ time use, we have concentrated on the total minutes of time devoted to aggregated time categories. In Chapter 3, one of the four aggregate time categories considered is employment time on the diary day. In Chapter 4, employment time again plays a role, but it is weekly employment time that is posited to affect the allocation of daily time for child caregiving, home production, and leisure. In this chapter, we think again about employment time’s effect on caregiving, but here our concern is how the time of day of paid work affects a mother’s allocation of time to child caregiving. We provided some descriptive evidence concerning the timing of caregiving in Chapter 2. Figures 2.16 and 2.17 provide evidence of the fluctuation in the incidence of caregiving across a 24-hour period. In those figures, we record the percentage of mothers engaged in child caregiving activities at each hour of the day. A similar pattern of caregiving timing is seen across different groups of mothers, by age of the youngest child and weekend versus weekday. In each graph there is a peak in the percentage of mothers engaged in caregiving around 8 a.m. and again between 6 and 8 p.m. The peak is more pronounced on weekdays than weekends and most pronounced for young school-aged children. Figures 2.18 and 2.19 contrast the group of mothers with children aged 0–5 who are employed full time during the week to those not employed. The same bimodal pattern of caregiving time can be seen for both groups, though it is more pronounced for those employed full time. But how much does the time of day of employment affect the mother’s caregiving time choices? This is the topic we explore in this chapter. Researchers are interested in the incidence of nonstandard work, that is, employment at times other than Monday through Friday “standard hours,” for a variety of reasons. First, nonstandard work affects a significant proportion of today’s workers and their families. Second, working outside the traditional weekday work schedule may place an 96 Connelly and Kimmel additional burden on individuals and families. According to Presser (2004, p. 1), “Research suggests that such schedules undermine the stability of marriages, increase the amount of housework to be done, reduce family cohesiveness, and require elaborate child-care arrangements.”1 According to Collins et al. (2000) in The National Study of Child Care for Low-Income Families, shortages in child care slots available during nonstandard working hours are often reported by lower-income mothers. Additionally, nonstandard work can make it difficult for parents to have dinner with their children or to supervise homework. Polivka (2008) and Wight, Raley, and Bianchi (2008) show that nonstandard working married partners enjoy less time alone with their spouses. Disruption of sleep patterns can have adverse health effects, and performing shift work raises the risk of on-the-job injury (Fortson 2004). There also may be negative effects of parents’ nonstandard work on their children (Han 2005). In this chapter, we consider whether mothers who are employed any hours outside the traditional 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. workday (i.e., nonstandard work hours) on their diary day differ in their caregiving behavior. We also look at how morning work hours affect morning caregiving hours and how evening work hours affect evening caregiving hours. Of course, working standard versus nonstandard hours is, in part, a choice, and so we model the simultaneity of the choice of time spent with children and the choice of employment schedule. The methodology we use is an endogenous switching regression in which we estimate the probability of working nonstandard hours simultaneously with the hours spent on child caregiving activities during the 24-hour diary day. Recall that the ATUS contains only one day’s worth of time use information . For many analyses, such as those in Chapters 3 and 4, having only one day is somewhat problematic. We worry about chores being moved across the week to compensate for today’s time constraints. However, for the issue we are considering here, we have exactly the information we need: the interrelationships between time choices made on a particular day. In other words, we can answer the following question : If a mother worked late yesterday, did she spend less time, on average, with her children than she would have had...

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