A study Time or Money: the impact of parental employment on time that four to five-year-olds spend in language-building activities, published in the Australian Journal of Labour Economics looks at how a father’s working hours impacts on family life and how this effects the time spent talking, reading and singing to children.

The study noted that “Early childhood is a critical time for establishing the communication and literacy skills that shape children’s subsequent academic, social and employment opportunities. Debates around the family environments that support children’s optimal development, have focused on mothers’ workforce participation, neglecting the effects fathers’ working hours, and socioeconomic differences.”

The study looked at over 2,000 preschoolers to see how much time parents spent reading, talking or singing to them. These activities are imperative for good language skills, especially at such a critical stage in a child’s development.

Most families depend on both parents working. Pressures at work mean that many men now work longer hours and have less time to engage in learning activities with their children when they do get home.

The study found that children were effected most in households where the father worked more than 45 hours a week and the mother was also engaged in paid employment, the impact on the child’s development increased if the mother worked full time.

In the case of families with high-income where both parents chose to work, children were less impacted as couples could afford to pay for domestic help in order to free up their time so they could spend it reading or playing with their children.

Jan Nicholson, associate professor at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and co-author of the study, said “Also because of their educational background there may be greater acknowledgement of the importance of reading and related activities so it gets prioritised”.

On average, children in the households studied only spent about an hour a day with their parents engaged in activities such as singing and reading.

Dr Nicholson continued “the findings suggest that for children at greatest risk of poor developmental outcomes, [their] opportunities may be enhanced by strategies that reduce long work hours by fathers,” she said.

The study found that in low and middle-income families where mothers stayed at home the fathers’ long work hours did not have a bad effect on the time children spent in language-related activities.

“Increasingly we are a society dependent on two incomes and the larger proportion of our families have both parents in the workforce,” Dr Nicholson said. “We need to think how to restrict fathers’ long working hours so they can have optimal time with their families.”

Writer Helen Splarn. Editor Dr Ramesh Manocha
Source: Time or money: impact of parental employment on time that 4 to 5 year olds spend in language building activities