Work schedules, childcare and well-being: Essays on the associations between modern-day job characteristics, childcare arrangements and the well-being of parents and children

Arranging care for children can be challenging for working parents, especially when parents do not work a nine-to-five weekday schedule. With the recent increase in the proportion of parents who work during evenings, nights and weekends, so-called nonstandard hours, the timing of parental work has become increasingly relevant when arranging care for children. Correspondingly, flexible working arrangements, allowing employees to determine their own working hours or workplace, have also become more common. Although some insights into how parental work affects childcare have already have been provided, studies have seldom included the work schedules of both parents or focused on both parental and nonparental childcare. Knowledge on how modern-day job characteristics are related to parental childcare arrangements is therefore limited. Moreover, the debate on how childcare affects children is still ongoing, indicating that it is desirable to obtain more knowledge on how childcare arrangements relate to child well-being. In addition, most previous research on the consequences of childcare arrangements has focused on children, whereas parents are also likely to be affected. Taken together, this dissertation therefore examines the following research question: To what extent are modern-day job characteristics associated with childcare arrangements, and how does the combination of parental work and childcare arrangements affect parental and child well-being? Results showed first that when parents worked during evenings, nights and weekends the opportunities to care for their children themselves increased, whereas these working hours decreased their likelihood of using formal and informal childcare. Although these parents were less likely to use these types of care, using nonparental childcare was beneficial for the mental health of fathers. In contrast, foregoing the use of nonparental childcare was harmful for the mental health of mothers in couples who worked during nonstandard hours. This dissertation also informs the debate on how formal childcare affects children by demonstrating that a more positive relationship between parents and caregivers was beneficial for children’s socioemotional well-being. This relationship was equally important for children whose parents worked standard hours and for those whose parents worked nonstandard hours. By contrasting the Netherlands with Finland and the United Kingdom, this dissertation demonstrated that that these countries differ with regard to associations between work schedules, childcare arrangements and well-being. For instance, parents who worked during nonstandard hours in the Netherlands were less likely to use formal childcare than those in Finland. This dissertation also showed country differences in the association between formal care characteristics and child well-being, revealing that Dutch children showed more internalising problem behaviour when they spent longer hours in formal care than British children did. To understand how the country context affects associations between work schedules, childcare arrangements and well-being, knowledge on both family policies and societal norms on childcare use is needed