Parental work characteristics and time with children: The moderating effects of parent's gender and children's age

This article investigates the association between work characteristics and parent-child interaction time. In addition to studying the commonly considered working hours, the authors investigated the effects of job demands and resources such as job insecurity, autonomy and non-standard hours. Moreover, they analysed whether these associations were different for fathers than for mothers and for parents with young vs adolescent children. The authors analysed self-collected data on 2593 Dutch parents and found that parents participated more in parent-child activities when they worked shorter hours, experienced more autonomy, could be reached by their children at work and worked during non-standard hours. Nevertheless, the work characteristics had little explanatory value additional to the working hours. The association between working hours and parent-child time was weaker for mothers and for parents with young children. Moreover, the beneficial effect of non-standard hours was stronger for mothers and autonomy more relevant for parents with adolescent children.