Against the backdrop of dramatic changes in work and family life, this article draws on survey data from 2,971 mothers working in the service sector to examine how unpredictable schedules are associated with three dimensions of parenting: difficulty arranging childcare, work-life conflict, and parenting stress. Results demonstrate that on-call shifts, shift timing changes, work hour volatility, and short advance notice of work schedules are positively associated with difficulty arranging childcare and work-life conflict. Mothers working these schedules are more likely to miss work. We consider how family structure and race moderate the relationship between schedule instability and these dimensions of...
Working parents must arrange some type of care for their young children when they are away at work. For parents with unstable and unpredictable work schedules, the logistics of arranging care can be complex. In this paper, we use survey data from the Shift Project, collected in 2017 and 2018 from a sample of 3,653 parents who balance work in the retail and food service sector with parenting young children from infants to nine years of age. Our results demonstrate that unstable and unpredictable work schedules have consequences for children’s care arrangements. We find that parents’ exposure to on-call work...
Drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with parents employed in the service sector in the San Francisco Bay area, we find that meeting the demands of work and parenting almost invariably involved reliance on informal child care. We unpack the relationship between work schedules and specific constellations of informal child care. We show that the stability and predictability of work schedules shaped child-care arrangements. Working parents with stable, although frequently nonstandard, schedules often managed child care using a tag team parenting approach. Those with unstable schedules often engaged in a child-care scramble, in which care arrangements were pieced together on an...
