HS 1002

Topic: The Employment Health Connection Video 2

Okay, so the focus of this second part for this week's lecture will be on the work-family
relationship, or often conflict, an important concept when thinking about work conditions
as sources of stressors and social determinants of health. Health is not something that is
produced in one body, biologically or innately. It depends on social conditions and it
depends on relationships. Not everyone who works is doing so in the context of being part
of a household or a family, but for those who are, work conditions can impact not only the
worker's mental health but also the health of others in their household. This is important to
consider from that interest in health at a wider population level.

So, we're going to take a closer look at this with a focus on households with couples who
have responsibilities for biological children. If what I am discussing in this second video is of
interest to you, I encourage you to read the optional article in Social Science and Medicine
on the topic, which is my anchor for our discussion of work-family conflict. Work-family
conflict refers to the strains—time-based and attention-based—that arise for parents when
work and family demands are incompatible. Work-family conflicts are dynamic, not static.
But what is important here is that this work-family conflict can be an important
determinant of the stress experienced by someone in relation to their job.

A point made by Lynn and colleagues in their article, based on research in Australia, is that
work-family context conflict is a social determinant of both mothers' and fathers' mental
health but also impacts children's mental health. And yes, the focus is for that study on
heterosexual couples. There is a large literature showing the impact on adults when
conflicts arise between family and work. Lynn and colleagues really extend that by getting
into the details of how workplaces, as they say, are one of the most important social
institutions families engage with. They also extend their impact to entire families by
impacting the resources available within that family. Paid employment provides material
resources to families but also impacts other non-material resources, such as parents' time
for family and mental health. Employment can leave a family well-resourced
psychologically, materially, and socially or under-resourced.

Connected to the concept of work-family conflict is another concept, that of the long arm of
the job. Merchant Misner, a retired professor from the University of British Columbia,
asked way back in 1971, what impact does working in a factory have on a worker's life
outside the factory? In other words, what impact does one's day-to-day experience at work
have on what one does and how one behaves when one is off work? He noted that many
had studied the ways in which different employment conditions provided employees with
more or fewer opportunities for such things as control, variety, and social interaction. But
what was not being empirically studied yet in the '70s was how the structure of one's work

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impacts one's life outside of work. So, he led a study involving interview surveys with 206
industry-based, unionized men on Vancouver Island to test hypotheses on the impact of
work on non-work life.

In this career-making paper called The Long Arm of the Job, Misner suggested and showed
that work experiences spill over into and heavily shape one's home life. A key example
Misner provided is that if your work is socially isolating, with limited opportunities for
interaction, this is actually replicated, rather than compensated for, at home in many cases.
This is quite a straightforward proposal, but it has stood the test of research studies since.
Investigations into work-family conflict have expanded to often include references to the
scarcity hypothesis. This theory, again proven through research, suggests we have limited
resources of time and energy, and when these become taxed to the point of overload, it
results in tiredness, emotional distancing, and absence from home. This is the norm of our
era, a norm I think we need to challenge.

When I saw this article, I wanted to read it because I too have lived work-family conflict, and
I will continue to face it potentially, and many of you will experience it as well in the future.
It’s something that we need to be sensitive to, not just in healthcare, but also whether
employed or unemployed. This is important for us to consider in our personal lives. So, the
study by Lynn and colleagues was a longitudinal study called Growing Up in Australia. At
the heart of the study were 2,496 dual-earning couples and their children. The goal of that
study was to explore the impact of various factors on children's health and development by
interviewing a national sample of parents twice a year, starting when their kids were in
kindergarten.

The authors were attentive and asked questions about particular things. In this article that
you can consult, the authors highlight four main findings: (1) those related to children's
mental health, as reported by a parent who knows the child best; (2) parents' reported
work-family conflict, so their experience of such a conflict, if at all; (3) parents' reported
mental health; and (4) parents' reported marital satisfaction. The main proposal of the
article is that when parents feel their time and attention is torn between family and work
life, this impacts their children's mental health. Parents' mental health impacts the child,
even if it does not directly impact what they are doing with the child.

Healthy child development depends on three key factors, as you might have learned in
your personal determinants of health course. These are a safe physical environment,
access to adequate nutrition, and quality supportive relationships. It is because work-family
conflict impacts a child's safe and supportive environment that this conflict in a parent can
impact their children. When a parent faces or exists in a state of chronic stress due to
feeling their energies and time are torn between job and family demands, it results in a
decline in their mental health. It can increase their irritability, probably due to fatigue, and

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decrease marital satisfaction. All of these things impact the family environment and thus
impact a child.

The authors note that the impact on children's mental health when their parents are
experiencing work-family conflict is different depending on whether it is the mother or the
father who is living that work-family conflict. There are some patterns. The authors
observed that it was hardest on children's mental health when work-family conflict was
chronic in mothers. When fathers' work-family conflict subsided, children recovered
quickly, regaining a level of mental well-being similar to that of children whose fathers had
never experienced work-family conflict. On the other hand, when mothers' work-family
conflict subsided, children's recovery was far slower. The children's mental well-being
remained negatively affected and detectable for approximately two years after the
mother's work-family conflict was alleviated.

This is a good example of how the impacts of objective work conditions that we can
describe and measure, in this case, conditions such as long hours, will depend on their
impacts on health and well-being on other social factors and determinants. In this case, in
the Australian context of this study, both mothers' and fathers' work-family conflict impacts
their own mental health and their children's mental well-being. However, a mother's work-
family conflict has a longer adverse effect on the children in the family. This probably has to
do, as the author suggests, with gender norms.

Gender norms can be defined as standards and expectations to which those socially
identified as belonging to a gender, for example, identified as a woman or identified as a
man, generally conform within a range that defines a particular society, culture, and
community at that point in time. Gender norms are acquired, especially in early childhood
and through socialization that continues throughout one's life. In contexts where a
woman's traditional roles include being the key organizer and person responsible for the
home and its well-being, the woman in a dual-earning household, particularly in a
heterosexual context, will not experience her work-family conflict in the same manner as
her husband. She is more likely to feel torn than her husband when work demands she
take more time away from home responsibilities.

Here’s my sister with her big lawyer job, my kid and her nephew, and she actually manages
to take about three months vacation in her flexible self-employment. So she's figured it out.
But dominant expectations that the mother will be there for her kids in many societies
generate stress in all households. In such a context, when the mother begins to be in a
position where she needs to allocate more time to work, children expecting their mother's
attention may feel neglected, which makes the mother feel bad, and this can be reinforced
through messages from friends, family, or neighbors.

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So, the point here is that this competition for time and energy between one's work and
home life will have different impacts on one's mental health contingent on social
expectations and norms. Work conditions can be identical for two people in a social-
cultural context, at least at the surface. But what those conditions mean socially, those
pressures to work longer hours or more flexibly, and how they're experienced and lived will
be subjective and different based on a person's biographical, but also socially constructed,
experience of that work-home tension.

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