Here’s something that sounds obvious but that parents might not think about: How you feel about work and your experiences on the job affects how you parent. And that, in turn, can influence your child’s development.
Developmental psychologist Maureen Perry-Jenkins and her colleagues found that a job that offers autonomy and support for a parent in a child’s first year of life is linked to better cognitive and social outcomes and mental health for that child six years down the road.
“People spend 40 hours a week at work, and that experience affects you and your mental health, your physical health, everything,” said Perry-Jenkins, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. That, in turn, affects how supportive and responsive a parent is. The results are outlined in Perry-Jenkins’s book “Work Matters.”
Work-family researchers often focus on studying schedules, parental leave, sick leave and overtime, rather than the actual work experience. Perry-Jenkins’s team also made a couple of other less-common research decisions: They decided to include fathers and to concentrate on low-income employees.
Stew Friedman, an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, found results similar to Perry-Jenkins’s findings among business professionals. About two decades ago, he and Jeff Greenhaus of Drexel University looked at the “inner experience” of 900 workers: how these employees valued career and family, how much they were distracted by work at home and how much control they had over their work conditions.
Read the full article at The Washington Post