Nonstandard Maternal Work Schedules & Child Health in Impoverished Families

描述（由申请人提供）：非标准的母亲工作时间表或那些存在于周一至周五，8 - 5标准之外的工作时间表会干扰儿童在生命最初几年的最佳健康和发展。贫困家庭的父母，特别是母亲，在需要非标准时间表的工作中所占的比例过高，这使人们担心，已经面临健康状况不佳风险的贫困儿童的健康和福祉面临更多威胁，破坏了入学准备，并为整个生命周期的健康差异奠定了基础。迄今为止的研究尚未审查不标准的产妇工作安排对贫困儿童健康和福祉造成的额外风险。该项目的目标是了解不标准的母亲工作时间表对贫困儿童身心健康的威胁。为了实现这一目标并为应对这一威胁的潜在政策解决方案提供信息，本项目将从随机选择的社区贫困婴儿母亲队列（N=450）中收集前瞻性数据，以：1)描述母亲在第一年从事非标准时间表工作的贫困儿童与母亲有标准时间表工作的贫困儿童在30个月时身体健康和情绪健康方面的差异；2)量化父母教养做法和母亲幸福感的差异在多大程度上解释了母亲工作时间表对贫困儿童身体健康和情感福祉的影响；3)确定个人、家庭和社会因素，这些因素对生活在贫困中的儿童起到保护作用，这些儿童的母亲在婴儿出生后第一年的工作时间不规范。该项目将在孩子3个月大时招募母婴，并跟踪他们直到孩子30个月大。与每个特定目标相关的假设将通过拟合线性混合效应模型来检验，以解释随时间评估的结果之间的相关性。项目结果将提供必要的信息，以帮助保护处于危险中的儿童。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Nonstandard maternal work schedules or those that exist outside the Monday thru Friday, 8 - 5 norm interfere with optimal child health and development during the first years of life. Parents in impoverished families, particularly mothers, are over-represented in jobs requiring a nonstandard schedule raising concerns that poor children, who are already at risk for poor health outcomes, face additional threats to health and well-being that undermines school readiness and creates a foundation for health disparities across the lifespan. Research to date has not examined the added risk that nonstandard maternal work schedules place on poor children's health and well-being. The goal of this project is to understand the threat of nonstandard maternal work schedules to poor children's physical and emotional well-being. To achieve this goal and inform potential policy solutions to the threat, this project will collect prospective data from a randomly selected community-based cohort of economically disadvantaged mothers of infants (N=450) to: 1) Delineate differences in physical health and emotional well- being at 30 months among children living in poverty whose mothers had a nonstandard schedule job in the first year relative to those whose mothers had a standard work schedule; 2) Quantify the degree to which variation in parenting practices and maternal well-being explain differences in the physical health and emotional well- being of children living in poverty by maternal work schedules; and 3) Identify individual, familial, and social factors that serve as protective factors for children living in poverty among mothers working a nonstandard work schedule during their infants' first year of life.. The project will recruit mother-infant dyads when children are 3 months of age and follow them until children are 30 months. Hypotheses related to each specific aim will be tested by fitting linear mixed effects models to account for the correlation among outcomes assessed over time. Project results will provide needed information to help protect at risk children. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The project examines the extent to which mothers' employment in a nonstandard schedule job predicts differences in impoverished children's physical health and emotional well-being at 30 months. Documenting whether nonstandard maternal work schedules undermine children's well-being and understanding the mechanisms by which it occurs are important first steps in conceiving, designing, and implementing policies that protect children, particularly those living in poverty who are already at risk for poor health outcomes.