9. Conclusion
Given the dramatic increase in maternal employment over the last 30 years and the inevitable impacts of this on family life, it is surprising how little is known about the patterns of participation in paid employment of families with young children. Even less is known about the effects of different patterns of parental employment, particularly maternal employment, on family life and wellbeing.
This report has taken advantage of the opportunity presented by the collection of an exciting new dataset, Growing up in Australia: the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, which provides information on these issues for young families. LSAC collects information from about 5,000 families with an infant and about 5,000 families with a 4–5 year-old child.
In this report, LSAC has been used to explore employment patterns, child care use, time with children, co-parenting and wellbeing for families with different employment patterns. These are all areas experiencing substantial change. The analysis illustrates the interconnections between these aspects of family life. Participation in paid employment can have a positive or negative effect on family life, and understanding the conditions under which negative effects are minimised and positive effects are maximised is an important challenge facing individual families as well as those responsible for design of policies that impact upon young families.
By providing detailed information on these issues, this report begins to fill important gaps in our knowledge base. The evidence provided is relevant to crucial questions such as: what is the impact of changing employment patterns on family wellbeing and ultimately the wellbeing of children? Providing answers to these questions will be critical to improving policies that affect families with young children.
The analysis illustrates the varied ways families combine raising young children with paid employment. In about half of couple-parent families with an infant, the father is employed full-time and the mother is not in paid employment. In about one-third the mother is employed part-time and the father full-time. It remains relatively uncommon in families with an infant for both parents to be employed full-time. However, by the time the youngest child in the family is 4 to 5 years of age, in over 60 per cent of couple-parent families both parents are in paid employment. Within this group the most common arrangement is for the father to work full-time and the mother part-time.
Only a relatively small proportion of couple-parent families have both parents not working (the so-called jobless family). Joblessness is a much greater issue in single-mother families with over 80 per cent of single mothers with an infant not employed and almost three-quarters of those with a 4–5 year old not employed.
The findings in this report provide new insights into the relationship between employment and wellbeing for families with young children. The findings in relation to employment patterns are generally consistent with previous research on the working arrangements of families with children.
Parental wellbeing and close family relationships are central for children's wellbeing and because most children live in families where one or both parents are employed, optimising parents' wellbeing with respect to their work arrangements may also benefit children now and into the future.
The findings in this report are relevant to the development of a wide range of policies including in the areas of workplace relations, income support, labour market policies, welfare reform and child care. The findings are also relevant to employers who need to be able to retain and attract employees, many of whom have young children.
The ageing population further increases the urgency to help adults combine working and caring. For some parents, paid work will need to be combined with caring for both children and ageing parents. An important implication of the findings of this report is that when thinking about policy in this area, it is important to consider the implications of employment within families on the wellbeing of the whole family.
A wide range of economic and social policies impact upon the capacity of parents to care for both themselves and their families. It is thus important that interactions between policies are taken into account and that the combined impact on families with children are considered.
Arguably families have more choice than in the past. This raises important questions about the impact of different working arrangements and decisions about the use of non-parental care on the wellbeing of parents and their children.