SummaryThe American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that women breastfeed because of improved health outcomes for mothers and children. Because maternal employment during the first year of the child's life has been identified as a reason for breastfeeding cessation, we develop and test a role-theory-based framework to explain women's continuation of breastfeeding after return to work (Study 1) and report results of an exploratory study linking breastfeeding at work with job attitudes and well-being (Study 2). Applying survival analysis to a longitudinal dataset gathered by the Centers for Disease Control (Study 1), we identify pregnant women's perceived employer support for breastfeeding as a predictor of women's breastfeeding goal intentions. Supervisors' negative workplace remarks about breastfeeding related to an eightfold increase of women's likelihood to discontinue exclusive breastfeeding and perceived support for breastfeeding after return to work predicted exclusive breastfeeding continuation. Results of Study 2 suggest that women who return to work and continue breastfeeding experience more family-to-work conflict and overload than women who do not reconcile work and breastfeeding. Further, results of Study 2 provide preliminary evidence suggesting that perceptions of supervisor and coworker support for breastfeeding relate positively to general perceptions of organizational support and negatively to depressive symptoms.
Work–family conflict affects employee performance and well-being. However, despite the underlying focus of work–family research on family health and well-being, we have limited knowledge about the impact of role-based stressors, such as work–family conflict, on child health. In this study, we propose and test the stressor-self-regulatory resources-crossover framework. In the spirit of extension of existing work–family research to other cultural settings, we report on two multisource studies conducted in Nigeria to explain whether, how, why, and when parental work–family conflict relates to child health. In Study 1, we collected multisource data from parent–child pairs in low-income families to test whether parental self-regulatory resources explain why work- family conflict relates to child health, resulting in findings that support the stressor-self-regulatory resources-crossover framework. In order to identify possible targets for future organizational-based interventions, we collected Study 2 data from parents and their children (who were enrolled at private schools) to test whether job autonomy and job demands altered the relationship between parental self-regulatory resources and child health. Moderator analyses of the multisource data reveal that self-regulatory resources matter for child health only when job demands are high or when job autonomy is low, pointing to potential intervention and policy levers.
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