Parents’ Daily Time With Their Children: A Workplace Intervention

Abstract

In the context of a group randomized field trial, we evaluated whether parents who participated in a workplace intervention, designed to increase supervisor support for personal and family life and schedule control, reported significantly more daily time with their children at the 12-month follow-up compared with parents assigned to the Usual Practice group. We also tested whether the intervention effect was moderated by parent gender, child gender, or child age. METHODS:The Support-Transform-Achieve-Results Intervention was delivered in an information technology division of a US Fortune 500 company. Participants included 93 parents (45% mothers) of a randomly selected focal child aged 9 to 17 years (49% daughters) who completed daily telephone diaries at baseline and 12 months after intervention. During evening telephone calls on 8 consecutive days, parents reported how much time they spent with their child that day.RESULTS: Parents in the intervention group exhibited a significant increase in parent-child shared time, 39 minutes per day on average, between baseline and the 12-month follow-up. By contrast, parents in the Usual Practice group averaged 24 fewer minutes with their child per day at the 12-month follow-up. Intervention effects were evident for mothers but not for fathers and for daughters but not sons. CONCLUSIONS:The hypothesis that the intervention would improve parents' daily time with their children was supported. Future studies should examine how redesigning work can change the quality of parent-child interactions and activities known to be important for youth health and development.WHAT'S KNOWN ON THIS SUBJECT: Children' s time with parents is critical for healthy development. Lack of control over parents' schedules and limited supervisor support for personal and family life can interfere with parents' family time. WHAT THIS STUDY ADDS:This is the first group randomized controlled field trial demonstrating effects of a workplace intervention, designed to increase schedule control and supervisor support, on working parents' time with their children, as assessed by using longitudinal daily telephone interviews. Dr Davis contributed to the conceptualization and design of the diary component of the Work, Family, and Health Study (WFHS), conceptualized the current study, planned the analysis steps, and wrote most of this manuscript; Dr Lawson conducted the analyses for the paper, wrote the Results section, created the tables and figures, and reviewed, revised, and approved this manuscript; Dr Almeida led the conceptualization and design of the telephone interview diary component of the WFHS, consulted on the analytic approach, and reviewed, revised, and approved this manuscript; Dr Kelly was involved in the design of the WFHS, including the development and implementation of the workplace intervention, and reviewed, revised, and approved this manuscript; Dr King contributed to the conception, design, and interpretation of the data, revised the manuscript critically for important intellectual content...

Intervention effects on safety compliance and citizenship behaviors: Evidence from the work, family, and health study.

“…Davis et al (2015) demonstrated the effects of STAR, implemented in a group-randomized trial, on increasing reported parental time with children at 12 months post-intervention. Kelly et al (2014) found that STAR led to reduced work-family conflict and improved perceived family time adequacy, as well as increased employee perceptions of control over work time and perceived FSSB at 6 months post-intervention.…”

“…To date, four studies conducted in the information technology industry document the positive effects of the WFHS intervention, referred to as STAR (Support.Transform.Achieve.Results) (i.e., Davis et al, 2015; Kelly et al, 2014; McHale et al, 2015; Olson et al, 2015). Davis et al (2015) demonstrated the effects of STAR, implemented in a group-randomized trial, on increasing reported parental time with children at 12 months post-intervention.…”

The effects of a workplace intervention on employees’ cortisol awakening response

“…Although the effect of the intervention was not apparent on average CAR across days, it had an effect on increased CAR on non-workdays. The findings suggest that this workplace intervention, which has been found to have positive implications for employees’ WFC (Kelly et al, 2014), emotional exhaustion (Moen et al, 2016), family functioning (Davis et al, 2015), and sleep health (Lee et al, 2016; Olson et al, 2015), and also has positive implications for employees’ physiological functioning. Findings from this study may be informative for researchers seeking to better understanding the mechanism through which work-related factors change employees’ adaptive physiological responses and also to practitioners seeking to develop more specific logic models for future workplace interventions.…”

Perceived time adequacy improves daily well-being: day-to-day linkages and the effects of a workplace intervention

“…Prior reports revealed that, as intended, the STAR intervention resulted in declines in employees’ global ratings of work–family conflict, increases in global ratings of schedule control, and improvements in the global ratings of perceived time adequacy with family in analyses by employees (Kelly et al, 2014). On a daily level, STAR also increased parents’ reports of time spent with children (Davis et al, 2015). …”

“…To date, only a few studies have provided evidence on the possibility of increasing time resources through workplace interventions (Davis et al, 2015; Kelly et al, 2014, 2011). We tested whether a randomized field experiment, designed to promote employees’ schedule control and supervisor support for family and personal life, increased daily time use and perceived time adequacy for parenting, partner, and personal activities in a sample of employed and partnered parents.…”