Flexible Work Hours and Other Job Factors in Parental Time with Children

Flexible working hours are typically seen to be advantageous to working parents, as the flexible hours more easily allow responsibilities of care and employment be balanced. But do flexible work hours actually mean that parents can spend more time with their children? This article explores this for parents of young children in Australia. The analyses use the time use diaries of children in the two cohorts of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC), from the first wave of the study in 2004. The study children in each cohort were aged about one year old and 4–5 years old. For each child, a weekday and weekend diary were completed, giving 5,579 weekday diaries and 4,478 weekend diaries. The diaries captured details of the children’s activities and of who they were with in each 15 min period of a day, and so allowed calculation of the total amount of time the child was with their mother and with their father. Multivariate analyses were used to determine whether amounts of mother-child and father-child time varied according to flexibility of work hours, taking account also of other job characteristics, family and child characteristics. The analyses showed that flexible work hours had only weak independent relationships with mothers’ and fathers’ time with children. Inasmuch as flexible hours are beneficial for parents, it appears that this is related to their ability to distribute their time between work and family time, rather than giving them more time with children.