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Personnel
Principal Investigator: Julie M. Rosenzweig
Consultants: Eileen Brennan, Paul Koren
Graduate Research Assistant: Kitty Huffstutter
Project Summary
The aim of Project Common Ground is to understand and describe how parents' employment is affected when caring for a child with a mental health disorder; the strategies used by parents to manage employment issues; and to identify workplace practices that support employees who are caring for children with special emotional needs.
Prior research conducted by the Support for Working Caregivers Project provides the foundation for this project. Data collected from focus group research and telephone interviews with employed parents of children with emotional or behavioral disorders recognize that significant challenges are faced by the parents as they attend to both job responsibilities and family needs. The degree of fit between work and family is constantly in flux, not only from the unpredictability of the child's behavior due to the mental health disability, but also from inadequacies within the community to assist families in negotiating work-family obligations. The care needs of children with emotional or behavioral disorders require a high degree of flexibility in the work-family boundary, not afforded by the traditional structure of employment, child care, or educational systems. Pathways to increase flexibility are extremely limited and created almost exclusively through major employment adjustments and adaptations. Restricted options for child care and workday interruptions from the child's school force an uneasy choice for parents to accommodate family needs through employment alterations.
There is no research in this area of children's mental health and limited literature to inform the direction and design of the research. The research endeavor of this project represents the initial exploration into this topic. It is the intent of this project to gather information that can be of value to both parents and employers.
Project Objectives
1. To update and review literature on employment policies and practices that effectively support employed parents caring for children with special needs, with particular attention to families with children who have emotional or behavioral disorders.
2. To systematically study the effect that caring for a child with emotional or behavioral disorder has on the parent's employment experience, career aspirations and development, and related employment decisions; describing stages of adjustments and adaptations.
3. To describe barriers to obtaining and maintaining desired employment uniquely experienced by parents caring for children with serious emotional and behavioral disorders.
4. To describe the strategies used by parents to obtain and sustain employment that maximizes fit with family responsibilities for parents caring for children with serious emotional and behavioral disorders.
5. To identify and study family-friendly, culturally competent employer practices that employed parents experience as directly inclusive of families whose children have serious emotional and behavioral disorders.
6. To furnish families, employers, educators, and mental health service providers through written reports, conference presentations, and training/consultation, a better understanding of employment needs, barriers, and strategies, and workplace practices that increase work/family fit for parents of children with emotional or behavioral disorders.
Major Research Questions
1. What do parents who are caring for children with serious emotional or behavioral disorders identify as workplace supports and barriers to obtaining and maintaining adequate employment?
2. What developmental and mental health status events occur with the child who has a serious emotional or behavioral disorders that precipitate adjustments in the family's employment situation? a. How do parents describe this adjustment process?
3. What are the employment characteristics from parents' perspective that maximize work/family fit for employed parents of children with serious emotional or behavioral disorders?
4. What are employment policies and practices from employers' perspective that are responsive to needs of families with children who have serious emotional or behavioral disorders?
Method
1. Literature review. There is a substantial body of literature and corporate response to work-family issues. As well, there are five Centers on Working Families across the country funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Additionally, The Boston College Center for Work and Family has recently launched the first Work/Life Professional Certification Program and in collaboration with the Alliance of Work/Life Professionals (AWLP) is designing a work/life professional development initiative. Literature reviews and contact with established work-family research and educational organizations will assist with the identification of research and resources targeting employment issues for families with children who have emotional or behavioral disorders. The organizations focusing on work-family research and training will also serve as key avenues for dissemination of the project's findings.
2. Surveys. Two surveys constitute the main sources of data collection for the Common Ground project: The Parent Employment Experiences Survey (PEES) and the Workplace Support for Parents of Children with Mental Health Disorders Survey (WSS). The PEES was developed to gather data from the parents' perspectives on the employment issues that support or interfere with caring for their children with mental health disorders. The WSS was designed to gather information about formal and informal workplace supports accessible to parents from the perspective of their family-friendly supervisors. Family-friendly supervisors were nominated by employed parents of children with emotional or behavioral disorders in order to draw a sample for the survey.
3. Analysis Plan. Analysis of the Parent Employment Experiences Survey includes descriptive information about the sample population as well as significant relationships between variables such as flexibility in the workplace, number of hours worked, sector of employment, workplace support, supervisor support, coworker support, family-friendliness, and work-family fit. Qualitative analysis of open-ended questions provided detailed information about the barriers to employment and the strategies parents' used to address them. Analysis of the Workplace Support for Parents of Children with Mental Health Disorders Survey is focused on relationships between workplace diversity, benefit availability and perceptions of family-friendliness and workplace culture. Relationships between supervisors' exposure to families with children who have emotional or behavioral disorders, organizational culture, and their perceptions about supervising them will also be analyzed using both qualitative and quantitative data.
4. Dissemination Plan. Presentations at work-life and mental health conferences, written reports, and training/consultation will furnish families, employers, and mental health service providers with valuable information about how best to support employed parents of children with emotional and behavioral disorders. Information about the benefits of family friendly business practices and strategies for parents to utilize in the workplace to maximize their work family fit are specific dissemination targets.
Results
1. Literature Review
Research and literature in the field of work and family (or work-life) continues to expand at a rapid rate. In part, this activity is fueled by the recent effort to professionalize work-life specialists as the demand for addressing employee work-family fit increases. There is a keen interest and a fruitful dialogue among work-life researchers about which theoretical underpinnings and research methodologies are most relevant for the field. Common Ground has identified literature on the intersection between work-family and parenting children with special needs. Within this literature search, a child with special needs typically includes developmental disabilities and/or chronic illness; but not mental health diagnosis per se. Embedded within some research samples are children identified as having "behavioral difficulties" but with rare exception there is no specific mention of children with serious emotional or behavioral disorders. When mental health diagnosis are mentioned, these generally fall into the category of learning disorder, i.e. Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. It is important to note that there is a significant body of research and initiatives taking place in Britain related to issues and concerns of balancing work and family for parents of children with disabilities. While there continues to be an absence to research directly addressing work-family fit for parents of children with serious emotional disorders, the increased attention to employed parents of children with disabilities indicates a readiness of the work-life field to better understand the needs of a diverse group of parents. More recently, articles pertaining to research on "family friendly" workplaces and who uses "family friendly" benefits, as well as some of their strengths and limitations for the general population have guided the theoretical framework for our most recent research. Of particular interest is the need to locate "family friendly" business practices within the context of community.
2. Data Analysis
A total of 349 parents responded to the Parent Employment Experiences Survey. Survey results demonstrated that parents of children with mental health disorders experience significant challenges to obtaining and maintaining employment. For instance, 27% of parents reported that they have had their employment terminated and 48% reported that they had quit work altogether at some point in their work trajectory to care for their child with an emotional or behavioral disorder. Despite the difficulty in meeting both work and care responsibilities, these resourceful parents developed strategies over time that enabled them to find and maintain employment that was suitable to their situations. Strategies specific to employment included finding work in family-friendly workplaces, restructuring employment (i.e., altering work hours or changing careers), disclosure in the workplace to supervisors or co-workers about the child's mental health status, and reciprocity negotiation. However, employment strategies are only a part of parents finding satisfaction with the level of integration in their work and family life. In fact, when we asked parents how satisfied they were with their ability to meet both work demands and family responsibilities, nearly 70% reported dissatisfaction, despite high levels of flexibility and support from supervisors and co-workers. For more information, take a look at the presentations listed below.
Preliminary analysis of the Workplace Support for Parents of Children with Mental Health Disorder Survey is currently underway.
3. Training and Dissemination
Common Ground staff continue to make presentations of results of the Parent Employment Experiences Survey for a variety of audiences and in a variety of formats. All of our project presentations are listed below for your viewing in portable document files. In addition, you can access the Summer 2204 edition of Focal Point to view our latest writing on survey results in the article Disclosure and reciprocity: On the job strategies for taking care of business…and family. We are planning to create brochures for parents and for supervisors that are designed to provide helpful information about workplace supports for parents of children with emotional or behavioral disorders
Latest Updates
- Project Common Ground staff have been working on the Workplace Support Survey. We have received a total of 32 mailed surveys and completed 22 interviews of supervisors nominated for "family friendly" practices by parent/employees of children with emotional or behavioral disorders. We are currently conducting preliminary data analysis and are planning publications about workplace supports for working parents of children with emotional or behavioral disorders.
Check out our latest presentation at the Georgetown Institutes by clicking on the "Supporting Families of Children With Serious Emotional Disorders" link below. To view any previous presentations, click on the corresponding links provided below.
Also, take a look at the newest Focal Point edition on the publications page for a discussion of strategies parents use in order to better integrate their work and family responsibilities. Julie Rosenzweig, Principal Investigator of Common Ground, has published an article in the journal Social Work. Rosenzweig, J. J., Brennan, E. M., & Ogilvie, A. M. (2002). Work-family fit: Voices of parents of children with emotional and behavioral disorders. Social Work, 47(4), 415-424. Reprints of this article are available from the RTC at no charge.
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