On this day before National Family Week starts, Relationships Foundation is publishing research which highlights the pressures on families who work weekends.
There are 6.5 million working families in the UK. Three quarters are affected by weekend working, and 24% (1.56 million) have a parent who works Sundays. One in five working families (1.3 million) have a parent who regularly works both Saturday and Sunday.
Working ‘unsocial hours’ (outside of 8am-7pm, Monday to Friday) can have a devastating effect on parents’ time with their children. Parents who work in these hours spend up to ten hours less with their children than parents who don’t.
Frank Field and Graham Allen, in their reports to the Government on Child Poverty, have found that parenting is much more important than money in improving a child’s chances in life. In 2007, David Cameron set out his desire to give families a ‘time increase’.
Weekend working also often leads to ‘shift parenting’: one parent looks after the children while the other works, and then they swap. This has two negative outcomes. Parents lose quality time with one another, which can weaken their relationship. Children lose quality time with both parents: watching adults interact is a key part of child development.
Furthermore it affects children in poverty more than any others: 15% of people with a degree work at weekends, whereas 38% of those with no qualifications do. Families on benefits are 35% more likely to be working at weekends than families who aren’t.
Commenting, Michael Trend, Executive Director of the Relationships Foundation, said:
“It is a sobering thought that as many of us enjoy a lazy Sunday with friends and family, millions of children across the country are deprived of the company of their parents.
“It is even more sobering when you think that these are often the very children who need time with parents to give them the best start in life.
“As the Government develops its “Family-Friendly” society it should focus on increasing the time families have together. Until it gets family life right, the Government cannot hope to deliver on any of its pledges.”
Notes to Editors
• National Family Week runs from the 30th May to the 5th June
• This research updates figures from the 2006 NatCen and Relationships Foundation report Working Atypical Hours: What happens to Family Life? (Barnes, Bryson and Smith), which used data from the UK Time Use Survey. The academic study is here, with a shorter briefing All Work and No Play here. It uses 2010 ONS data on working households and household formation. It assumes that the proportions of people working weekends has remained broadly the same: developments in benefits and flexible working are unlikely to have impacted hugely.
• Professor Philip Cowan at the University of California, Berkeley, has reported on the positive relationship between parents’ relationships and child development.
• A 2001 study by the Chartered Institute of Professional Development (looking at long hours rather than specifically weekend working, but the two are linked) found that just 19% of those with children felt that it had also damaged their parent-child relationships. BUT 83% of the partners of these workers felt that the long hours worked had a negative impact upon their partner’s relationships with their child(ren). The same study found that 11% of those surveyed had experienced a non-marital relationship break-up because of the effect of hours worked, 27% of long hours workers had strained relationships with a partner, and 3% had divorced because of long hours.
• Harriet Harman said that her Government needed to do more to address ‘shift parenting’: “The impact when work isn’t flexible is on how the parents feel about themselves. [If] they feel it has a bad effect on the children, it affects the marriage or relationship, and over and over again you hear these examples. We need to have a debate about how we enable families to spend more time together. It’s not just about the child having enough time with the mother or the father, it’s about doing things as a family.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/nov/26/uk.women
• David Cameron told the 2007 Conservative Party Conference ‘I don’t just want to give people a tax cut. I want to give people a time increase. Time for many families is the most precious commodity of all – time you can spend at home, time to help with the homework, time you can do things in the house, and that’s why I think it’s time not just for these benefit and tax changes I’ve spoken about, but also to say to all employees in all companies with children that you should have the right to ask for flexible working’.
• Frank Field found: ‘It is family background, parental education, good parenting and the opportunities for learning and development in those crucial years that together matter more to children than money’.