Our research team sought to discover the factors that lead to the unemployment of parents of children with mental health disorders. Our preliminary analyses and findings are reported in this presentation. We controlled for factors that affect participation in the paid workforce for parents in general: (a) child age, (b) level of caregiver education, and (c) the number of children in the household. We also introduced factors that pertain specifically to families that have children with emotional or behavioral disorders: the level of the child\u27s internalizing and externalizing symptoms, and the number of child absences from school. Our research was guided by specific hypotheses: 1. The more severe the child\u27s symptoms, the more days of school the child will miss. 2. The greater the number of child absences, the greater the disruption in the caregiver\u27s employment. 3. Some caregivers will have to stop working outside the home because of frequent disruptions

Bradley, Jennifer R.

Brannan, Ana Maria

Brennan, Eileen M.

Huffstutter, Katherine J.

Kendall, Judy

English

PDXScholar (Portland State University)

Portland State UniversityPDXScholarSocial Work Faculty Publications and Presentations School of Social Work1-1-2006"Come pick up your child!" Integrating Work and Family Life forParents of School-Aged Children with Mental Health ChallengesEileen M. BrennanPortland State UniversityAna Maria BrannanPortland State UniversityJudy KendallJennifer R. BradleyPortland State UniversityKatherine J. HuffstutterPortland State UniversityLet us know how access to this document benefits you.Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/socwork_facPart of the Social Work CommonsThis Presentation is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Social Work Faculty Publications and Presentations byan authorized administrator of PDXScholar. For more information, please contact pdxscholar@pdx.edu.Citation DetailsBrennan, Eileen M.; Brannan, Ana Maria; Kendall, Judy; Bradley, Jennifer R.; and Huffstutter, Katherine J., ""Come pick up yourchild!" Integrating work and family life for parents of school-aged children with mental health challenges" (2006). 83“Come Pick Up Your Child!”:  Integrating Work and Family Life for Parents of  School-Aged Children with Mental Health Challenges1     Lead Presenter:  Eileen Brennan Co-Principal Investigator, Work-Life Integration Project Research and Training Center on Family Support and Children’s Mental Health Portland State University PO Box 751, Portland OR 97207-0751   Phone: (503) 725-5003  Fax: (503) 725-5545 brennane@pdx.edu  Co-authors and Co-presenters:  Ana María Brannan Research Associate Center for Evaluation and Program Improvement Vanderbilt University  Judy Kendall Professor, School of Nursing Oregon Health Sciences University  Jennifer Bradley  Co-Principal Investigator, Work-Life Integration Project Research and Training Center on Family Support and Children’s Mental Health Portland State University  Kitty Huffstutter Project Manager, Work-Life Integration Project Research and Training Center on Family Support and Children’s Mental Health Portland State University          1Author Note: The secondary analysis was supported by funding through the Research and Training Center on Family Support and Children's Mental Health, NIDRR Grant H133B40038. Data collection for this research was funded by the Child and Fam-ily Branch, Center for Mental Health Services in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (contract numbers 280-97-8014, 280-99-8023, and 280-00-8040). Preparation of this manuscript was partially supported by NIMH grant #1R21 MH067905-1A. The final analysis of the data has been accepted for publication as: Brennan, E. M., & Brannan, A. M. (in press). Participation in the paid labor force by caregivers of children with emotional and behavioral disorders.  Journal of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders.  84 Background and Context Growing numbers of parents of children with emotional or behavioral problems are entering the work-force in the United States. However, due to the demands of caring for a child with mental health chal-lenges, these employed parents find themselves torn between their duties at work and their responsi-bilities to care for children with high levels of need. When a child is diagnosed with a mental health dis-order like ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), the parent is engaged in a long-term process that involves frequent disruptions of family and work life (Kendall, 1998) and that affects family man-agement styles (Kendall & Shelton, 2003).  Work-life integration, or the degree to which people are able to “function and find satisfaction in both work and personal life, independent of the amount of time they actually spend in each domain at differ-ent stages of their lives” (Rapoport, Bailyn, Fletcher, & Pruitt, 2002, p. 17), is often difficult to attain for these family members. In fact, parents are often compelled to quit work or are terminated due to their responsibilities to care for a child with emotional or behavioral problems (Rosenzweig & Huffstutter, 2004).  Parents’ capacity to engage in employment also depends on the levels of family support and workplace accommodation that are available in their communities (Rosenzweig, Brennan, & Ogilvie, 2002). When schools can manage disruptive or troubling behavior that occurs during the school day, and when the workplace allows flexibility in work location and schedule, parents may be able to engage in employ-ment even while caring for a child with pronounced mental health needs. Research Focus Our research team sought to discover the factors that lead to the unemployment of parents of children with mental health disorders. Our preliminary analyses and findings are reported in this presentation. We controlled for factors that affect participation in the paid workforce for parents in general: (a) child age, (b) level of caregiver education, and (c) the number of children in the household. We also intro-duced factors that pertain specifically to families that have children with emotional or behavioral disor-ders: the level of the child’s internalizing and externalizing symptoms, and the number of child ab-sences from school. Our research was guided by specific hypotheses: 1. The more severe the child’s symptoms, the more days of school the child will miss. 2. The greater the number of child absences, the greater the disruption in the caregiver’s employ-ment. 3. Some caregivers will have to stop working outside the home because of frequent disruptions.  Methods  We conducted a secondary analysis of data taken from the national evaluation of the Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services for Children and their Families Program (CCMHS; Holden, Santi-ago, Manteuffel, Stephens, Brannan, Soler, et al., 2003). In this analysis, we used data from 39 CCMHS sites that had data sufficiently complete to be included. Data were collected from families par-ticipating in the evaluation between 1998 and 2004. To be included, the child had to be receiving ser-vices at the time of entry into the study, be between 5 and 17 years of age, and have attended some form of school within the prior 6 months. Additionally, caregivers had to care for the child in their home and to have answered all of the relevant questions.  Sample. A total of 2,660 children were included in the study; 68.8% were male. The majority of children (53.2%) were between the ages of 10 and 14, whereas 25.4% were between 5 and 9 years of age, and the remaining 21.4% were older than 14. The sample was racially and ethni-cally diverse: 49.5% were non-Hispanic European Americans, 18.5% were African American, 11% were Hispanic, and 21% were other races or had no ethnicity reported. The children had Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL; Achenbach, 1991) mean scores that were above the clinical cutoff point of 64 for ex-ternalizing behavior (M = 67.5, SD = 10.9) and slightly lower than clinical range scores for internalizing behavior (M = 63.0; SD = 11.7). Caregivers had a median number of 2 children in their household and a plurality had engaged in education beyond high school (43.1%). A slight majority of the caregivers (52.2%) worked in paid employment.  Analysis. We used structural equation modeling to examine the relationships among child symptoms (measured by the CBCL internalizing and externalizing scores), school absences (measured using par-ent report of school attendance), and caregiver participation in the workforce (obtained by parent report of being employed outside the home or not). The analysis controlled for age of youngest child, number of children in the home, and caregiver education level.  Research Findings  The model was supported as indicated by the fit indices (CFI = .982, RMSEA = .028), and individual pa-rameter estimates were found to be significant and in expected directions, as can be seen in Figure 1. Severity of child psychiatric internalizing (γ = .12, p < .001) and externalizing (γ = .16, p < .001) symp-toms were significant predictors of frequency of absences, with more child problems being associated with more frequent absences. Frequency of absences, in turn, was negatively related to the likelihood that the caregiver worked outside the home (β = -.05, p < .025); the more frequently the child was ab-sent, the lower the probability that the caregiver worked outside the home. As expected, older child age (γ = .11, p < .001), more caregiver education (γ = .30, p < .001), and fewer children in the household (γ = -.06, p < .001) were positively related to caregivers participating in the paid workforce. The model ac-counted for a substantial portion of the variance in caregiver workforce participation, R2 = .11, χ2 (3, N = 2,660) = 9.43, p =. 02).        5  85 86Conclusions and Implications Our findings confirmed that a higher level of mental health symptoms predicted less frequent atten-dance at school for children in this sample. They also supported the hypothesis that a caregiver’s ability to participate in the paid labor force was negatively affected by the demands of caring for a school-aged child with emotional or behavioral disorders. However, a limitation of our study was that we only tested for a few of the many possible factors affecting a parent’s decision to participate in the paid labor force.   Schools and out-of-school care programs need to have additional supports for staff that will allow them to nurture children with mental health challenges and allow parents the time to engage in fulfilling and necessary employment (Brennan, Bradley, Ama, & Cawood, 2003). When caregivers who wish to par-ticipate in paid employment are not able to, the potentially ensuing economic jeopardy may cause less desirable outcomes for them and their families. (Brody & Flor, 1998; Costello, Compton, Keeler, & An-gold, 2003; Luthar, 1994). Clearly, future studies of the outcomes of mental health services should con-sider including caregiver workforce participation as a standard measure.   87References  Achenbach, T. M. (1991). Manual for the Child Behavior Checklist and 1991 profile. Burlington: Univer-sity of Vermont Department of Psychiatry.  Brennan, E. M., Bradley, J. R., Ama, S. M., & Cawood, N. (2003). Setting the pace: Model inclusive child care centers serving families of children with emotional or behavioral challenges. Portland, OR: Portland State University, Research and Training Center on Family Support and Children’s Mental Health.   Brody, G. H., & Flor, D. L. (1998). Maternal resources, parenting practices and child competence in ru-ral single-parent African American families. Child Development, 69, 803-816.  Costello, E. J., Compton, S. N., Keeler, G., & Angold, A. (2003). Relationships between poverty and psychopathology: A natural experiment. Journal of the American Medical Association, 290, 2023-2029.  Holden, E. W., Santiago, R. L., Manteuffel, B. A., Stephens, R., Brannan, A. M., Soler, R., et al. (2003). Systems of care demonstration projects: Innovation, evaluation, and sustainability. In A. Pumariega & N. Winters (Eds.), Handbook of community systems of care: The new child and adolescent com-munity psychiatry (pp. 432-458). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.  Kendall, J. (1998). Outlasting disruption: The process of reinvestment in families with ADHD children. Qualitative Health Research, 8(6), 839-857.  Kendall, J., & Shelton, K. (2003). A typology of management styles in families with children with ADHD. Journal of Family Nursing, 9(3), 257-280.  Luthar, S. S. (1994). Poverty and children's adjustment. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.  Rapoport, R., Bailyn, L., Fletcher, J. K., & Pruitt, B. H. (2002). Beyond work-family balance: Advancing gender equity and workplace performance. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.  Rosenzweig, J. M., 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.  Rosenzweig, J. M., & Huffstutter, K. (2004). Disclosure and reciprocity: On the job strategies for taking care of business and family. Focal Point: A National Bulletin on Family Support and Children’s Men-tal Health, 18(1), 4–7.   

Come pick up your child!  Integrating Work and Family Life for Parents of School-Aged Children with Mental Health Challenges

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Come pick up your child! Integrating Work and Family Life for Parents of School-Aged Children with Mental Health Challenges

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