Departmental Seminar - A New Frontier of Work and Family: How Does Telework Matter for American Families with Young Children?

25 February 2025 at 3:00:00 am

This paper examines the impacts of the rising post-pandemic telework on family economic hardships and parent mental problems. Based on the sociology of work, workplace management, and gender inequality in the household division of labor, the paper conceptualizes how the gain in schedule autonomy and the loss of coworker community due to telework create complex mechanisms leading to consequences for working families with children. The paper analyzes 113,716 American families with young children from the nationally representative Household Pulse Survey (HPS) in recent 14 months. The analysis provides three findings: (1) Telework reduces family economic hardships. (2) Telework does not increase or reduce mental problems for mothers but significantly increase them for fathers. (3) Remote has a dose effect that significantly further reduces family economic hardships and increases fathers’ mental problems. When considering policies addressing telework, we need to analyze the wellbeing of the whole family and individual family members.

About the speaker:

Dr. Lingxin Hao is Benjamin H. Griswold III Professor in Public Policy, Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University. She is the former Director of Hopkins Population Center (HPC) and the current Director of the Scientific Core of HPC. Her areas of specialty include social demography, family, migration, sociology of education, and quantitative and computational methodology. Dr. Hao has been the principal investigator for many multi-year projects supported by federal grants from NIH and NSF. Her publications appear at Demography, Journal of Marriage and Family, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, International Migration Review, Sociology of Education, Child Development, Sociological Methodology, and Social Science Research. She was a Residential Fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation and a Residential Fellow at the Spenser Foundation. Dr. Hao received her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Chicago in 1990.