When Work-Family Conflict Hits Home: Parental Work-Family Conflict and Child Health

Work-family conflict affects employee performance and well-being. However, despite the underlying focus of work-family research on family health and well-being, we have limited knowledge about the impact of role-based stressors, such as work-family conflict, on child health. In this study, we propose and test the stressor-self-regulatory resources-crossover framework. In the spirit of extension of existing work-family research to other cultural settings, we report on two multisource studies conducted in Nigeria to explain whether, how, why, and when parental work-family conflict relates to child health. In Study 1, we collected multisource data from parent-child pairs in low-income families to test whether parental self-regulatory resources explain why work- family conflict relates to child health, resulting in findings that support the stressor-self-regulatory resources-crossover framework. In order to identify possible targets for future organizational-based interventions, we collected Study 2 data from parents and their children (who were enrolled at private schools) to test whether job autonomy and job demands altered the relationship between parental self-regulatory resources and child health. Moderator analyses of the multisource data reveal that self-regulatory resources matter for child health only when job demands are high or when job autonomy is low, pointing to potential intervention and policy levers.