Research project detail

Maternal Employment and Mental Health: LSAC Parenting Australian Children Collaboration

The Parenting Australian Children Collaboration involves the analysis of data from the nationally representative Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) to produce a series of papers on parenting and child wellbeing. This project began as a collaboration between the PRC, and the LSAC research team at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute. The maternal employment and mental health theme focuses on the relationships between structural factors such as job quality and access to paid parental leave, and maternal wellbeing in the first year following childbirth.

Rationale

Maternal mental health following childbirth is commonly assumed to be governed by individual, psychological and hormonal factors. Increasingly, however, evidence is emerging that adverse circumstances including structural, family, infant and contextual characteristics are significant risk factors for worse maternal mental health in pregnancy and following birth. Employment, job quality, employment conditions and employee entitlements have not been widely investigated as potential risk factors, despite the increasing proportion of women who return to employment after having a baby. This study uses nationally representative cohort data from Growing up in Australia: the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children to investigate the effect of poor employment conditions and entitlements on maternal mental health in Australian mothers of infants.

Method

This Parenting Australian Children project is a collaboration between researchers at the PRC and the LSAC team at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. Together, we are working to analyse data from the comprehensive LSAC dataset. LSAC was initiated by the Australian Government Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs in 2004, and was designed to examine the impact of Australia’s unique social, economic and cultural environment on the next generation. The project employs a multiple cohort, cross-sequential, longitudinal design and waves of data are collected every two years. The final sample of over 10,000 children is broadly representative of all Australian infants, and three waves of data have been collected and are available for analysis.

Results

The aim of the first analysis arising from this theme was to investigate the contribution of poor job quality to maternal mental health in the postpartum. Women participating in the LSAC project were included in this analysis if they had an infant younger than 12 months, and had returned to employment in the first year after their baby’s birth. The primary outcome for the study was maternal mental health, assessed using a standardised assessment (Kessler-6) that has been widely used in Australian research, and measures common symptoms of psychological distress.

We found that even when risk factors for worse maternal mental health were included in our analyses, poor job quality – including no access to paid parental leave, inflexible hours, low control and low security – had a significant independent relationship to worse maternal mental health. These findings confirm the relevance of workplace and structural conditions to maternal wellbeing following childbirth. Policy implications include a need for improved access to maternity leave and other family-friendly workplace conditions for women returning to employment after having a baby in Australia.

Research team

Parenting Research Centre

• Dr Amanda Cooklin
• Dr Rebecca Giallo
• Professor Jan Nicholson
• Elizabeth Westrupp
• Nina Lucas

Australian National University

• Dr Lyndall Strazdins

Contact

Dr Amanda Cooklin
E: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
P: +61 3 8660 3536

Funding

Victorian Government Department of Education and Early Childhood Development

Ethics

Australian Institute of Family Studies Human Research Ethics Committee

Reports/Publications

Cooklin, A.R., Canterford, L., Strazdins, L. & Nicholson, J.N. (2011). Employment conditions and maternal postpartum mental health: Results from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. Archives of Women’s Mental Health. 14, 3, 217-25