Children with parents working low-quality, precarious jobs are more likely to experience poorer mental health and lower grades than their peers whose parents enjoy high-quality, stable jobs.
That’s according to a pair of new studies co-led by Dr. Faraz Shahidi, associate scientist at the Institute for Work & Health (IWH), and Dr. Anne Fuller, assistant professor of pediatrics at McMaster University.
Many jobs today are precarious in nature, offering limited stability and low pay,
says Shahidi. Such low-quality work can have adverse implications for the health and wellbeing of workers.
Our research suggests there is also a link between the quality of parents’ jobs and their children’s mental health and development,
adds Fuller. These findings underscore the importance of job quality as a pressing issue that merits the attention of researchers and policy-makers.
What the studies found
The researchers analyzed two Canadian surveys and, using a method called latent class analysis, sorted households according to the quality of parents’ jobs.
High-quality jobs included those with full-time hours, predictable schedules and good pay. Low-quality, or precarious, jobs included those with inadequate hours, irregular schedules and low pay.
The first study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health (doi:10.1136/jech-2024-223366) analyzed data from the 2014 Ontario Child Health Study, a dataset that was designed to mirror the demographic makeup of the province—including households across the full income distribution. Drawing on surveys of parents of 9,927 children aged four to 17, the team’ study found that households where two parents were employed could be sorted into three broad groups:
- two parents with high-quality jobs (53 per cent of the sample),
- primary earner households, where one parent (most often fathers) had full-time jobs but with irregular or long hours, and the other parent (most often mothers) had part-time jobs of varying quality and lower pay (22 per cent), and
- two parents with low-quality jobs (8 per cent).
It also found two groups of single working-parent households:
- single parent with a high-quality job (8 per cent), and
- single parent with a low-quality job (6 per cent).
The research team found that in dual-parent households where both parents had low-quality jobs, or in single-parent households where one parent had a low-quality job, children were more likely to experience mental health difficulties, including symptoms consistent with anxiety, depression and hyperactivity. These children were also more than twice as likely to have low grades at school compared to children who had both parents in high-quality jobs. Children in primary earner households also tended to experience less favourable outcomes than those with two parents holding high-quality jobs.
The second study, published in Social Science & Medicine (doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.118482), analyzed the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, which followed the households of 16,903 children from 1994 to 2008/2009. This dataset, which was also representative of the Canadian population, gave the researchers an opportunity to examine parental employment conditions across different stages of childhood.
The researchers focused only on households where both parents worked, the result being a sample of 7,292 children. They sorted the households of these children into the same three job quality groups. Thirty-nine per cent of the sample fell into the high-quality group, 36 per cent fell into the primary earner group, and 26 per cent were in the low-quality, precarious group.
This study found that children who grew up with parents in the lowest-quality jobs were twice as likely to experience emotional problems (e.g., anxiety, depression) in adolescence, relative to those whose parents held high-quality jobs.
If there is one clear takeaway from our research, it is that the quality of parental employment plays an important role in shaping the mental health and development of children,
says Shahidi.
We lack a reliable estimate of the proportion of children impacted by precarious household employment,
says Fuller. Our studies suggest it may be as much as one in five children, but we have yet to understand the full scale of the problem.
The need to improve job quality
For the researchers, these findings reinforce growing calls to improve the quality of jobs that are available to working parents in Canada and better understand the impact of job quality on other aspects of life.
The researchers note that the mental health and developmental challenges that children experience may follow them into adulthood and, as other IWH research has shown, produce lasting effects on their lives, including their earnings and other labour market outcomes.
The benefits of a good job don’t stop at the worker, but appear to extend to families as a whole,
says Shahidi. By improving the quality of jobs, we have the potential to improve the lives of children, in both the short and the long run.