Almost one in five parents work complementary day and night shifts, or plan to do so, to reduce childcare costs, according to a survey by the Guardian and parenting website Netmums.
For a family with two children who need full-time childcare, so-called shift parenting – in which one parent is always at home while the other is at work – saves an average of £11,700 a year. But it can also mean limited family time and experts say the arrangement can be bad for marriages and damage parents’ health and career prospects.
“We’re like ships passing in the night: I walk into the house and Colin walks out,” said Rachel, who works as a nurse practitioner from 8am to 4pm, and whose husband works 5pm-10.30pm on weekdays and 7pm-1am on Saturdays for Royal Mail.
The couple, who live in north-west England, have two children, aged 11 months and two. “We wouldn’t choose to have this arrangement but we can’t afford not to. Sometimes I’m proud of the way we’ve arranged things, but sometimes it’s just very hard going,” said Rachel. “But it’s not unusual: loads of people we know have the same sort of arrangement.”
Almost a third of families in the survey earn £15,300 to £26,399, with 28% earning £26,400 to £35,599, and 17.5% earning £35,600 to £49,099. Just over 40% of the parents have one child, with almost a quarter of these saying they would like to have more but cannot afford it. A further 40% have two children.
Aimee Smallman and Steve Edmundson share the care of their sons, Lucas and Jensen, who are four and three. Edmundson works 12-hour shifts as an electrical engineer in a pattern of two days and two nights on, then four days off. Smallman does 12-hour shifts two nights a week as a mental health nurse, fitting her rota around her partner.
“I’d work full-time, but the way childcare would work out, it would be more expensive. Added to which, even with me working part-time, Steve and I often literally don’t see each other for two days at a time. We just have one day a week together as a family,” said Smallman. “This arrangement is so limiting that neither of us are able to progress in our careers. We’ve both been told we could have promotions but it would mean going back to working conventional hours, which we can’t afford.”
According to a 2010 study jointly run by the University of California’s Center for WorkLife Law and the Center for American Progress, 26% of night-shift workers choose the hours because of childcare needs. Many are at the bottom of the economic ladder. In Living in a 24/7 Economy, the late University of Maryland sociologist Harriet Presser reported that 68% of dual-earner couples with under-fives who earned less than $50,000 included at least one partner working non-standard hours.
Not all the parents in the Guardian/Netmums survey work unconventional hours owing to pressures, however. Although 55% say their relationship with their partner has suffered because they don’t see each other enough, almost a quarter report getting on better because they appreciate the time they do have together.
Natasha Box, manager of a 24-hour call centre, and her husband Tim, a motor insurance engineer who works from home, have eight-year-old twins, Leonie and Eloise. “I work 5pm to 12am, and Tim works 8am to 4.30pm,” said Box, who lives in Southampton. “I’m up at 7am and the kids are out of the house by 8.20am. I do housework, shopping, I get involved with school activities, help out on school trips, go into school to help with reading and swimming.”
Box’s experience reflects the findings of a study by Sara Raley, a professor of sociology at McDaniel College in Maryland, which found night workers have their children “in their orbit” more often than those who work days, as they tend to be home between 3pm and 6pm, when children return from school.
“I absolutely love this arrangement and consider us to be incredibly fortunate,” Box said. “We’re far from unusual: I manage a team of seven people on my evening shift. We’re all mothers who are splitting a day and a night shift with our husbands to avoid having to pay childcare.”
But Siobhan Freegard, founder of Netmums, warned: “This is the first generation of 24-hour shift parenting. We don’t yet know what the implications are on parents and their children. But we do know that shift work has very damaging psychological and physiological effects on workers which, on top of the very demanding job of being a parent of young children, means life quickly becomes an exercise in sheer drudgery.”
The long-term health risks of working nights are well documented. In 2007 shift work was listed by the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer as a “probable carcinogen”. A 2012 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology said male night workers are three times as likely to develop prostate cancer as day workers. The ongoing disruption of a person’s natural circadian rhythms has also been linked to cardiovascular disease, obesity, digestive problems, and diabetes.
