A significant proportion of the global workforce consists of parents – in 2023 34% of adults aged 25 to 54 had a least one child under the age of six. The number of working parents is also increasing, with dual-income families becoming more common.
Although there is an abundance of research focusing on mental health in the workplace and mental health during the transition to parenthood, rarely are the two combined - researchers in Germany have begun to address this gap.
It has been found that in their transition to parenthood, expectant parents may be susceptible to the negative effects of adverse working conditions – particularly precarious employment and abusive supervision or management - which can be an important predictor of mental health symptoms 14 months postpartum. Mental health problems in new parents can have long-reaching implications not only for the affected individual, but also for the healthy development of their children.
Previous research into postpartum mental health has focused on individual-level factors such as age, stressful life events, obstetric experiences and lack of social support. However, the study of the role played by working conditions has been lacking.
The limited evidence that was previously available suggests that working conditions during the transition to parenthood do have an important influence on postpartum mental health. For example, precarious employment (including, e.g., temporary employment, low wages, and authoritarian treatment) during pregnancy predicted symptoms of depression in mothers eight weeks after childbirth. In addition, perceived pregnancy discrimination in the workplace was found to be indirectly related to maternal postpartum symptoms of depression via perceived stress during pregnancy. In expectant fathers, poor job quality was identified as a significant risk factor for symptoms of psychological distress in the first year postpartum, and high job burden as well as low job satisfaction predicted birth-related posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms eight weeks postpartum.
Particular aspects of the work environment appear to be especially relevant to employees’ mental health, including abusive supervision (e.g. aggressive and hostile behaviour by supervisors; job insecurity (e.g. fear of losing one’s job or important features of it; and high job demand (e.g. high workload and time pressure experienced at work. First evidence from the peripartum period on these aspects suggests that experiencing abusive supervision, as well as vicarious abusive supervision (e.g. witnessing colleagues being abused) in the peripartum period can contribute to job-related emotional exhaustion and postpartum depressive symptoms in mothers.
The results of this new study indicate a need for further examination of the links between working environments and expectant parents, and underscores the importance of workplaces ensuring that they have well developed processes for identifying and controlling psychosocial hazards.