The Unseen Costs of Low-Income Work: Understanding the Relationship Between Parent Work and Child Cognitive and Academic Outcomes

Parents play a central role in their child’s school outcomes. For working parents, however, particularly those working low-wage jobs, managing work and family demands is a constant and often overwhelming reality that can have significant and adverse effects on engagement with family and children. Much of our understanding of the relationship between parental work and child school outcomes, however, has been limited to broad contextual factors (e.g., income level, time). As articulated through Bioecological theory, the context through which children’s school outcomes may be influenced is layered and multifactorial. The Job Demands-Resources model and spillover-crossover model of the work-family interface provide a theoretical lens through which we can examine how direct work factors, as well as parental efforts to navigate the work-family interface, impact child school outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to explicate the integration of Bioecological theory and Spillover-crossover theory to provide a framework for examining these factors and to highlight several areas in the work-family literature that are ripe for exploration of their role in child school outcomes. For children of parents working low-wage jobs, the detrimental effects of parent work factors on parent–child interactions and child outcomes are particularly salient. By leveraging work-family theory and established literature on parental involvement, this review provides an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the link between the systems that shape parent experiences (i.e., their work roles) and child cognitive and academic outcomes.