Service workers have less stable job schedules — and it impacts their kids' health, sleep, and behavior

41% of children whose parents had unstable work schedules did not get adequate sleep, with their health and behavior taking a hit too during COVID.

• The children of parents with unstable work schedules sleep worse, their grades suffer, and they act out.
• People of color are overrepresented in industries with inconsistent scheduling, and see less stability than their white peers.
• Work conditions and scheduling for service workers has gotten even worse during the pandemic. 

Service workers have seen some of the worst impacts of the pandemic, facing lockdowns, closures, and increased risk of exposure to the virus.

A new study finds that the instabilities of working in the service sector don't just hurt workers — they have huge consequences for their kids as well.

That's what the Harvard Kennedy School's Shift Project reports in a study tracking the well-being of workers and their families. The researchers found that unstable and unpredictable work schedules, which service workers experience disproportionately, have "intergenerational impacts." 

"Substantial evidence shows that children suffer when parents cannot control the timing of their work," the study says. "Children lose consistent daily routines and parent-child time all while parents become more stressed." 

The report finds that these conditions trickle down to their children in logistical and developmental ways: parents with unstable schedules are less able to manage their childrens' health conditions and drop their kids off to school, for instance, but their children are also more likely to act out and sleep poorly due to psychological stress. In the long run, this puts children of service workers at a mental and physical disadvantage compared to their peers. 

This report comes as service workers across the country have faced increased workplace challenges during the pandemic, with service workers at greater risk of death than any other industry, also reporting that they're getting overloaded with work due to consistent understaffing, and being forced to work by their bosses despite having COVID-19.

The researchers write that children suffer when their parents cannot decide the timing of their work, losing consistent daily routines and time with their parents, with both parties becoming more stressed. The study found that parents' unstable schedules are associated with an increase in behavioral problems for their children, school absences, sleep problems, and even worse health.  

Last minute changes to a shift mean that parents can't ensure their kids get to school on time, for instance, and children sleep less due to the economic and psychological stressors that unstable schedule put on their homes. 41% of children whose parents had the greatest schedule instability did not get adequate sleep each night compared to the children of parents with stable and predictable schedules (27%). 

And in the case of parents who have children with health problems like asthma, an unpredictable schedule means that they can't plan to monitor symptoms, administer medication, or make doctor's appointments — impacting the health of their kids.

"Children thrive in contexts of stability and of warm and engaged parenting," Daniel Schneider, a Harvard sociologist who worked on the study with Kristen Harknett, a sociologist at UCSF, told Insider. "Parental exposure to schedule instability and unpredictability undermines household economic security, increases parental stress, and wreaks havoc on the routines of childcare, meals, and bedtimes."

Service workers don't have stable schedules, and people of color have even less stability than their white counterparts 

People of color make up more than their fair share of service workers — just over four-in-ten front-line workers are Black, Hispanic, Asian-American/Pacific Islander, or some category other than white (41.2%), according to a 2020 Center for Economic Policy Research report. That's much higher than the non-white share of adults in the overall population of 23.7%.

But they aren't just overrepresented in the industry: they're exposed to unstable and unpredictable schedules more often than their white counterparts, the Shift report says. 

Between Spring 2020 and Fall 2021, the researchers found that men of color (67%) and women of color (68%) were more likely than white men (62%) and white women (62%) to have less than two weeks' advance notice for their schedules. During this timeframe, people of color were also more likely than white people to work on-call, and women of color were 15-30% more likely to experience canceled or on-call shifts and involuntary part-time work than white men. 

And those disparities have real implications on their families, with the children of service workers of color bearing the brunt of them. 

"Unequal exposure does contribute to unequal contexts for children of color," Schneider said. "But we find that all children whose parents are exposed to unstable and unpredictable scheduling bear the risk of negative consequences…  It is [a] scheduling divide and workers of color are exposed to more unstable schedules."