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Work and Health of Parents of Adult Children with Serious Mental Illness
Author(s) -
Song Jieun,
Mailick Marsha R.,
Greenberg Jan S.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
family relations
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.772
H-Index - 87
eISSN - 1741-3729
pISSN - 0197-6664
DOI - 10.1111/fare.12043
Subject(s) - flexibility (engineering) , psychology , mental health , psychological intervention , work schedule , spillover effect , mental illness , developmental psychology , work (physics) , clinical psychology , gerontology , psychiatry , medicine , mechanical engineering , statistics , mathematics , engineering , economics , microeconomics
This study examined the effects of work schedule flexibility and the spillover of work stress to family life on the health of parents of adult children with serious mental illness ( SMI ). The authors compared 100 parents of adult children with SMI to 500 parents with nondisabled adult children using data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. The detrimental impact on health of a lack of work flexibility and of higher levels of negative work‐to‐family spillover was more pronounced among parents of adult children with SMI than parents with nondisabled adult children. The results have significant implications for developing interventions to help midlife families of persons with SMI cope with work‐related stress and for policies that provide for greater work schedule flexibility .