I am honored to be the recipient of the Mavis Hetherington Award for Excellence in Applied Developmental Science. I deeply admire Mavis Hetherington’s commitment to the rigorous study of families and family systems as key contexts for child development and seek to carry on that legacy in my own work.
As a community and developmental psychologist, my research makes contributions to the understanding of how systems external to the family – primarily the parental employment and poverty policy contexts – influence family processes and, in turn, children’s development.
My research has shown that parents in the current U.S. context experience many workplace stressors on a daily basis, including unpredictable work schedules, nonstandard work hours, high and low workload, and negative interpersonal interactions. Each of those stressors at work spill over to workers and families (Ananat & Gassman-Pines, 2021; Gassman-Pines, 2011a, 2011b, 2013, 2015), meaning that low-income parents’ work experiences affect not only their own well-being but also the functioning and well-being of their families and children. For example, although both nighttime and weekend hours are “nonstandard” (outside Monday -Friday, 9-5), using daily survey data collected over several weeks, I showed that the consequences of different types of nonstandard work hours differ: nighttime work hours were adversely associated with family outcomes – more negative mood and mother-child interactions and less positive child behavior – but weekend work hours were not (Gassman-Pines, 2011b).
A second area of my research relates to families’ experiences of unexpected shocks like job loss or a health emergency. Although such shocks can affect families of all income levels, they are particularly hard for low-income families to weather as they have fewer resources to buffer from negative consequences. Understanding how these unexpected shocks affect family functioning and child well-being is crucial since children grow up to be the citizens of the future, and because both family-level instability and instability in the broader context can greatly influence child development.
The COVID-19 pandemic was obviously unexpected, and I have been among the developmental scientists at the forefront of understanding ways in which low-income families experienced the pandemic (Ananat et al., 2022; Gassman-Pines et al., 2021; Gassman-Pines et al., 2020; Gassman-Pines & Gennetian, 2020; Steimle et al., 2021). With Dr. Elizabeth Ananat, I used daily survey data to show that both parental work and family well-being declined markedly after COVID-related restrictions were put into place. Further, the more COVID hardship that families faced in the early months of the pandemic, the worse parents’ and children’s mental health became (Gassman-Pines et al., 2020). Disruptions to school and childcare were very common throughout the fall of 2020 – with disruption on nearly one quarter of all days – and negatively affected both children and parents (Gassman-Pines et al., 2021). Parent mood and child behavior problems were worse on days with disruptions, compared to days when school and care went smoothly.
But, even before the pandemic, I examined ways in which communities around the country experienced unexpected economic downturns following factory closings, with substantial cascading effects on families and children. Child development scholars have long examined effects of economic downturns on children by focusing on the consequences of family members’ employment or income loss. Such changes in families’ economic circumstances are strongly linked to individual children’s outcomes. However, my work has demonstrated both theoretically and empirically that economic downturns should be conceptualized as community-level phenomena. Many, if not all, children within communities will be affected, not merely those who directly experience family job or income loss (Gassman-Pines et al., 2015; Gassman-Pines & Schenck-Fontaine, 2018). This set of studies has contributed to public policy and to broader scholarly and public dialogue on economic downturns, and we have summarized our empirical findings in Science (Ananat et al., 2017). That paper showed that economic downturns not only affected youth immediately, in terms of reductions in academic achievement (Ananat et al., 2013; Ananat et al., 2011) and increases in suicide-related behaviors (Gassman-Pines et al., 2014), but also affected intergenerational mobility in the longer-term.
I am so grateful to everyone who has helped make my research possible: most importantly, my family, and also mentors, students, collaborators, and colleagues. I am grateful for the deep community of support behind me.
References
Ananat, E. O., Daniels, B., Fitz-Henley II, J., & Gassman-Pines, A. (2022). Racial And Ethnic Disparities In Pandemic-Era Unemployment Insurance Access: Implications For Health And Well-Being. Health Affairs, 41(11), 1598-1606. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2022.00741
Ananat, E. O., Francis, D. V., Gassman-Pines, A., & Gibson-Davis, C. M. (2013). Children left behind: The effects of statewide job loss on student achievement. NBER Working Paper No. 17104.
Ananat, E. O., & Gassman-Pines, A. (2021). Work schedule unpredictability: daily occurrence and effects on working parents’ well-being Journal of Marriage and Family, 81(1), 10-26.
Ananat, E. O., Gassman-Pines, A., Francis, D. V., & Gibson-Davis, C. M. (2017). Linking job loss, inequality, mental health, and education. Science, 356(6343), 1127-1128. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aam5347
Ananat, E. O., Gassman-Pines, A., & Gibson-Davis, C. M. (2011). The effects of local employment losses on children's educational achievement. In G. J. Duncan & R. Murnane (Eds.), Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality and the Uncertain Life Chances of Low-Income Children (pp. 299-313). Russell Sage Foundation.
Gassman-Pines, A. (2011a). Associations of low-income working mothers’ daily interactions with supervisors and mother-child interactions. Journal of Marriage and Family, 73, 67-76.
Gassman-Pines, A. (2011b). Low-income mothers’ nighttime and weekend work: Daily associations with child behavior, mother-child interactions and mood. Family Relations, 60, 15-29. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3729.2010.00630.x
Gassman-Pines, A. (2013). Daily spillover of low-income working mothers' perceived workload to maternal mood and mother-child interactions. Journal of Marriage and Family, 75, 1304-1318. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12068
Gassman-Pines, A. (2015). Effects of Mexican immigrant parents’ daily workplace discrimination on child behavior and family functioning. Child Development, 86(4), 1175-1190.
Gassman-Pines, A., Ananat, E. O., Fitz-Henley II, J., & Leer, J. (2021). Effect of daily school and care disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic on child behavior problems.
Gassman-Pines, A., Ananat, E. O., & Fitz-Henley, J. (2020). COVID-19 and parent-child psychological well-being. Pediatrics, 146(4). https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2020-007294
Gassman-Pines, A., Ananat, E. O., & Gibson-Davis, C. M. (2014). Effects of statewide job losses on adolescent suicide-related behaviors. American Journal of Public Health, 104, 1964-1970. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2014.302081
Gassman-Pines, A., & Gennetian, L. (2020). COVID-19 Job and Income Loss Jeopardize Child well-Being: Income Support Policies Can Help. SRCD Child Evidence Brief, 9.
Gassman-Pines, A., Gibson-Davis, C. M., & Ananat, E. O. (2015). How economic downturns affect child development: An interdisciplinary perspective on pathways of influence. Child Development Perspectives, 9, 233-238.
Gassman-Pines, A., & Schenck-Fontaine, A. (2018). Economic strain and job loss. In B. Fiese (Ed.), APA Handbook of Contemporary Family Psychology (pp. 457-470). American Psychological Association.
Steimle, S., Gassman-Pines, A., Johnson, A. D., Hines, C., & Ryan, R. M. (2021). Understanding patterns of food insecurity and family well-being amid the COVID-19 pandemic using daily surveys.