SEMINAR "Work, family and health: current research, future questions"
On March the 22nd and 23rd we welcomed Prof. Lyndall Strazdins from the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University.
Prof. Strazdins is a psychologist whose research focuses on contemporary predicaments of work and care and their health and equity consequences. Recently, she has been developing a theory on time as a social determinant of health, that includes the attempt to understand time as a resource that not only structures power and gender relations but also people’s capacity to be healthy. She is an author of more than 100 publications.
On March the 23rd Prof. Strazdins delivered a broad and informative lecture on the relationship between work, family and health in Australia that looked at issues such as the effects of population aging, longevity, globalization and gender relations on the labor market in Australia, the time men and women spend at work and at home caring for children, and the impact of the work-family conflict on parents’ mental health, the quality of child care they provide and their children’s health. Aside from analyzing the current situation in Australia, with brief comparisons to Japan, the lecture offered clear suggestions as to how and to what extent women should be included in the labor market, about the need to encourage fathers to spend more time caring for children and about how work-family conflict should be addressed in future policies on labor and fertility, while paying attention to gender equality and mental health of both parents and children.
On both days of her stay, our project members held consultation with Prof. Strazdins about the inclusion of psychological measures of parent and child health in the next rounds of the National Survey of Work and Family we are scheduled to conduct, and on possible venues of future joint, comparative research.