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This chapter examines the connections between working conditions and the health of workers' families in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. It begins with a review of the theoretical and empirical basis for a link between parental working conditions and children's health. Similar arguments in relation to the health of elderly and disabled family members are then presented. The core of this chapter reports new findings from a series of studies conducted as part of the Project on Global Working Families, including in-depth interviews of working caregivers in Mexico, Botswana, Vietnam, Honduras, and the United States. The chapter concludes with the policy implications of these findings.

This chapter analyses the correlates of child nutritional status in rural India in an attempt to understand which drivers may be used as entry points to policy intervention. Using children’s standardized weights as a measure of their nutritional status, the analysis uses a health production function framework, in which child nutritional status is postulated as a function of food intakes—as measured by the frequency at which various foods were consumed in the previous week—and various individual-, parental-, household-, and village-level socio-economic factors. The analysis is based on unit record data on 16,755 pre-school rural children in the 1998–9 National Family Health Survey (NFHS). A unique feature of the estimation method is an explicit accounting of sequential fixed effects at the parent, household, and village levels. The chapter suggests that household incomes positively impact the nutritional status of children. However, the authors argue that there is no single solution to the problem of child undernutrition—what is required is a set of complementary strategies.

This chapter deals with family health and the role of health services in family lives, particularly where there is a disability or ongoing health problem. It notes that the most dominant health issue may be mental health, depression and anxiety, sometimes linked to area conditions but also linked to struggles of everyday family life on low-incomes in those poor conditions. It explores the health of the 200 families surveyed here, and investigates their experiences of local health services.

This chapter identifies appropriate resources needed in the research through a survey. The professionals participating in the survey tended to identify community-based services that were informal and flexible as being particularly appropriate for families where mothers had mental health problems. Although practitioners emphasised the need for appropriate residential settings, most of the resources they described were supportive or preventive. There were concerns that existing mental health services were targeted too high for mothers to be able to use them. Some of the suggestions for integrated services which might offer mental health interventions for parents, child care services and family support on one site came close to constituting a model for a family mental health service. Contemplating such alternative service configurations raises questions about the divides between both children's and adults' services and between health and social care.

In this chapter, the author reflects on health care in Haiti in the post-earthquake period. Public health and medical care are two arenas in which the earthquake amplified preexisting social catastrophes. The state of Haiti's Ministry of Public Health reflected the country's health care after the earthquake. The quake also destroyed eight major hospitals and seriously damaged twenty-two more, in addition to medical and nursing schools. Before disaster struck, the country had about twenty-five physicians and eleven nurses for every 100,000 people. The quake killed hundreds of doctors and nurses, along with other health care workers. The author first provides an overview of health care in post-earthquake Haiti before discussing the links between politics and health. She then considers issues regarding health care access and goes on to describe the work of two organizations, Partners in Health and the Association for the Promotion of Integrated Family Health.

This examines the lived experience of precautionary consumption by drawing on interviews the author conducted with 30 New York City mothers to learn how much precautionary consumption is part of their foodwork and shopping routines. Women became aware of cultural ideals of femininity and good motherhood when they entered their reproductive years, and this translated into a deep sense of accountability for their child’s future. Precautionary consumption offered a way for women respond to these cultural ideals, and they wove precautionary consumption into existing caregiving and foodwork routines.

This chapter narrows in on the class dimensions of precautionary consumption. It explores the invisible but significant resources that some mothers used to accomplish this practice. Mothers’ routines look very different depending on how much money they have, their access to organic foods and non-toxic goods, how much time they have to read an ingredient label, weigh the costs and benefits of organic food relative to conventional food, and whether their lives can accommodate the mental effort associated with complex decisions involved in learning and practicing precautionary consumption