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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Longitudinal Employment Patterns and Parental Health: A Cross-Country Look

Referee Report

This paper addresses an important and timely question concerning the relationship between longitudinal employment patterns, particularly non-standard work arrangements, and parental health across different countries. The study employs a rigorous methodological approach, using sequence analysis and regression models to examine the associations. The cross-country comparative perspective is a significant strength, allowing for insights into how different social and policy contexts may moderate these relationships.

Strengths:

• Relevance: The topic is highly relevant, given the increasing prevalence of non-standard work schedules and their potential impact on families.

• Cross-Country Design: The use of data from four developed countries (Australia, Germany, UK, and US) allows for valuable comparisons and insights into the role of different national contexts.

• Methodological Rigor: The combination of sequence analysis and regression models provides a robust approach to analyzing longitudinal work patterns and their health consequences.

• Clear Research Questions: The study is guided by well-defined research questions that are clearly stated in the introduction.

• Comprehensive Data Availability: The data is fully available without restriction, making this study highly reproducible.

Areas for Improvement:

• Sample Sizes: As acknowledged by the authors, the sample sizes for Germany are relatively small, which may limit the power to detect statistically significant effects.

• Voluntary vs. Involuntary Work Schedules: The analysis does not differentiate between voluntary and involuntary non-standard work schedules.

• Social Determinants Discussion: Could be expanded on how social determinants influence health.

• Data Comparability: Although the authors do take steps to ensure data comparability, they can be further improved.

Specific Comments and Suggestions:

• Introduction: To strengthen the introduction, the authors could briefly discuss the specific parental leave and childcare policies in the four countries under study, highlighting how they might relate to non-standard work arrangements.

• Data and Methods: Justify the age range chosen. Explain how missing data was handled and if there were any limitations with the methodology.

• Results: Provide more specific examples of differences in health outcomes due to specific reasons.

• Discussion: Focus on why parental work may carry long-lasting impacts on health, and how to deal with this issue.

Potential Typos and Misspellings:

• Page 7: "Jianghong Li, WZB Social Science Center Berlin, Germany; Curtin University and The Kids Institue, Western Australia" - "Institue" should be "Institute"

• Page 11: "sync of biological rthyms" - "rthyms" should be "rhythms"

• Page 14: "Perry-Jenkins et al" it is not consistent, some cases the last name is not hyphened. The name shoudl be the same.

• Page 15: "Specifically, the four countries examined in this study differ signifcantly in key" - "signifcantly" should be "significantly"

• Page 19: "Where the concept applies to the contry context" - "contry" should be "country"

• Page 21: "which with transforming one sequence into another"- It is "With" or "which"?

Reviewer #2: Longitudinal Employment Patterns and Parental Health: A Cross-Country Look

Summary

This paper studies how long-term employment trajectories are associated with parental physical and mental health using a life-course and cross-country perspective. Motivated by the growth of nonstandard and unstable work arrangements and cross-national differences in labor-market flexibility and health-care systems, the authors ask whether parental work schedule patterns across adulthood are linked to later health, and whether these associations vary across institutional contexts.

Using longitudinal data from Australia, Germany, the UK, and the US, the authors first apply sequence analysis to classify work schedule trajectories between ages 25 and 54. They then relate these trajectories to health outcomes measured at ages 35/40, 45/50, and 55/60 using multivariate regression models with rich sociodemographic controls.

The results show that persistent non-employment and volatile or nonstandard work trajectories are associated with worse physical and mental health across all four countries. While adverse associations are more persistent in countries with lower labor-market flexibility and weaker health-care protection (notably the US), effect sizes are larger at later ages in countries with more generous social and health systems, such as Germany and the UK.

The paper contributes by providing a comparative life-course analysis of parental work and health, highlighting how employment flexibility and institutional health-care contexts shape the long-term health consequences of unstable work arrangements.

Review

While this paper addresses a timely topic, uses rich longitudinal data, and applies a careful empirical strategy, I am left with concerns regarding (1) the motivation and relevance of the research question, particularly the implications of parental wellbeing; (2) the originality and contribution of the study, given its purely associational nature and the limited engagement with existing causal literature on work arrangements and health. Below I provide a set of comments and suggestions that I hope will help the authors clarify these issues and better articulate the paper’s contribution.

Relevance

While the paper addresses an important and timely topic, its broader relevance could be strengthened by more clearly articulating why parental wellbeing matters beyond individual health outcomes. The analysis convincingly documents associations between long-term work trajectories and parental health, but it stops short of situating these findings within a broader discussion of economic efficiency and social costs. In particular, the paper does not fully explore how deteriorations in parental health may affect labor supply, productivity, public health expenditures, or the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage. As a result, the relevance remains primarily descriptive, with the economic implications of the findings left largely implicit rather than central to the argument.

Method and Interpretation of Results

The authors are transparent about the subjective and structural aspects of the sequence analysis, including clustering decisions, treatment of missing states, and cross-country comparability constraints. These limitations are inherent to life-course sequence analysis using international panel data and are handled using standard, defensible practices, though the following points would benefit from revision:

Causality: The paper appropriately frames its results as associations rather than causal effects; however, given the academic and policy relevance of work schedules and labor-market arrangements, it is crucial to clarify these limitations from the outset. I encourage the authors to expand the discussion of causality by explicitly addressing: (i) why causal estimates would be particularly valuable in this context; (ii) what the reliance on associations implies for academic contribution and policy relevance; and (iii) how the life-course, trajectory-based approach, while not resolving endogeneity, helps mitigate some limitations of associational evidence by capturing cumulative exposure rather than point-in-time correlations.

Institutional context and cross-country interpretation: More detail on the legal and institutional context shaping labor-market flexibility and health protection across countries is needed to strengthen the interpretation of cross-country differences by more systematically linking observed patterns to institutional features such as working-time regulations, employment protection, schedule flexibility rights, and health-care system coverage.

Origininality

The paper provides a solid discussion of the literature documenting associations between work instability and parental wellbeing; however, it is not clear how by providing evidence on associations the paper contribute academically and may have implication for policy. In particular, the reasons for the existing gap in cross-country evidence sufficiently discussed, whether due to data limitations or the complexity of comparing highly heterogeneous institutional contexts. Moreover, given that the paper does not report causal estimates, it would be useful to clarify how the analysis nevertheless adds value to the literature and complements the existing causal evidence. More specifically:

• Clarify why US-centric evidence is a limitation. More explicitly articulate why the dominance of US-based studies poses an external validity problem, particularly given differences in labor-market regulation, social protection, and health-care systems across countries.

• Explain the source of the cross-country evidence gap:. Clarify whether the lack of cross-country analyses in the literature primarily reflects data constraints or whether contextual heterogeneity has limited meaningful comparison, and explain how the paper navigates these challenges and add to the literature by dealing with data of countries with such differential features.

• Position the contribution relative to existing causal evidence. There is a growing body of work providing causal estimates of the effects of work instability/flexibility or even parental leave on parental and infant wellbeing that is not fully discussed or identified in the current version of the paper. The contribution would be strengthened by acknowledging this literature and clarifying which aspects remain missing in these studies (e.g., cross-country evidence or life-course perspective) and how the present analysis complements rather than replicates existing causal findings. See some of them:

o Persson, P., & Rossin-Slater, M. (2024). When dad can stay home: fathers' workplace flexibility and maternal health. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 16(4), 186-219.

o Bloom, N., Liang, J., Roberts, J., & Ying, Z. J. (2015). Does working from home work? Evidence from a Chinese experiment. The Quarterly journal of economics, 130(1), 165-218.

o Chuard, C. (2023). Negative effects of long parental leave on maternal health: Evidence from a substantial policy change in Austria. Journal of Health Economics, 88, 102726.

Other comments about writing

Introduction and motivation: The Introduction does not sufficiently clarify the motivation and contribution of the paper. It would benefit from a clearer articulation of the underlying theoretical mechanisms, a precise research question, and a concise explanation of how the paper answers this question and contributes to the existing literature. As currently written, the framing feels incomplete and makes it difficult to assess the paper’s value early on.

Presentation of results: The results are largely presented as a sequence of estimates with little interpretation at the point of reporting. This gives the impression that the paper is primarily reporting numbers, with substantive discussion postponed to later sections. Integrating interpretation alongside the presentation of results is necessary to help readers understand the relevance and implications of the findings.

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Longitudinal Employment Patterns and Parental Health: A Cross-Country Look

PONE-D-25-46936R1

Dear Dr. Han,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

-->Comments to the Author

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Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

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Reviewer #1: (No Response)

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-->3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? -->

Reviewer #1: Yes

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The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.-->

Reviewer #1: Yes

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-->5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.-->

Reviewer #1: Yes

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Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)-->

Reviewer #1: Thank you for the concise responses to the concerns raised. I am satisfied with the answers provided and the changes made to address the issues.

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Reviewer #1: No

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