A 2-Year Longitudinal Relationship Between Work-Family Conflict and Health Among Older Workers: Can Gardening Help?

With the graying workforce worldwide, identifying factors that facilitate older workers' health is critically important. We examined whether gardening mitigates the relationship of work-family conflict with disability, chronic conditions, depressive symptoms, and self-rated health among older workers. We drew a subsample of older workers aged 55 years and above from the Health and Retirement Study (N= 1,598). Our results indicate that the relationships of work-to-family conflict at baseline with disability and with poorer self-rated health at a 2-year follow-up were stronger for those who gardened less than those who gardened more. No significant interaction was found between family-to-work conflict and gardening in predicting the health outcomes. This study is the first to show that gardening may have a protective effect against the adverse impact of work-to-family conflict on older workers' health.