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.