Balancing Work and Family: Overview

Introduction

The balance between work and family has become an important issue in the United States and abroad as traditional female roles, primarily of childrearing, changed dramatically over the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The balance of work and family involves the responsibilities of employers, role of government in assisting and protecting families, and gender roles in childrearing and domestic management.

In the United States, major issues involving the balance between work and family include the rights of employees to take time off from work to attend to family issues, the stability of families in which both parents work outside the home, the status of childrearing as a career alternative, and the effects of cultural trends on divorce rates. Time-off legislation has been viewed by some as a step in the right direction and by others as falling short. Workers may have concerns about being passed over for career opportunities when family issues conflict with work. It is often thought that one’s ability to advance professionally requires unquestioning dedication to one’s job. Dedication is often demonstrated by working long hours and being open to frequent travel, relocation, or any other job requirement or expectation. These elements of dedication may interfere with childrearing and contribute to divorce rates and family instability. Social scientists have suggested that American society has not fully adjusted from the feminist movement of the 1960s, which resulted in more women entering the workforce and fewer focusing on domestic management. Some believe that families in which both parents work outside the home cannot achieve the same stability as families in which one parent concentrates on childrearing. Others believe that working families can learn to balance career and family life through a combination of behavioral changes.

Families can also feel the pressure of balance when parents assume traditional roles. Women engaged only in domestic management may feel looked down upon by peers who are engaged in careers. These women may also find themselves working longer hours than those in an office setting and always being on call for their families. They may enjoy a lesser role since they work but do not bring tangible finances into the household. Similarly, people who work long hours outside the home may feel guilt or frustration due to a possible lack of involvement in and control over household issues. The dissatisfaction on both sides can cause distress in the family.

While some observers agree that legislation is required to allow parents more time to attend to family issues, others believe that employers should be free to create their own policies regarding paid and unpaid leave for employees.

Understanding the Discussion

Domestic management: All duties related to the maintenance of the home and family members, including childrearing, home maintenance, laundry, cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, and related activities.

Feminism: The belief in the political, social, and economic equality of the sexes and that men and women should have the same rights and privileges.

Nuclear family: The concept of the central family structure that includes both parents and their children, whether biological or adopted.

Parental leave: The right to take time off, paid or unpaid, from work to attend to the birth or adoption placement of children and to arrange for the welfare of one’s children.

History

Each culture has different norms and values when it comes to the balance between work and family. In some cultures, career success is the primary goal for both men and women, while in other cultures, men are expected to focus on career advancement while women are expected to concentrate on domestic management.

The nuclear family is a relatively recent concept, developed largely in the United States and parts of Europe. Before the 1800s, many families lived near extended family groups where many family members participated in family management. The extended family structure provides more flexibility and support for both parents to divide time between family duties and other work.

Though American women have been part of the paid workforce since the establishment of the colonies, most White women worked only until they were married or had children. American women did not begin entering the paid workforce in large numbers until after the Civil War (1861–65), when the country lost over 600,000 male workers.

An increasing trend toward smaller, nuclear family units made it difficult for parents in working-class families to attend to both work and family issues. There was widespread concern among psychologists that allowing more women into the workforce would be detrimental to family cohesion.

Until the 1920s, most US employers did not hire married women or women with children, as they were considered unreliable workers. It was customary to view women as temporary employees. During the Great Depression (1929–39), more women joined the workforce to alleviate financial burdens. Despite greater numbers of women working outside the home, childrearing and domestic duties were still considered women’s work, and most employers did not allow male workers to take leave for family concerns.

The feminist movements of the 1930s and '40s were divided among different and occasionally competing goals. Some feminist groups attempted to help women achieve career goals through antidiscrimination legislation and worker’s compensation policies. Other feminist groups were interested in promoting domestic management and childrearing as acceptable alternatives to working outside the home.

By 1960, most feminist groups were encouraging women to seek work outside the home as a means of discarding the traditional roles assigned to women. Some argued that the feminist movement posed a danger to family stability, while feminist theorists called for men to take greater responsibility for domestic management. During the 1960s and '70s, thousands of women entered the workplace, aided by legislation that prohibited sex discrimination in hiring practices.

Social and economic factors urged increasing numbers of women into the job market, and by the 1980s, families in which both parents worked outside the home were common. During this period, researchers became concerned by rising divorce rates and declining marriage rates, while academic literature began to address work-family balance as a serious social issue.

During the 1990s, the federal government began to develop legislation aimed at protecting families. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993 made it mandatory for large employers to provide certain full-time working mothers, fathers, and adoptive parents with unpaid, job-protected leave of up to three months at or around the time of childbirth or adoption to ensure the welfare of children. In 2008, the US House of Representatives introduced and passed House Resolution 5781 called the Federal Employees Paid Parental Leave Act of 2008. This resolution allowed federal employees to substitute any paid leave, such as sick leave, for parental leave purposes. This meant that federal employees could find ways to get four weeks of leave in addition to the normal parental leave. Many hoped that this advance in parental leave would become the norm in private companies.

In 2005, researchers at Rutgers University analyzed divorce and marriage rates based on the 2000 United States Census and the 2005 American Community Data Survey. Researchers found that over 17 percent of American marriages ended in divorce. The Rutgers study also found that marriage rates had declined by 50 percent from 1970. American couples were increasingly choosing cohabitation, or living together, over marriage. Approximately 40 percent of such couples had children, and studies indicated that these couples were more likely to separate than married couples. The combination of divorce and separation indicated, to some researchers, that the percentage of families remaining together in the United States had reached a historic low. Analyses from the Census Bureau indicated that 63 percent of children lived with both biological parents, the lowest percentage in all Western nations. According to sociologists, financial concerns and a lack of commitment by one or both partners are among the leading factors contributing to divorce and separation. Some social scientists believed that focus on career advancement had increasingly become more important to many Americans than maintaining committed relationships or focusing on childrearing.

In the mid-to-late 2010s, polls indicated that generation Z and millennials prized personal or family time over career advancement at higher rates than their elders and, along with that, valued flexible working arrangements. Work increasingly bled over personal or family time, however, as newer technologies such as smartphones led to round-the-clock business connectivity. Even when allowed leave, such as vacation, Americans frequently did not use all the hours they accrued or chose to work during off days. Meanwhile, the cost of childcare also rose, pushing many American families toward single-earner households as one partner's lost annual income was equal to or less than the cost of daycare. Employment interruptions and part-time employment have been more common among mothers, and remained true in the 2010s and 2020s.

Some high-profile female executives such as Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook widely promoted women's advancement in the workplace and sought to counter what they perceived as working women “opting out” of the labor force when they had children. Despite the popularity of Sandberg's “lean in” mentality, women choosing to prioritize career over dedication to family and household management remained contentious.

Calls also continued for national guaranteed paid leave for all American workers, even as parental leave gained traction in the private sector. Several Democratic and Republican proposals for paid leave were introduced in Congress, though none came to fruition. In 2015 President Barack Obama granted federal employees six weeks’ paid leave for a new child or an illness; subsequent legislation passed in 2019, under Republican president Donald Trump, extended that covered period up to twelve weeks. Also in 2015, a number of major corporations, including Netflix, Johnson and Johnson, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook, announced lengthy paid leave policies offering months or even a year of paid parental leave. Overall, the share of employers offering paid maternity leave to their employees grew substantially throughout the 2010s—rising from 14 percent of companies surveyed by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) in 2009, following the global recession, to 53 percent in 2020—but fell to 35 percent by 2023.

Eleven states and Washington, DC, instituted their own paid family leave insurance programs between 2002 and 2022, while the capital and sixteen states mandated paid sick leave, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Ten states also provided some protected time off for parents or guardians to attend their children's educational activities. By the early 2020s, more than four in five American families were considered “nontraditional” and often relied on domestic partners or chosen family, rather than families of origin or a legally recognized spouse, for caregiving support, according to the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. These families, and especially LGBTQ-headed households, thus may lack access to the benefits accorded to nuclear heterosexual families. Some states also broadened their official definitions of family, enabling LGBTQ people to take paid family or sick leave to care for a chosen family member, and similar legislation was also proposed at the federal level in the early 2020s.

The difficulty Americans face in balancing or integrating work and home life was underscored by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. As many businesses, schools, and daycare centers were forced to close their buildings in 2020, many working parents, particularly white-collar workers, had to complete their work remotely alongside overseeing their children's education and play activities. Others were forced to quit the workforce, while still others decided to leave their jobs or change careers to spend more time with family. Meanwhile, the vast majority of low-wage earners lacked paid sick leave to care for themselves or their family members. During the pandemic, Congress passed several relief bills, such as the Families First Coronavirus Response Act and CARES Act, which extended sick-leave protections to many but not all working parents. Other notable federal legislation of that period included the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and Providing Urgent Maternal Protections (PUMP) for Nursing Mothers Act, which provided protected break times for pregnant and lactating workers as well as flexible scheduling and other accommodations for expectant parents.

Balancing Work and Family Today

One major avenue for alleviating American families' work-life imbalance is through government policy. A 2023 YouGov poll found broad support across the political spectrum for tax incentives for families with children, those with at-home parents, and employers providing pro-family benefits; greater public funding for adoption and foster care, early childhood education, after-school programs, health care and affordable housing for families with children, and child care for low-income families. Other proposals include aligning school schedules aligned with standard business hours; offering job training; spurring job creation; addressing food insecurity; funding young-adult and postpartum mental health; making prekindergarten free and universal; and sending a cash allowance directly to parents to help improve the birth rate and aid families in states where abortion access was eliminated or restricted.

While many sociologists support legislation like the FMLA, it has been argued that legislation will not be effective without an accompanying shift in American values. It has been suggested that although many employers conform to government standards, employees who utilize their benefits to the full extent may still be penalized through being passed over for promotions, for example. Some have also pointed to the widespread societal belief that the mother in a heterosexual couple is the “default parent” as a barrier to change.

The proposed solutions to work-life imbalance are many. Some advocate corporate policies such as generous leave policies, midcareer sabbaticals, returnships, job sharing, and flextime to enable working parents to do caregiving themselves, while others favor programs such as employer-sponsored childcare facilities or additional pay for offsite childcare. Still others focus on individual skills such as meaning making, boundary setting, time management, prioritization, and negotiation with a partner.

These essays and any opinions, information or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

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