Balancing Work and Family

Abstract

Balancing work and family is a challenge that a majority of American parents experience. Traditionally, men offered financial support to their families, and women did more in the home. However, that trend has changed and increasingly both parents work. Better health is reported by both working men and women once their children enter school. In addition, women who are self-employed tend to feel their time is better balanced as their schedules are more flexible than women who work for someone else. Further, Black American parents who work report worse health when compared to working White parents. College students' views of balancing work and family in the future are discussed, as are some solutions to the challenges parents face while raising young children and working.

Overview

Balancing Work & Family. According to 2020 data from the US Census Bureau, only a minority of married women with children under the age of fifteen were in stay-at-home mom roles (approximately 22 percent). This has changed drastically from the status of mothers during the early 1900s when only 5 percent of married women had jobs outside of the home. At that time, staying at home was so expected of a woman that historians have dubbed the era the "cult of true womanhood" (Lerner, 1969; Wenter, 1966, as cited in Kammeyer, et al., 381). The fight for voting rights, civil rights activism, and the women's liberation movement changed the trend of the women's "cult" to encompass education, career, and motherhood. The US Bureau of the Census reported that by 1991 "60 percent of mothers . . . were in the labor force" (1992, as cited in Kammeyer et al., p. 382). The number of fathers staying at home also increased by 2020.

Judith Warner, author of the book Perfect Madness, and a working mother of two, knew from experience that the work and home-life dichotomy caused an unfair struggle for parents. She explained that "middle class life is now so . . . expensive that in most families both parents must work gruelingly long hours just to make ends meet" (Warner, 2005, par. 20). She also notes that what Americans experience is not a universal condition. According to Warner, the workweek in the United States is one of the longest in the world; in 2005, fathers worked about fifty-one hours per week, and mothers worked just over forty; however, the number of hours both mothers and fathers work was shifting dramatically. A 2014 Gallup report stated that the average length of the workweek for a full-time American employee was 46.7 hours. In 2021, the average full-time worker, man or woman, in the United States worked 42.65 hours. This data does not include the reasons why parents in the US work so much more than in other countries, but it has to be inferred that practicality is an issue: they do it because they have to.

Several things need to be considered when addressing these issues. First, providing family income—now often the responsibility of both parents—makes life very different than it was when previous generations were growing up. Mothers are not always home when their children are released from school, and fathers are not always home in time for dinner. Second, the time a parent spends away from their children causes conflict, either within the family structure itself or within the employment arrangement. Finally, children between the ages of infancy to six years (when they generally attend school) require more time from a caretaker than do children who go to school. As a result, conflicts stemming from the combination of caregiving and working outside of the home are at an increase during this time period.

A 2016 Pew Research study found that 56 percent of married adults surveyed said that sharing household chores was very important to marital success. Yet an imbalance remained. According to the American Time Use survey by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), in 2019, 46 percent of women did housework on a typical day compared to 22 percent of men. The survey also found that women spent more time physically caring for children, less time on leisure activities, and were more likely to spend time doing household activities like cooking.

Warner's 2005 essay titled "Mommy Madness" was featured as the cover story in Newsweek magazine. While collecting data for the piece, Warner interviewed nearly 150 American women born between 1958 and the early 1970s. Most of the women in this generation, she wrote, "grew up believing that we had fantastic, unlimited, freedom of choice" (par. 18). Somewhere amid growing up with such freedom, however, a disconnect developed between a woman's expectations about her life and the reality of being a working mom. This disconnect turned out to be painful and conflicting, as Warner writes:

“You can continue to pursue your professional dreams at the cost of abandoning your children to long hours of inadequate child care. Or: You can stay at home with your baby and live in a state of virtual, crazy-making isolation because you can't afford a nanny, because there is no such thing as part-time day care, and because your husband doesn't come home until 8:30 at night. . . . These are choices that don't feel like choices at all. They are the harsh realities of family life in a culture that has no structures in place to allow women—and men—to balance work and child-rearing” (Warner, 2005).

The freedom Warner described comes with a great deal of responsibility. And those who are the most responsible often find fault with themselves when they cannot meet their own expectations. Rather than finding fault with employers who do not offer flex-time or daycare providers that are inadequate or unaffordable, mothers blame themselves. In turn, they make career decisions that can be limiting. For example, Curtis noted that women held 42 percent of the college and university faculty positions in the United States; the numbers increased in the subsequent years. However, while that number is substantial when compared to statistics from the 1980s, it denotes positions for women that do not compare in rank to male academics. Curtis reported that many women choose to accept positions in community colleges or in larger institutions without the possibility of tenure so that they do not have to put in the long hours required for higher ranks.

Further Insights

Fathers Struggle Too. The conflict experienced by working mothers has been public for years. That is not the case for fathers who want to be involved in the lives of their children. In addition to juggling work and family, men confront the issue of tradition, which has promoted fathers as the family breadwinner for generations. According to Reeves (2004), "it is not just that most breadwinners are men, it is that, to be a man, you have to be a breadwinner" (p. 20). Moving away from this traditional role is a difficult task, especially when such expectations—that manhood equates to providing financial security for one's family—are ingrained in society; it is as though something is wrong if he chooses to stay at home rather than go to work. This may cause conflict for him in the workplace, either with a supervisor or with coworkers who have their own impressions of a working father's role. Still, as gender roles grow and evolve in the twenty-first century, more men are choosing to be stay-at-home dads. In 2021, 2.1 million fathers chose to stay at home with their children instead of seeking employment.

Family & Medical Leave Act. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) allows employees twelve weeks of unpaid time off per year to care for a child (birthed, adopted, or with a medical illness). It is easy to misunderstand this legislation. The act assures that a person's position cannot be filled during the twelve weeks that they take off. It does not ensure that an employer will be happy about that person being away from work for three months. In addition, an employee does not get paid during that time. For households that require the income of two people to run sufficiently, any unpaid time causes additional conflict, especially if it is time that requires a court battle to acquire. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has filed several suits against employers who have denied fathers the time automatically given to women after the birth of a child. Those suits have received mixed results in court, but the fact that they have been filed at all demonstrates how different families have become. In 2017, the EEOC filed a lawsuit against the major cosmetics manufacturer Estée Lauder under allegations that the company had paternity benefit policies that were not equal to those offered to female employees; the following year, a settlement of just over $1 million was reached.

Flexible Time. Texas Instruments and Ernst & Young were among the first large businesses that incorporated policies offering men paid paternity leave and flexible schedules. Sun Microsystems was one of the first companies to adopt a program allowing employees to work "anywhere, anytime" so showing up at an office was no longer a priority as long as work got completed. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, when large numbers of Americans worked from home, many companies extended work-from-home policies. In the 2020s, it became common for one or both parents to work from home. In a survey conducted by Monster.com, 330 working fathers were asked about their preferred work arrangements when considering their families. Of those surveyed, 70 percent stated that if money was not an issue, they would consider being the parent who stays at home; in addition, 71 percent noted taking on flexible work schedules when their employers offered it. Indeed, traditional roles have changed, and many men would opt to remain at home, even on a part-time basis, if it were financially feasible to do so. Granting paid time off to both men and women has become much more common in the 2020s.

The increased involvement in family life is a trend that is not limited to men in the United States. In fact, in the United Kingdom, "the amount of time fathers spend with their children has tripled in the past few decades," (Reeves, 2004, p. 20). It is possible that the increase is based on the fact that more than half of the "married or cohabiting [British] women with pre-school-age children" are currently in the workforce (Reeves, 2004, p. 20). With so many women in the workforce and so many couples sharing the responsibilities of both employment and child care, as of 2014, the British government began offering parental leave for eligible parents within the first year of their child’s birth or adoption.

The Health of Working Parents. Unless working parents are healthy, the financial support they provide for their families is not necessarily a positive feature in a family's life; in fact, it may seem like a burden. Schnittker studied the health of working parents to determine if the work/family combination showed either a negative or positive effect on mothers and fathers. Using over twenty years of cumulative data from the General Social Survey in addition to ten years of data from the National Health Interview Survey, Schnittker documented the following conclusions with regard to the health of working American parents:

• Those [women] who go to college report higher levels of good health than women who do not;
• Women who are employed, regardless of the number of hours they work or how they combine their work responsibilities with family obligations, report better health than those who are not employed;
• For women, having a child under age 6 reduces the health benefits of employment;
• Mothers working 1 to 30 hours report better self-rated health than do mothers who are not employed;
• Fathers with children under the age of 6 report better self-rated health if they work full-time rather than part-time; fathers working more than 50 hours a week report somewhat better health than do fathers working 31 to 50 hours;
• Mothers with children under the age of 6 report progressively worse health the more they work. Mothers working more than 50 hours a week report worse health than mothers working 1 to 30 hours and somewhat worse health than mothers working 31 to 50 hours.

It is important to understand these statistics. Women who work report having better health than women who do not work. Yet, if those same women have children under the age of six, the benefits of employment are reduced. Furthermore, the more hours they work, the worse they feel. Conversely, fathers with young children report better health when they either work full-time or in excess of fifty hours per week than those fathers of young children who only work part-time. It is difficult to determine what causes this disparity between work and health for parents across genders, and more studies are needed.

What is not in alliance with tradition is the striking impact of education on the health of women. Those who go to college (regardless of whether or not they earn a degree) have better health than those who do not go to college. This would make sense if the education was directly associated with a higher rate of pay for women, but in Schnittker's 2004 study, he did not find that correlation. In fact, he notes that "education can promote health even in absence of employment [and a paycheck], perhaps because of its relationship to knowledge" (Schnittker, 2007, p. 223). Indeed, there is a factor of learning that stimulates positive health, and it does not have to be rewarded by a job opportunity to prove its worth. It is important to note, however, that this is true for both men and women. A 2021 study found that both men and women with a college education led longer and healthier lives.

Race Differences. IIn the early twenty-first century, Piatt & Marcussen also noted differences across racial categories. Using information collected from the 1996 General Social Survey, the researchers sampled more than 750 working parents to determine whether role strain (the combined effects of work and family) affects mental and physical health differently for Black Americans when compared to White Americans. According to their data,

"African American respondents have less income, more children and are much less likely to be married compared to White respondents [and] . . . tended to report poorer physical health in contrast to White respondents. [Yet,] African Americans report less work strain than their white counterparts" (Piatt & Marcussen, 2003, p. 8-9).

Across all race demographics, higher income was correlated with better health, and increased age was correlated with poorer health. Furthermore, demographics had no factor in the report of work-family conflict. For example, "family strain (role conflict that occurs when work prevents a person from performing family responsibilities) is more important for physical health than work strain (role conflict that occurs when family responsibilities affect work behavior) . . . those respondents who reported greater success balancing work and family also reported better physical health" (p. 9). Being able to effectively manage one's time while at home is better for overall health and should lead to a sense of satisfaction, regardless of race.

Additionally, Piatt & Marcussen note that the "perception that work interferes with family obligations decreases perceptions of physical health and increases reports of depression and anxiety" (emphasis by authors, p. 12). While such a report was important to researchers at the time, any other report would seem nonsensical. For example, if a father perceives himself as being unable to meet the needs of his family because he works so much, then for him to report that he feels mentally healthy would suggest that he does not care much about how his household is being maintained without him.

The Next Generation of Parents. In a random sampling of all students registered at a small liberal arts college in the south, Kaufman (2005) found that students (between the ages of 18 and 22) expected to take on the role of working parents. However, Kaufman noted a distinct gender difference regarding the expectations of how that balance would be demonstrated. "When asked how many hours per week they expect to spend on housework in ten years, men gave an average of 6.7 hours while women gave an average of 9.9 hours" (p. 64). In addition, men and women both tended to still retain a gender bias when it came to traditional roles. For example, "one-half of women strongly agree that women are as capable as men of performing technical tasks compared to one-third of men [who feel women are as capable], and . . . [only] one-third of women . . . [and] one-fifth of men feel strongly that men are as capable as women of performing childcare tasks" (p. 65).

To be clear, the female respondents in this study expected to do almost ten hours of housework per week in addition to having a full-time job. Half of them also believed that they were as technically savvy as their male counterparts, and the majority of them felt that women take better care of children than men do. In other words, this group of young women had not yet graduated from college and already felt that they would do more housework than men, could complete fix-it tasks just as well as men and could take care of children better than men. This study was limited to a small college, yet the findings were pervasive in regard to what was already known about gender roles at the time: While they were still in college, young women were already expecting to be overworked once they gained a career, a spouse, and a child. Although progress has been made in the sharing of responsibilities between working parents, according to the Pew Research Center, as the twenty-first century progressed, women continued to manage a heavier load concerning work and family.

Self-Employment. Waismel-Manor (2003) conducted a study of over one thousand working women in upstate New York to determine if women who are self-employed feel more successful juggling work and family when compared to women who work for an organization. According to the researcher, self-employed women "are likely to have more perceived success at personal and family life, as well as more perceived control of work, suggesting that self-employment offers these women greater flexibility and control over their lives" (p. 1). The women in the sample averaged forty-four years of age and worked just over forty hours per week on average. Over 20 percent of the sample had children under the age of six, and almost all of them had a live-in partner at home. In addition, and probably contrary to what most people believe, the self-employed women earned almost fifteen thousand dollars per year less than their peers who worked for an organization (p. 10). In light of the salary difference (which was considerable), self-employed women reported having more control over their lives, in part, one can argue because their lives were more flexible than women who had different working conditions. It is plausible to conclude that flexibility rather than a higher income is what can make self-employed women feel more in control.

Viewpoints

New Ideologies are Needed. The following excerpt comes from Judith Warner's 2005 essay, "Mommy Madness":

“Women today mother in the excessive, control-freakish way that they do in part because they are psychologically conditioned to do so. But they also do it because, to a large extent, they have to. Because they are unsupported, because their children are not taken care of, in any meaningful way, by society at large. Because there is right now no widespread feeling of social responsibility—for children, for families, for anyone, really—and so they must take everything onto themselves. And because they can't, humanly, take everything onto themselves, they simply go nuts” (Warner, 2005).

Schnittker (2007) notes that views like Warner's are not unique. "Hays (1996) . . . argues that mothers are subject to an increasingly extensive and elaborate ideology of intensive mothering, an ideology that demands both nurturing behavior in the home and the income provided by full-time employment" (p. 224). It is possible that the mothers who struggle with the work/family imbalance have created that imbalance and simply expect more of themselves than they can put forth. However, it is also possible that these mothers became mothers with an unrealistic expectation of what the world would offer them by way of support. When we grow up, we recognize that any support offered by outside sources costs money.

Easing the Stress. Warner suggested the following changes to alleviate the strain caused by the work-family conflict in the United States.

• Government-mandated childcare standards,
• Flexible, affordable, locally available, high-quality part-time daycare,
• New initiatives to make it possible for mothers to work part-time,
• Progressive tax policies that would transfer wealth to the middle class.

In addition to easing conflict within families, these suggestions offer options that most working parents simply do not have in the United States. Ideally, working parents would be in the workforce because they want to—because they have earned positions based on their education and experience—rather than because they need to in order to support their families. A solution to the disconnect between choice and necessity lies in the configuration of the economy and, many would argue, in the hands of people who tend not to experience anxiety, poor health, and guilt due to balancing work with raising young children. In European countries like England, governments have taken action to solve the issue of this disconnect, offering extended maternity and paternity leave.

Paid Family Leave Gains Traction. Paid family leave has increasingly been an issue of political debate. According to the New York Times, although the United States has the Family and Medical Leave Act, which allows certain employees to take twelve weeks of unpaid time off for the birth or adoption of a child, the United States is the "only industrialized country to offer no paid family or sick leave." By 2024, states including California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, and Washington had paid family leave (albeit partial) laws in effect of up to as much as twelve weeks in some cases, which were financed through payroll taxes. In 2015, Connecticut Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro and New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand introduced legislation for a federal paid family leave act financed through a trust fund in the Social Security Administration. Although some politicians believe that federal paid time off for families is unlikely to become a reality because of the juggling act between work-family responsibilities that most American families experience, the notion has gained political traction. In 2023, DeLauro and Gillibrand introduced an updated version of the legislation to create a permanent, national paid family and medical leave program, the Family and Medical Insurance Leave (FAMILY) Act.

Debates over federal paid family leave only increased during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic declared in 2020. During lockdowns aimed at controlling the spread of the virus, a larger number of Americans were required to work from their homes rather than in a company office. Many reported exacerbated challenges in separating their work and home/family lives, juggling childcare and guided virtual schooling while working full-time, and maintaining work performance and family care under so much extra stress. In early 2021, President Joe Biden proposed the American Families Plan, and part of the package was a program for paid federal leave, which was later signed into law as part of Biden's Build Back Better campaign.

Terms & Concepts

Anxiety: A state of agitation or being nervous about something.

Depression: A disorder occurring after a prolonged experience with anxiety or stress; symptoms include lack of concentration, sleep disruptions, feelings of hopelessness, and, in more serious cases, suicidal thoughts.

Discrimination: The unfair treatment of one person or a group of people based on a prejudice (a preconceived idea) about race, ethnicity, age, religion, or gender.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC): Branch of the federal government that enforces laws promoting equal employment regulations, practices, and policies (civil rights and anti-discrimination laws).

Family and Medical Leave Act (1993): Federal legislation requiring employers to grant eligible employees up to 12 workweeks of unpaid leave during any 12-month period for one or more of the following reasons: 1) the birth and care of the newborn child of the employee; 2) placement with the employee of a son or daughter for adoption or foster care; 3) to care for an immediate family member (spouse, child, or parent) with a serious health condition; 4) to take medical leave when the employee is unable to work because of a serious health condition; or 5) “any qualifying exigency arising out of the fact that the employee’s spouse, son, daughter, or parent is a covered military member on ‘covered active duty.’”

Feminism: The movement (that generally began in the early 1970s) which attempts to gain access to the same opportunities already afforded to men.

General Social Survey (GSS): A cross-section of the US population.

National Health Interview Survey (NHIS): Survey information collected through random interviews for the National Center for Health Statistics.

Stress: Strain (emotional, mental) caused by constraints on time or anxiety-provoking situations; can cause physical symptoms like high blood pressure or depression if experienced for a continuous period of time.

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