Family and work: the family's perspective

In research and public discourse, the issue of the relationship between work and family life has largely focused on working parents, and the stress that they may experience from "balancing" their roles. There has been very little Australian qualitative research that explores the experience of family life for working families, particularly from the perspective of children.

Our paper reports preliminary results from qualitative research undertaken by the Australian Institute of Family Studies with 69 parents and 71 children from 47 families in Melbourne. In-depth one-on-one interviews about work and family were conducted with parents and their children aged eight years and over.

There were 18 single parent families, and 29 two-parent families. Of the single-parent families, eight of the parents were in full-time employment, seven were in part-time employment and three had no regular paid work. Of the two-parent families, eight were families with both parents in full-time work, 16 had one parent in full-time work and the other in part-time work. In the remaining families, both parents worked part-time, or one had no regular paid employment. These classifications represent the families’ current employment patterns. In reality, most of the families have had different work patterns across the lives of the children, so current patterns of employment do not necessarily reflect the children’s experiences for their whole lives, or even the greater part of their lives.

Most of the parents interviewed in the study were born in Australia (n= 55), with the remaining 14 born in South Africa, Italy, Fiji, England, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Egypt, Uganda, Vietnam and the Philippines. Only one interview was conducted with the assistance of an interpreter.

Parents ranged in age from 31 to 58, while children interviewed ranged in age from eight to 21. Forty of the children were male, 31 were female.

The education background and range of occupations of parents reflected the breadth of the sampling procedure. While half the sample had either degree or post-graduate qualifications, 16 parents had completed Year 12 or lower, and 14 had trade, certificate or diploma qualifications.

The range of occupations which parents were employed in was similarly broad, including professionals such as social workers, teachers, social scientists; and accountants; para-professionals, such as nurses and child care workers; tradespersons and apprentices, such as carpenters and cooks; clerks such as secretaries, receptionists, office administration workers; labourers; and machinists and drivers.

Interview schedules

The adult interview schedule covered the following areas:

• parent’s employment;
• family’s typical daily routine;
• experiences of using Non-parental care;
• time spent with children;
• parenting self-efficacy;
• children’s knowledge of parents’ work;
• parent’s working practices;
• perceptions about impact of work on family; and
• final overview questions.

The children’s interview schedule covered the following areas:

• family’s typical daily routine;
• children’s knowledge of parents’ work;
• experience of non-parental care;
• time spent with parents;
• parents’ working practices;
• perceived Impact of work on family;
• "all the money in the world" question; and
• child’s future plans - future career; family plans; work and family plan.

Conclusions

In drawing conclusions from this research, it must be remembered that all the children who were interviewed were aged eight and over. This research cannot comment on the experiences of families with only younger children. It should also be noted that very few of the parents worked extremely long hours, with only a couple of families having a parent who reported working more than 50 hours per week.

One of the clearest conclusions to be drawn is that parents may gain new insights into the way that they are navigating work and family if they talk to their children. Children have opinions about whether the amount of time that parents can spend with them feels like enough, and they have opinions about what they would like to do in the time that parents are available to them. These opinions are not easily predicted by the hours that parents work. It is clear that in this sample of children aged eight and over, children by and large accept their parents’ work status, but even when judging parents’ work hours as "alright", they also express a need to have parents available, especially for particular kinds of time. The variety in the patterns of the children’s responses to the questions about how much parents work and how much time they spend with children reveals the potential harm that could result from reducing analysis of the work-family relationship to purely the number of hours worked by parents.

When there is discussion about parental employment and children, it is often assumed that time itself is the key variable - that more time is better, and that parents and children should all want more time together. This research suggests that children and parents refer to much more than either the quantity of time, or what they do in the time they share. Neither parents nor children report that work has a negative influence on every aspect of family life or parent/child interaction. Very few of the children in our sample reported that they had trouble getting parents to focus on them. Very few reported having to wait for parents because of their work. Very few reported that their parents worked at home in such a way that the children felt they were unavailable to them. Similarly very few parents reported that work interfered with their capacity to pay attention to children, nor did many parents report work as a contentious presence in the home - at least as far as the children were concerned. Both parents and children did talk about other factors that influence the relationship between work and family. For example, some parents talked about needing greater flexibility at work in order to exert more control over the impact that work may have on their capacity to be available to their children.

The way that parents and children talked about work and family in this research is consistent with both models of work and family interaction, and models of parent-child interactions. There are many aspects of a job that impact on how parents feel about working. Galinsky’s model emphasizes some of these factors, including job demands, job quality and support at work. However, other factors, such as how much parents are paid and what kinds of family friendly initiatives are available within the work place, also appear to be important. All of these aspects of work can affect family functioning and parents’ relationships with children.

Within families there are internal and external factors that will have an effect on how work and family impact on each other. Children have different needs that vary with their temperament and developmental stage. Parents differ in their capacities to provide the different kinds of attention and interaction that children need. Some of this difference in capacity comes from individual personality and adjustment, and some from external resources such as financial capacity and social supports. Some comes from differences in parenting skills, which may be enhanced through practice, effort or training. Some parenting roles require continuous quantities of time, and some parenting roles require regular commitments of time. Some parents in the study talked about being "better" at focused activity rather than time spent "dagging around", and vice versa. Work may impact both positively or negatively on parents’ internal and external resources, thus affecting their capacity to parent well, but the effect of work will also be mediated by these same internal and external resources. For every parent and every child in each family, the patterns will be slightly different, so there will never be a one-solution-fits-all answer to managing work and family.

The question that needs to be addressed is whether the family is functioning well or not, and there is every indication from most of the families interviewed for this study that it is possible to function well in a wide variety of circumstances. The children who were interviewed revealed themselves to be very adaptable. Some of the parents are having to compromise in terms of their ideals about how they would work and parent, but, even so, most of the parents in this sample are actively pursuing strategies that make their families function well with the constraints that they face. The fact that parents and children can adapt so well to less-than-ideal circumstances is something that is not acknowledged enough by society or within families. Many parents need to be less critical of themselves, and feel less guilty about the way that they are navigating work and family. However, the reality of this adaptability should not be used as an excuse for society to avoid making circumstances easier for families wherever it can. We should also bear in mind that parents who are not coping with these challenges are unlikely to have volunteered to take part in a study such as this, so this study cannot articulate their needs.

Parents should talk with their children, but all of us should be very careful about how we use the concept of time when we talk about work and family, both in the public discussion we have, and in the private conversations we have in our families. Children will mean different things when they talk about wanting more time with parents. Some will mean that they need someone to drive them somewhere, some will want to avoid after-school care, some will want to have the opportunity to have friends over, and some will mean that they want to spend more time talking and playing because it is fun. All of these may be legitimate desires and parents will need to decide whether they need to change the way they work to deal with them. In general, children in this sample expressed a desire for more family time to do more of the everyday things that they already find enjoyable. A few children who say that they want more time with a parent may mean that they are not happy with their family life. If the latter is true, then work may be one of many variables that is causing this feeling, but it is unlikely to be the only one, and it may not be about the number of hours that parents work. Some of the children in this sample were also coping with significant changes to family structure, and issues of time for these children often related to time spent with separated parents or re-partnered parents.

This research cannot give any answers to questions of children's outcomes. Children may not like homework supervision that a parent at home after school provides, but such monitoring and supervision may help them in the long-term. Similarly, an older child may not like having to be at home alone after school, but may gain independence and confidence through the experience. While it cannot comment on outcomes, this research can provide a guide to the kinds of questions that parents should ask themselves, and should ask their children, when evaluating the current state of family functioning. It is notable that all the parents who participated in this research are responding to the issue of how they manage work and family responsibilities in an active way. Many parents had developed strategies to improve the quality of family functioning. Some of these strategies involved changing jobs, cutting back hours, or making use of flexible conditions of employment, while some were related to parenting itself and how life at home is managed. The fact that there is such a lively discourse about work and family in both the media and the community reflects the fact that parents are aware of the issues. However, this research encourages us to include children in that conversation. To do this we need to reframe the way that we talk about family and work with "time" as only one of the critical factors that influence quality of family life, rather than using the concept of time as a summary for many factors. By doing this it should be possible to enrich debate, and make it easier for families to find solutions to their particular challenges.