By Harriet Shaklee,
Family Development Specialist
University of Idaho Cooperative Extension
In the spring of 1997, the University
of Idaho Cooperative Extension was in the midst of a project to develop a curriculum for
welfare participants returning to work under the new TAFI program, which went into effect
in Idaho on July 1. No longer would welfare
be an entitlement to those who qualify, but rather would be earned by moving into the
working world. Cooperative Extension
educators anticipated a role for a class series to ease this transition for families, many
of whom have been participants in previous extension classes for low-income audiences. Congruent with the traditional emphasis in
extension on family wellbeing, problems in balancing work and family were selected as the
core concern of the new curriculum, including issues of family management, budgeting, and
nutrition.
Hip-deep in the process of developing this curriculum, I came across two
recent publications on balancing work and family which brought me back to the viability
issue: can we balance the conflicting demands of work and home, and is it good for parents and children to become
enmeshed in the demands of the two worlds? Stephanie Coontz in The Way We Are Today
responds with a resounding “yes,” while Arlie Russell Hochschild, in The Time
Bind, isn’t nearly so sure. Both
books are outstanding products of scholars concerned enough about these socially relevant
topics to bring the research in the field to the attention of interested laypeople. On the other hand, if they’re each so
well-grounded in research, why do they paint such differing pictures?
The Workplace and Family Life
Hochschild’s study comes as a
logical sequel to her earlier book, The Second Shift, in which she chronicled the
extra burdens of household and family responsibility borne by wives in homes where both
parents worked. Male resistence to full
partnership at home was evidence of the “stalled revolution” in the return to
work for women, and was targeted as a marital stressor with adverse consequences for
parents and children alike.
In The Time Bind, Hochschild
turns to the other side of the work-family equation so see if the revolution is
“stalled” there as well. That is,
has the workplace changed to accommodate the participation of parents managing family
responsibilities as well? To answer the
question, Hochschild did an extensive case study of “Amerco,” a real company
(false name) which prides itself on its family friendly policy. How are families faring in this work environment?
Not so well, concludes Hochschild. “Family-friendly” may be the written
policy, but the informal norm at the company is that long hours at work are the only
universally-acknowledged sign of commitment to the company.
This means early, evening, and weekend work both on site and at home for
managers and executives, and overtime for hourly employees.
Family-friendly in this case means an on-site day care to leave children
while they spend so many hours away from their families.
Employee-oriented programs fostering
a comfortable and rewarding work environment further contribute to the attraction of work. Many parents find their work hours to be much more
pleasant than time at home, with clear cut goals and rewards, and plenty of encouragement
from coworkers for attaining them. Furthermore, companies
employ a host of professionals expert in the art of maintaining worker morale during the
long day at work. In contrast, home
life can be a labyrinth of spouse and child wants, needs, and behaviors, with
unpredictable outcomes for doing one’s best. Cramming one’s home-relationships into a shrinking
time period as the work day expands exacerbates the problem, limiting the time for leisure
with loved ones, and increasing the likelihood of family frustration with such miserly
attention.
Hochschild finds adverse effects of
these trends on children in behavior such as resistance to the many transitions of
hurry-up schedules, academic backtracking at
school, and persistence of parent-child disagreements when there is so little time for
resolution. Relationships between spouses
suffer as well, with little time to address family needs and overcome the difficulties
common to marriage. Finally, Hochschild finds
working parents lamenting the lost opportunities for the family life they dreamed of
offering their children, hoping to make up
for it in an imagined future with more family time.
Case studies, such as
Hochschild’s study of Amerco, offer a
rich record of the personal experiences of the participants, but suffer from having no
“control” group for comparison. For
example, the author tends to attribute each unwanted mood or behavior of children and
adults to the adverse effects of a long day at work.
But how do children act in unhurried
families? Don’t those children also
resist the transitions of daily life, and have problems in school and social life? Do
spouses in these homes also avoid facing their interpersonal problems, burying themselves
in some safer activity? Do those families
also find real life to pale in comparison to the “Hallmark” image of ideal
family harmony evident in the media, or in our rose-colored memories of times past?
Homemaker vs. Working Mothers and
Family Life
Stephanie Coontz, in The Way We
Really Are, suggests that point-of-comparison may be critical to the conclusions we
reach about families today. Also a sequel,
Coontz’s earlier book is The Way We Never Were, an historical analysis of the
American family, in which she contrasts the call of “family values” advocates to
return to times past with the historical record of family life in America. Here, she finds that the so-called
“traditional family” with breadwinner dad and mom home with the kids was only
briefly the norm in American life. Furthermore,
few lower income families have enjoyed this luxury, with the income of moms and older
children important just to obtain the basics of life.
Thus, those who wish to turn back the clock will have to aim carefully to return to
the family form nostalgia brings to mind.
In The Way We Really Are,
Coontz turns her attention to more contemporary evidence, contrasting the call for return
to the traditional family with the record of wellbeing for children and adults in
America’s changing families, including single-parent families as well as co-provider
families in which both parents work.
In contrast to family values
advocates, Coontz finds a key role for economics rather than lavish family consumerism or
self-indulgent careerism of women as the source of recent trends for mothers to join
fathers in the workplace. In recent decades,
real wages for men (and women) have fallen, especially in the entry-level jobs most
available to young parents. The potential for
better employment has been undermined by the soaring costs of higher education during the
same time period, and shrinking support for education available from government sources. Finally, the same young families must make ends
meet while managing housing prices which command an expanding portion of the family
budget. Maternal employment remains as one of
the few options to maintain the family’s standard of living in the context of these
adverse economic trends.
However, one need not think of these
women as working against their will. Rather,
women, like men, have discovered the workplace as a source of friendship, encouragement,
and self-esteem few would give up if they could afford to.
Furthermore, income for wives translates into more power in male-female
couples, an added incentive for continued workforce participation. Part-time work might be attractive, but few
part-time jobs offer the pay, benefits, and potential for advancement associated with
these satisfactions.
For children and mothers alike, those
in co-provider families fare as well, if not better, than those with homemaker moms. Working moms may report stresses, but are also
healthier, less depressed and less frustrated than full-time homemakers, a reminder that
life as a homemaker has its limits as well. Children
also do well when mothers work, as long as quality child care is available, with children
in co-provider families looking as strong (if not better) than those from homemaker
families in both academic and social skills.
Finally, Coontz finds nothing
“traditional” when dad’s breadwinner roles limit their meaningful
participation at home. In contrast, in past
years when homes were centers of productivity, fathers had central roles in moral
instruction and education of their children, and took as much satisfaction as mothers in
their family lives. Thus, she finds movements
to be historically ill-informed which try to reassert fathers’ positions as heads of
households and sole family providers, a family form which was the exception rather than
the norm in America’s past. In fact,
surveys show fathers yearning for a return to their true past roles of significant family
involvement, with dads nearly matching moms in reports of difficulty in balancing work and
family, or in willingness to make less progress at work (slower promotions, less pay) to
allow for more time at home.
Family Transition in Perspective
The reader closes the book by Coontz
with a substantially different feeling about the lives of two-earner couples than that
suggested by Hochschild. The case study of
Amerco shows work-based overload with adverse effects on children and adults, while Coontz
shows co-provider families to be in at least as good shape as those in which mothers stay
at home with the kids. Hochschild finds
children starved for attention of parents, while Coontz cites evidence that direct
involvement with children is comparable in co-provider and homemaker families, though
timing may be different (more time on weekends, less on weekdays for two-earner families).
One contributing factor to these
differing images is the standard against which the evidence is compared. Hochschild finds family and work lives of Amerco
employees to be wanting in contrast to the terms of the “family friendly” policy
at the company, or against the idyllic family lives the employees had hoped to have. Coontz compares her evidence against points in
America’s past and against current lives for breadwinner-homemaker families and finds
co-provider families to be doing well. Hochschild pits the real against the ideal; Coontz
compares one real against another (co-provider vs. breadwinner-homemaker; today vs. times
past). Each point of comparison provides a
unique lens through which to view today’s families.
Coontz reminds us that nostalgia
trips about the good old days of the American family are ill-informed and that families
are doing well today at providing for their children using the new forms of care
necessitated by our more extensive involvement in out-of-home work. These changes in how children are cared for are
part of the continuum of change in relationship between worlds of home and work which
started in the 19th century when productive work moved out of the home. This transition, too, inspired much uncertainty
about family wellbeing, as fathers’ long hours away from home compromised their roles
in childrearing. Now, moms are at work as
well, necessitating more cultural changes to adequately care for children in these new
circumstances. The strains felt by
co-provider families today may be endemic to transition, when new family forms require
different norms of social support, but the culture has not yet responded. Such support would include workplace changes
to accommodate family needs (e.g. flextime, parental leave, on-site daycare), altered
community support to meet children’s needs while parents are at work (e.g.12 month
school calendar, adult supervision before and after school), and new norms of egalitarian
participation by fathers and mothers in family life.
Hochschild, on the other hand, shows
how we’re falling short of our ideal in the quality of family life, pinpointing areas
in which pressures from work compromise life at home.
Most disconcerting is her analysis of how work time has become more
comfortable and leisurely than home life, attracting even family-oriented employees to
longer hours away from home. Especially
useful is her in-depth analysis of the resistance of the workplace to family-friendly
policies, even when those policies are formally endorsed by the company, reminding us just
how slow-going transition can be in the culture of work.
In combination, The Time Bind
and The Way We Really Are offer a well-grounded view of the contemporary American
family, including a perspective on families of the past and why we may not want to go
back, comparisons among family forms today which show many formats to be adequate to the
task of childrearing, and analyses of what we want for the future of our families with a
clear assessment of how we’ve progressed in attaining those goals.
Welfare-to-Work and Family
Wellbeing
What do these books tell us about our
welfare reform project on balancing work and family, as welfare parents, most of them
single mothers, return to work? Some
cautionary notes are in order.
Coontz
found co-provider families to be doing best when moms and dads shared family roles. Although many such families also lived under the
same roof, in several cases, parents living apart were successful at providing the support
for each other necessary for a quality family life for children. Where a second parent was unavailable, other
adults in children’s lives played a key role in extending the network of care to meet
children’s needs. Moms caring for
children alone may be at greatest risk; reaching out to the father, other family members,
or friends may be critical to effective participation at work and at home.
Parents at lower income levels
commonly meet children’s needs during their working day with volunteer help from
friends, family and neighbors. However,
Hochschild’s workers comment that this network is breaking down. With more and more people at work there is no one
to call when a child is sick, or when a worker is asked to take an extended shift. Welfare participants are likely to have the same
experience, as their friends join them in the return to work. This may require more reliance on paid care for
children, and may necessitate development of formal systems of back-up care, such as sick
child centers. Welfare reform may provide a
unique opportunity to actively foster the development of such family support systems
needed by all working parents.
Finally, salary and working
conditions are likely to affect the amount of conflict experienced between home and work.
Hochschild’s workers reduced work-family conflict by hiring substitute services to
meet family needs, including take-out meals, child care, summer day camp for kids,
manufactured rather than home-made goods, cleaning and gardening services. All of the employees earned a comfortable living,
and in many cases were quite wealthy. In
addition, all had benefits including paid holidays, sick leave, and parental leave to help
meet family needs for time and attention. If
these people were experiencing work-based stress on home life, consider the worker making
minimum wage with no benefits. How much
greater stress would be experienced in this home, where parents work long days and have
few resources to reduce the strain on home life?
Considerations such as these underscore the importance of a livable
wage and benefits for all workers, for the wellbeing of adults and children alike. Go-to-work aspects of welfare reform provide a
context for more concerted advocacy to improve the living conditions for all working poor
families.
This discussion was based on :
The Way We Really Are, by Stepanie Coontz,
The Time Bind, by Arlie
Russell Hochschild, New York:
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