Family life under pressure? Parents' paid work and the quantity and quality of parent-child and family time

Abstract

Even though family life and paid work are often considered as difficult to reconcile, prior research found that family time is relatively unaffected by the demands paid work imposes upon employed parents. This dissertation investigates this puzzling finding by exploring how parents protect family life from work encroachments. We study the protection of family life by looking in more detail at both the work and the family domain. In the work domain we examine work characteristics other than the most commonly considered work hours, such as the organizational culture and job insecurity, and in the family domain we distinguish between different types of activities and the quality and quantity of family time. Additionally, we study whether the effects of paid work on family time differ for fathers and mothers, parents of younger and older children, and parents living in countries with different reconciliation policies and cultural norms. We conclude that the effects of work characteristics remain small, even when different work characteristics and differences between family activities are considered. Still, our results shed new light on the strategies parents employ to reconcile work and family responsibilities as we found that parental paid work affects some family activities more than others, depending on their social utility. This dissertation also demonstrates that even when working parents ensure to spend enough time with their children, paid work can still have adverse effects on the quality of parent-child interaction. Finally, we found that paid work hours and parent-child time are stronger associated in countries were part-time work is more accessible, suggesting that, in these countries, strongly child-oriented parents protect parent-child time by reducing their work hours.