From Work-Family Balance to Work-Family Interaction

Part IV

WORKING FAMILIES: HOW WELL ARE THEY WORKING?

We tend to think of maternal employment as a recent phenomenon, but, throughout history mothers and fathers have divided the work needed to sustain a family, usually with mothers working closer to home, probably because they spent most of their adult years nursing or pregnant. The nature and place of work has changed, not the fact that mothers and fathers are both working.

In some ways, the manner in which mothers and fathers work today keeps them away from their children more than in the past, if you consider the distance to work, the time spent commuting, and number of nights away from home on business trips. Also, we would argue, although the jobs many working families hold today are still ...