A Balancing Act: Balancing Work and Family in a 24/7 World
By Jana Long, Ph.D.
Since women joined the work force, society has been contemplating how women can and should balance work and family. We’ve talked about how women’s labor force participation might affect their children, how women can better plan for multiple roles, how their multiple roles conflict, and how the stress resulting from this conflict affects women’s health. We have even talked about how women tend to plan for more hours in the day than they actually have. We’ve moved from expecting women to remain in the home, to expecting that they can have it all, to now recognizing a balancing act requires compromises and sacrifices. However, little has been said about how men balance work and family. It is as if we just assumed that men wouldn’t have conflict between their many roles in the home, community, and work. Yet, increasingly women have entered the labor force, and men have become involved in dual-earner or dual-career couples. A recent study by the Families and Work Institute revealed that men have become more involved in household and childcare duties and are reporting work-life conflict in greater degrees than they have in years past…
