Work-life balance doesn’t exist for working parents
If work-life balance is hard to come by for many American workers, then it’s virtually impossible to achieve for working parents. A new study from the Pew Research Center captures just how porous the boundary is for parents who are struggling to juggle work and life. For the majority of parents, their caregiving responsibilities bleed into work—and vice versa. In a survey of 2,242 working parents in the U.S., Pew found that among those who worked full time, 70% said they took care of parenting-related tasks while on the job, and 59% handled work responsibilities while with their children. Over half of them said it was a challenge to balance work with family life and that their job made it harder to be a good parent. Nearly as many parents—45%—said it was difficult to advance in their career as a parent. Even when parents worked part-time, over half said work-life balance was hard to come by. Working mothers are, of course, having a more difficult time striking a balance. A whopping 81% of women surveyed said they dealt with parenting tasks while at work, and a significant portion of them (38%) reported doing so very often. On the whole, women were more likely to feel the strain of balancing work with parenting obligations—though men also reported facing the same challenges in relatively high numbers. Plenty of fathers (62%) also said they took care of parenting tasks while on the job, and 57% spent time working while with their children (as compared to 63% of women). Perhaps that’s in part because women shoulder more of the caregiving burden: According to the survey, 52% of parents said the mom handled more day-to-day parenting tasks and 43% said the mom handled more household chores. A significant portion of parents—about 40%—also claimed that those tasks were shared equally. But there’s some disagreement on the distribution of labor, depending on who you ask: Men were a lot more likely to suggest that parenting tasks and household chores were shared equally. Women