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RECOMMENDATIONS
For Employers
For Public Policies
For Schools &
Communities
For Working Families
APA Office of Public Affairs
750 First Street, NE
Washington, DC 20002-4242
(202) 336-5700
Email: Public Affairs
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Families Are Changing
The two-parent, single-wage-earner family that was idolized in 1960s sitcoms is becoming increasingly rare in real life, with nontraditional families redefining the statistical norm. A strong, loving family life is still central to most people's well-being and research shows that a supportive, quality home environment is pervasively related to positive outcomes for children and other family members. Children can develop equally well regardless of the employment status of their parents; the home environment is a far more important determinant of how children fare as they grow up because caring parents sacrifice their own personal time and find ways to adapt their schedules and their own needs to attend to their children's needs (Gottfried, Gottfried, & Bathurst, 2002). But, too often, contemporary families are feeling stressed as they negotiate the sometimes conflicting demands of paid employment especially with long hours and a hectic pace and home responsibilities. Low-wage workers are particularly vulnerable because they have fewer care options for family members, less disposable income to pay for help, especially child care, and less overall support. In thinking about work-family interactions, family composition and type of work are important variables for advancing our understanding of how work and family mutually influence each other.
Working Mothers
Of course, all mothers are working mothers, as anyone who has ever cared for an infant or a child (or children) for even a few hours knows. About 70% of mothers with school-age children work for pay outside the home, with 55% of mothers with infants younger than 1 year old employed outside the home (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2004). Infants need to be fed several times during the night and need frequent visits to a health care provider even if they are well, yet only one state (California) has any paid leave to allow mothers of newborn infants to take time off from work to care for their babies. (Mothers of newborns in California can take up to 6 weeks' leave at up to 55% pay before returning to work.) Paid leave is especially valuable for working poor and single parents. With one in three children born to a single mother, a significant number of mothers are raising infants without a spouse. Or considered another way, 7 million mothers in the United States do not have a spouse to share the work of earning a livelihood and caring for children. There are large numbers of children growing up with little or no father involvement, a fact that almost all social science research shows to be detrimental to child outcomes. Of course, well-adjusted children are raised in all sorts of family arrangements, and many single mothers raise wonderful children, but in general, research has shown that children raised without fathers are more likely to be raised in poverty and have the negative outcomes associated with poverty (more crime, less school achievement) than children raised with supportive fathers (Dudley & Stone, 2001).
Even in families where there is a spouse, the unequal division of household work has been slow to change, with the result that women still do more of the housework and child care, even when spouses work approximately the same number of hours and the women earn more money than the men (Bond, Thompson, Galinsky, & Protas, 2003). Child care is still mainly women's work, and when men care for children, they are more likely to "help out," and less likely to assume the executive functions of knowing what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. When children are young or care needs are high (e.g., there is a disabled family member), women often want high-quality part-time and flexible work, which is rarely available (Hill, Martinson, & Ferris, 2004). This is especially a problem for working poor families who cannot afford to pay for care for a child or sick family member.
Working Fathers
Often overlooked, but critically important, is the role of fathers in children's lives. In dual-earner families, the news about fathers is mostly good. Fathers are spending more time caring for children than their own fathers did (although still less than the mothers do), especially when their spouses work. In fact, 30% report that they take equal or great responsibility than their wives in married dual-earner families (Bond et al.). So, total time with parents has not changed much over the last 30 years for children with two working parents, it is just distributed more evenly (but still not equally) between mothers and fathers, and there are benefits to spending more time with Dad. Husbands in dual-earner households do more housework than their own fathers did, thus creating new role models for their children.
More than 1.5 million single fathers are engaged in the difficult day-to-day tasks of raising children without the financial or emotional support of a spouse. Or, considered another way, a father heads one in every five single-parent households. Working fathers have the same access to paid family leave that working mothers do--in other words--almost none.
Some Trends
In general, the most educated women and men have been marrying at increasingly older ages and having fewer children, a trend that is less pronounced for less-educated adults. The best educated adults are substituting years of education for years of marriage and spending fewer adult years raising fewer children. They also expect to work more years, again showing the way in which work and family are intertwined. The data thus far suggest that a later age at first marriage will translate into fewer divorces and greater investments in time and money into the few children that couples have, increasing the divide between the children of privilege and the children of low-wage workers.
Other Family Types
There are too many types of families to try to name them all, for example, stepfamilies, same-sex parents and couples, grandparents raising second- generation children, childfree couples, singles, surrogate parents, foster care, families with disabled parents and children, and all sorts of informal family arrangements. Even if we focus only on families that are raising children, there is still a great deal of diversity in family type. Almost half of Americans are or will be in stepfamilies at some point in their lives.
Closely linked with step-parenting is the issue of cohabiting couples who are raising children together without the formal benefits of marriage. In 2000, there were 5.5 million unmarried couples who lived together in the United States, and these "cohabitors" represent 9% of all couples in the United States.
Older adults often assume the role of care recipient and caregiver. Older women, in particular, provide significant care for spouses with disabling conditions, as well as grandchildren. Currently, 2.1 million children are raised by grandparents alone. An abused or neglected child enters kinship foster care when a child welfare agency places the child with a relative and a court makes that relative responsible for the child's care. Close to a half-million children lived in kinship foster care in 2002.
Next: The World of Work is Changing
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