Dual-income family là gì

DISTRIBUTION OF FAMILY TIME

How much time do dual-earner families spend together and what do they typically do? We found that overall the mean proportion of beeps spent with family was 11% (SD = .07 and .08 for mothers and fathers respectively), meaning that families spent almost 12 hours per week together (.11 × 7 days X 15 hours) engaging in different family activities.

Interesting variation was found when we decomposed family time into types of activities. Families spent almost half of their time together in direct interaction (31.8 and 30.3% of beeps out of all family beeps for mothers and fathers respectively) or eating meals together (15.6 and 17.8% for mothers and fathers respectively). Not surprisingly, a substantial amount of time was also spent on household-related tasks (15.1% for mothers and 12.7% for fathers). Leisure activities came fourth (7.4 and 9.1% for mothers and fathers respectively). Finally, less than 3% of all family beeps were spent on either assistance to children, religious, or social activities.

Note that there were minor differences between mothers’ and fathers’ responses because parents may not necessarily engage together in the same type of activity, although both of them are present. For example, mother may be cooking while father is helping child with homework in the kitchen. In this case, all family members are together in the same place although they engage in very different types of activities. It is therefore not surprising that mothers’ share of family time spent on household-related tasks and assistance to children was slightly higher than that of fathers.

THE FUTURE

Several demographic and attitudinal trends suggest that the dual-earner family will continue to be the dominant American family form. The trends that lead to this conclusion include:

a rising age at first marriage for both women and men over the course of the past five decades

declining fertility rates and lengthening of the life span for men and women

the increasing prevalence of egalitarian gender-role attitudes

increasing numbers of women students at all levels of post-secondary education; and

a growing reliance on wives’ earnings to enable couples to maintain a middle-class standard of living.

6 Financial Well-being

Married couples typically have both higher incomes and greater wealth than unmarried individuals, even after income is adjusted to take into account the number of people in the family (Lupton and Smith forthcoming, Waite and Nielsen 2001). Among married couples, those with two earners have higher incomes, on average, than those with one-earner. In the US, two-earner families have pulled ahead economically as their incomes have increased faster than the incomes of one-earner families. In 1970, the median income of dual-earner families was 1.32 times as high as that of married couple families in which the wife did not work for pay (Spain and Bianchi 1996). In 1998, the ratio was 1.79 (United States Bureau of the Census 2000). But the higher income of two-earner families must be adjusted for the loss of home production. One estimate suggests that dual-earner families need about 35 percent more income to have the same standard of living as families with one spouse—almost always the wife—working full time in the home, to make up for the goods and services produced at home and for clothes, transportation, and other costs of employment (Lazear and Michael 1988).

Women and men are marrying later and spending more time unmarried than in the past. In many countries, levels of education have risen dramatically, especially for women, at the same time that family size has fallen. These changes reduce the need for women's time at home and increase the rewards for their time in paid employment, pushing them and their families toward dual-worker and working parent families.

1 Introduction

Scholars and journalists write extensively about the difficulties of juggling work and family commitments in contemporary society. Individuals clamor for information about how to cope with extensive work and family responsibilities, and employers increasingly offer work–family programs to help their employees relieve work–family stress and, at the same time, meet their obligations in the workplace. Previously thought to be separate worlds that do not impinge on one another, work and family lives are currently recognized as being inextricably intertwined, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.

What lies behind this interest in work–family relationships? First, the increasing representation of women in the workforce—especially mothers of young children—has rendered the dual-earner family a dominant family structure in the United States. With the blurring of traditionally rigid gender roles—women as full-time homemakers and men as sole providers—both partners in a dual-earner relationship are confronted with the daily challenge of handling their work and family responsibilities in a way that meets the needs of the family and the employer alike.

Moreover, a divorce rate that has stabilized at approximately 50% in the United States has produced increasing numbers of single parents in the workforce. These single parents, most of them women, often struggle to meet extensive work and family responsibilities, often without a great deal of support from their families or their employers.

In addition to, or perhaps because of, these structural changes in family life and workforce participation, employees’ values have changed in recent years. Women and men are seeking balance in their lives in deciding what jobs to accept and what jobs to leave. Job applicants are increasingly raising the issue of work–family balance in their employment interviews, and a sizeable number of employees seem willing to make sacrifices in their careers to achieve a high quality of life. Some individuals have chosen to leave their profession when it continually interferes with their family lives.

All these forces have combined to produce an intense interest in the relationship between work and family lives. Researchers in psychology, sociology, and management have risen to the challenge. The past three decades have witnessed an explosion of research on the intersection of work and family roles. Understanding how work can affect family—and how family can affect work—has been the aim of most of this research. Gaining insight into the relationships between work and family lives is important for a number of reasons.

First, the more that is learned about the intricate relationships between work and family commitments, the more likely employers can provide relevant programs to help their workers manage their work and family lives. Second, understanding the interplay between work and family roles can help women and men learn how to obtain employment that is compatible with their desired lifestyle, how to cope with the stresses of daily life, and how to gain the support of family, friends, and coworkers in relieving work–family stress.

In this article, a wide range of issues regarding the ways in which work and family lives affect one another are discussed. First, the two key roles—work and family—are defined. Then, a variety of mechanisms that have been proposed to explain the relationship between work and family roles are discussed. More detailed discussions of the effects of work on family life and the effects of family on work life are then presented. Moreover, because gender is so central to the interplay between work and family roles, gender issues in work–family relationships are discussed. Finally, some steps that employers and individuals can take to manage the work–family interface effectively are presented.

3 Research on Child Development in Other Types of Nontraditional Families

As difficult for children as family instability and difficulties in parent–child relations can be, other variations from the so-called ‘traditional family’ arrangements, especially those that do not involve disruption of the family unit, seem to be less troublesome.

2 Domains of Transition: Developmental Tasks

Havighurst (1948) introduced the concept of developmental tasks in order to describe transitions. Developmental tasks are learning tasks across a lifespan. Successfully solved developmental tasks in the context of real demands enable people to learn new skills and competencies which are necessary for the satisfactory and constructive mastering of life within a given society. Success in solving tasks at earlier stages increases the probability of successfully solving subsequent tasks. People are expected to solve a series of developmental tasks across different life periods in order to be accepted in society. However, not all developmental tasks of a specific life period have to be solved at the same time. Within which time range and in which order developmental tasks are solved is subject to individual differences as well as to cross-cultural variations and sociohistorical shifts.

Work and Family

At this level the model emphasizes the differential advantages, restrictions, and stressors rooted in men’s and women’s work and family roles, including their ability to find time for health-promoting behaviors. Rieker et al. (2010, p. 63) noted that differential “occupations and social roles carry expectations, create routines of daily life, and establish norms of social interaction, all of which contribute to relationship quality, stress levels, health-related behaviors, and coping styles.” In addition, marital quality and children can affect men’s and women’s emotional state and their ability to make health a priority (Evenson & Simon, 2005). Hochschild (2012) discusses how everyday decisions about domestic tasks and child care are constantly negotiated among couples, with women still assuming more of the burden, even as many of these tasks are more often outsourced. For example, a role such as single parent or caregiver to aging parents or to children with special health care needs can be time consuming and stressful regardless who performs them, but more often it is still women (Leiter & Rieker, 2012). Both work and family roles include demands and routines that are inflexible, such as addressing urgent situations or taking or getting a child to school or a doctor. Regardless of whether one works from home or goes into workplace, the boundaries between work and home life have become increasingly blurred as advances in technology makes us ever available and vigilant. Whether this gives us more flexibility to manage conflicting demands and enables making health a priority is an empirical question that CC can address.

Even though men’s and women’s family and work roles have converged over time, the lingering differences can have cumulative effects on health and on the ways in which family decisions directly or indirectly impact health. Families have less discretionary time than ever, because dual-earner families have become the statistical norm for married couples (US. Department of Labor, 2014; see Table 4). Compared with men, women typically acquire more health information and take a larger role in the health of their families. Men and women continue to be differentially distributed across the professions and industries, along with the demands and level of control they experience in the workplace. Work can be intrinsically and extrinsically rewarding in a way that promotes health, or unfulfilling in a way that is detrimental to well-being. Although more occupations and work environments provide manageable demands and healthy and supportive environments, others place substantial physical or emotional demands on employees. High-demand and low-control work has been shown to be particularly stressful in ways that impact health (Theorell & Karasek, 1996). Workplaces also differ in the extent to which they provide work–life programs and child care policies that facilitate or even encourage positive health behaviors such as physical activity and healthy eating.

For example, to shed light on the interplay among gender, work time, control over work schedules, and health behaviors, Fan et al. (2015) applied the CC framework to a study of couples at a Fortune 500 company. They examined fast food consumption and exercise behaviors using survey data from 429 employee couples in an IT division, including survey data on professionals’ own work hours and those of their spouses/partners. Although empirical evidence on the association between hours worked and food choice or physical activity is mixed, Fan et al. (2015) found that employees’ decisions about whether to exercise or eat fast food are made in light of their own and their spouses’ work hours and flexibility. Specifically, men who work about 50 hours/week and women whose husbands work about 45–50 hours/week are more likely to eat fast food. In terms of exercise, women in IT are most apt to exercise if they and their husbands put in 45 or more hours a week, but this applies only to women with considerable schedule control. Men who work long hours are especially likely to exercise only if their wives either work fewer hours or have jobs with considerable flexibility; this suggests that wives who are able to take on home obligations free their partners to exercise. The researchers concluded that “long work hours are not always a constraint on healthy behavior…work hours’ effects depend on the gendered arrangements of the couple dyad and the work-hour flexibility of both partners’ jobs” (p. 105). Both married and partnered workers are increasingly negotiating with their partners regarding the allocation of time, but the expectations of career jobs and the press of home obligations continue to constrain women’s options, thereby crowding out their time to exercise. This seems not to be the case for men respondents. Wives and female partners are therefore time resources for men in a way that is not reciprocal. Among women, longer work hours are associated with less perceived time adequacy with family. Women’s time adequacy (but not men’s) was also affected by having children living at home, especially for preschoolers and for children older than age 6 years, compared with no child at home. A CC explanation reveals how the importance of schedule flexibility and on-site day care in the workplace assists employees and their spouses in making health-promoting choices such as exercising and healthy eating. The gendered findings additionally suggest that women benefit from greater schedule flexibility, which seems to help them and their husbands to engage in healthy behaviors. There is less known about how men experience structural constraints, formulate their priorities, or respond to work and family stress, or about when and how, for example, they turn to alcohol and drugs as forms of coping or self-care. These findings underscore the value of a CC framework to guide research that will help us better understand the process of how family relationships, work hours, schedule flexibility, and other workplace policies influence couples’ decision making regarding health behaviors, so that effective interventions can be developed.

Stable patterns of spillover

Just as erratic trickles from everyday rainfall may carve deeper and deeper ruts into soil that overtime become entrenched, short-term spillover processes may accumulate and establish more stable patterns of work and family dynamics. For instance, patterns of short-term spillover responses in IRM studies were used to create individual-difference variables that reflect a tendency to react to a stressful day in a particular way (e.g., with anger, or disregard, or distancing), and those spillover patterns were correlated with both the individual's and the spouse's marital dissatisfaction [8•].

Two recent studies testing stable associations between perceptions of job stress and family behavior capitalized on an ethnographic video archive of the daily routines and social interactions of dual-earner families. One found that the wives’ self-reported job stress predicted naturalistic observations of their own and their husbands’ support behavior. Wives who reported more job stress were observed receiving more support from their husbands, both because they solicited more and because their husbands offered more support. There was no link between husbands’ job stress and couple support behavior [10••]. A separate analysis of the recordings revealed individual differences in spillover: high-neuroticism husbands who reported high levels of job stress displayed more negative and engaged social behavior, whereas low-neuroticism husbands with high job stress showed social withdrawal behaviors, operationalized as a decrease in emotion display and involvement with family members [11].

Given that some of the roots of work-family research lie in the maternal employment literature of the 1970s, it is not surprising that there has been much interest in the effects that job stressors may have on the parent-child relationship [12•]. In one study that used direct observational methods, mothers’ ratings of a more negative interpersonal atmosphere at work predicted less positive (e.g., less sensitive and stimulating) mother-infant and father-infant interactions 3 months later, as well as more negative (i.e., more intrusive) father–infant interactions [13]. Although the fathers’ workplace atmosphere did not predict the quality of parenting behavior in that sample, a cross-sectional study also employing direct observation found that fathers working in less supportive work environments were less engaged and less sensitive with their infants [14]. Work schedules have also been examined as potential stressors. For instance, low-income mothers of preschoolers who worked nonstandard schedules reported higher levels of parenting stress [15]. However, a non-standard work schedule can also have positive effects on family life. Husbands of nurses working an evening shift (compared to those on day shifts) spent more time with their school-aged children and knew more about their activities; the children also gave their fathers’ parenting skills higher ratings [16].

Though not specifically focused on job stress, a longitudinal study that tracked job satisfaction and marital quality over 12 years found that declines in job satisfaction contributed to increases in marital dissatisfaction and discord over the next 3 years (but not later on) [17]. The reverse relationship — marital quality predicting job satisfaction — was even stronger, which is consistent with a bidirectional work-family spillover process.