Dual-Income Families' Time Crunch
Why Support Families that Want a Stay-at-Home Parent? (Article #1)
In the last sixty years, American families went through a tremendous transformation. In the 1960s, only 25% of married couples were dual-income earners. By the turn of the millennium, “[t]he proportion of dual earner married couples more than doubled . . . to 60 percent” of families.1
Within a single lifespan, we went from a country where most families had a parent at home to one where only a minority of families had mom or dad taking care of the kids full-time. This sweeping societal transformation impacted almost every aspect of American life. Importantly, it made families really, really, really busy.
Some stats:
“The average middle-class married couple with children now works a combined 3,446 hours annually, an increase of more than 600 hours—or 2.5 additional months—since 1975. This average combines dual- and single-earner couples, but the trend is mostly driven by increases in the employment of, and hours worked by, women in dual-earner couples.”2
In particular, working mothers are tremendously busy. A recent study collected time diaries of new parents in dual-income families. The study found that (on average) working moms with a nine-month old baby “filled nearly 70% of their time after work-related activities and sleep were excluded with some form of childcare” during the work week.3 In other words, a mom of an older baby who works outside the home spends nearly all her waking hours on working or childcare during a typical workday . . . . leaving her little time for other activities (like exercise or seeing friends!)
Unsurprisingly, this degree of time pressure leads to burnout and exhaustion. Anne Helen Petersen recently published an excellent article, The Work-From-Home Revolution Is Also a Trap for Women, exploring working mothers’ burnout. She cited “the findings of Deloitte’s 2022 Women at Work survey, in which . . . a whopping 46% felt burned out, and 33% had taken time off to deal with their mental health.”
By contrast, stay-at-home moms have more leisure and sleeping/napping time than working moms — although they also do significantly more housework and childcare.4
The data are clear: the transition away from breadwinner/homemaker families to dual-income families put tremendous time pressure on parents, and particularly on working mothers.
Readers, I’d love to hear your reactions to the two-working parent time-crunch and thoughts on fixing it.
Jonathan Fisher & Nathaniel Johnson, The Two-Income Trap: Are Two-Earner Households More Financially Vulnerable?, Center for Economic Studies (2019), https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2019/CES-WP-19-19.pdf.
Isabel V. Sawhill & Katherine Guyot, Women’s work boosts middle class incomes but creates a family time squeeze that needs to be eased, Brookings (2020), https://www.brookings.edu/essay/womens-work-boosts-middle-class-incomes-but-creates-a-family-time-squeeze-that-needs-to-be-eased.
Letitia E. Kotila et al., Time in Parenting Activities in Dual-Earner Families at the Transition to Parenthood (2022), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4578481/.
D’Vera Cohen et al., After Decades of Decline, A Rise in Stay-at-Home Mothers, Pew (2014), https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2014/04/08/after-decades-of-decline-a-rise-in-stay-at-home-mothers/.
From the Brookings report, by Sawhill & Guyot, I was most struck by this:
"Other advanced countries have done much better. The average American worker spends 200 to 400 more hours at work over the course of the year than workers in most European countries. That’s an extra four to 10 weeks of work. This gap is due to a combination of lower weekly hours and more weeks of leave in other countries."
Five years ago after giving birth to my first (and currently only) kiddo, I was job hunting and found a workplace that explicitly prioritized a family/friends/community-first philosophy. Our ED, critically, models what this looks like. He takes time off when his kids need him, basically never works more than 35 hours, takes a month off in the summer, doesn't respond to messages on vacation (unless very urgent). We're also essentially fully remote, with staff scattered across the country and several international folks as well. It's made it so much easier to be present with my kid!
I was convinced before, but working here (and being more productive than ever) I am entirely convinced that shortening the work day and work week would solve a lot of our problems. And more generally, we need to eliminate the idea that more time equals more productivity.
A few ways that we can go about that:
* unionization to raise wages and contractually decrease hours (our workplace is unionized) - also passing legislation that makes it easier to unionize!
* passing legislation that raises the minimum wage
* passing legislation that guarantees paid time off (minimum of a month)
* passing predictive scheduling laws so folks know when they're working (like the Schedules that Work Act)
More broadly, companies should stop prioritizing short term profits over long term success. Zeynep Ton has written about this extensively, but basically if you create good jobs you create good companies. And good jobs let people be present with their families.