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 whom you ask: Men were a lot more likely to suggest that parenting tasks and household chores were shared equally. Women, on the other hand, were more likely to say they did those tasks on their own. (Even dads, however, were not inclined to take credit for handling these tasks on their own. Just 25% of them said they took care of more household tasks, and only 13% said the same of parenting tasks.)
This difference in perception also carried over into how families handle childcare gaps. Mothers were far more likely to say they took time off when childcare issues came up unexpectedly, with 68% of them reporting that, compared with 29% of fathers.
The most damning finding? Even in families where the mother worked longer hours, both parents were more likely to report that she handled more parenting and household tasks. Is it any surprise, then, that senior-level women—the very mothers who should have more resources and support—are struggling with this high-wire act?
Still, the odds are especially stacked against working mothers who also lack financial privilege. Parents with lower incomes were less likely to have workplace benefits like parental leave or the flexibility to work from home; they were also less likely to have access to health insurance or paid time off. This lack of workplace support also engenders more anxiety about job security when those parents face childcare gaps or have to take time off to care for a sick child.
While perks like remote work help ease this burden to some extent, there’s no silver bullet. Even when parents are able to work from home, the Pew survey found they are just as likely to say that a work-life balance is out of reach.
As one mother from the survey put it: “I’m supposed to work like I don’t have kids and supposed to parent like I don’t have a job.”