Work–family balance in the United States
Solutions for helping individuals manage work–family balance in the U.S. include legislation, workplace policies, and the marketization of care work.
[1][5] As industrialization occurred and families shifted from rural agricultural settings to urban ones, the number of children per household also declined.
[8] The Works Progress Administration opened about 3,000 part-day Emergency Nursery Schools for about 75,000 children from 1933 to 1935, which provided child care to help eligible adults looking for work and which employed teachers in an industry where two-thirds of private nursery schools had closed during the Depression.
Families could no longer survive on the single income of the male breadwinner and both sexes were relied upon for financial support.
[12] However, the economy was still assumed to run on an outdated breadwinner-homemaker model as evidence by the following things: women made significantly less income than men, they were still expected to do the majority of domestic work, and the nine-to-three o'clock school schedule of children still existed.
As more and more previously lucrative manufacturing jobs were sent overseas, men without college educations could no longer support their families on a single wage.
Women's labor force participation rates have steadily increased since the 1940s[3] Since the 1970s, the relationship between marriage and college education has also been positive.
[13] Historically significant pieces of legislation have been enacted at the federal level to address the sex disparities in the workplace.
These pieces of legislation attempt to address the wage gap in the U.S., gender discrimination in hiring and firing, and the occupational rights of workers in taking family and medical leave.
Despite these significant legislative efforts, the U.S. still lags behind other developed countries in progressive family-friendly work policies.
[15] The Equal Pay Act of 1963 attempted to abolish wage and payment discrimination between men and women.
[18] The only federal childcare ever implemented was Head Start, which was created in 1965 as a part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty.
[21] In 1988, the Family Support Act was passed, which required parents using federal programs, like Head Start, to actively be working, getting an education, or taking part in professional training.
These family inequalities significantly affect the intersection of race and social class in the United States as well.
Although the figures vary depending on parents' household income, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates families spend anywhere from $134,370 to $269,520 raising a child from birth through age 17.
[32] Although American women have made significant strides in the workplace, they are still culturally and socially required to be mothers first and foremost.
[33] The cultural ideas of motherhood in the U.S. have given birth to a new ideal: a working mother who not only has a wonderful career but also manages to flawlessly balance her family and domestic duties as well.
The idea that parents only should raise their children is not a long-standing social expectation, but one that is reserved to the United States and its conservative nuclear family values.
[37] Before modern medicine, high mortality rates meant it was common for children to be raised by others outside their immediate family.
[37] For a brief period in the early 1800s, infant schools challenged this notion, but by the mid-1800s, counter-movements de-popularized this belief and reinforced that mothers specifically were supposed to raise their children.
To combat this belief, propaganda spread that mothers working poorly impacted their children’s mental well-being.
[37] It was not until the 1960s and 1970s, when more mothers started to enter the workforce, that the idea of childcare switched from something meant for children with problems at home to something that was a nationwide necessity.
[49] As a result, lower class mothers have a greater a time crunch and more conflict in balancing their work needs with those of their children.
[51] The United States has lagged behind the social benefits that support working families when compared to other developed countries.
[54] Moving into the 1990s and 2000s, the framing became centered around working women’s need for childcare, but contrasting views that mothers should stay at home to take care of their young children halted provisioning from happening.
[54] Current policies are motivated by the improvement of children’s development, facilitating employment among mothers, or alleviating poverty.
Employees who have this flexibility increase productivity and have less work–family spill over[66] and they are less likely to miss work due to family related issues.
It has been shown multiple times that the work culture influence whether employees take advantage of work–family policies.
[48] The huge lack of government funding at the state and federal levels also make these workplace policies unrealistic at this point.
[39] Legislation such as the Family and Medical Leave Act had little impact on gender inequality in care work and was strongly opposed by businesses.
