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A short brief introduction about work life balance
A short brief introduction about work life balance
Importance of work-life balance within the employment
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The question most women have to think at some stage of their life is “how to handle both a job and a family”. There are those who still think it’s impossible to ‘have it all’, while most women just want to find a way to make it work.
We’ll look at what the situation is all about, provide you real tips and solutions on making it work and bust some myths surrounding balancing job and family as a working mom.
The numbers behind the dilemma
There’s plenty of data to suggest how the act of balancing a job and a family as working mother is not an easy thing to do. As women are being presented with increasing career opportunities around the world, more women will be confronted with having to find career and family equilibrium.
In fact, two-parent
But when it comes to scheduling and sick days, including the need to take time off work, the burden tends to fall on the shoulders of the mother.
For example, Pew Social Trends have studied the issues in the US. In the most recent study from 2015, the figures highlighted the following facts:
• Six out of ten working mothers believe balancing a job and a family is difficult.
• 41% of mothers said parenting make career advancement harder; with only 6% of moms feeling career progression is actually easier.
• 40% of full-time employed mothers feel they are constantly rushed, with 50% stating they sometimes feel rushed and 42% stating they don’t get to spend enough time with their children.
Attitudes towards the dilemma have also grown rather pessimistic among some women. In her 2014 book, Getting Real About Having It All, Megan Dalla-Camina surveyed 1,000 female professionals and made the following findings:
• 70% of women think it’s impossible to be a success at work and home
• 64% of women felt they don’t have everything they want, meaning something has to give when finding the
There’s a sense among working women that you either have to say goodbye to your dream career or spend less time with your children. But is finding the balance impossible?
What you can do to get on the right track
If you want to start your journey to a more rewarding life as a working mom, both in terms of your career and family, there are steps you can take. The three keys to get yourself on the right track include defining your priorities, setting boundaries and taking care of yourself.
#1: Define your priorities
The first thing you need to focus is finding out where your priorities are. It might turn out to be true that you “cannot have it all”, but would you even want that? Could it be that you are just dreaming about that CEO job since it’s something a business-minded person should dream about?
It’s essential to understand what your priorities are and what are the things you truly want to achieve. You should define your priorities in three categories:
• Personal priorities – What are the things that matter to you the most?
• Family priorities – What do you want as a family? It’s a good idea to discuss these family goals together with your partner.
• Career priorities – What do you want to achieve in your
Read, Katy. "Regrets of a stay-at-home mom." Real Families. Salon, 05 Jan 2011. Web. 4 Apr. 2014.
At what point does work life start interfering with family life to an extent that it becomes unacceptable? Is it when you don’t get to spend as much time with your family as you would like, or is it the point where you barely get to see your family due to long hours at work? Is it even possible to balance work with family life? Anne-Marie Slaughter, the author of “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”, believes this balance is impossible to achieve in this day and age. In contrast, Richard Dorment, the author of “Why Men Still Can’t Have It All”, believes that there will never be a day when someone will have it all, certain sacrifices will always have to be made. Both of these articles are similar in the respect that they both examine balancing a demanding career with raising children. The two authors’ views on the subject differ greatly, especially regarding how gender roles have a significant impact on our society.
In older times, many women had to leave their job due to newly motherhood and having to care for their child, but that number has dropped significantly.
In Letha Scanzoni’s book Men, Women, and Change: A Sociology of Marriage and Family she observes that a wife’s duty was “to please her husband...to train the children so that they would reflect credit on her husband”(205). Alongside the wife’s duties Scanzoni provides the husband’s duty to “provide economic resources”(207).These expectations have long been changed, since then these have become common courtesies. Today, we see less and less of the providing father, homemaking wife and respectable children family structure. We are now seeing what sociologists call the senior-partner/junior-partner structure. Women and mothers are now opting for the choice to work and provide more economic resources for the family. This has changed those expected duties of both men and women in a family scene. A working mother more or less abandons the role of homemaker, to become a “breadwinning” mother, and the father stays his course with his work and provide for the family. Suzanne M. Bianchi in her book Changing Rhythms of American Family Life comments on the effect of mothers working and the time they spend in the home. “Mothers are working more and including their children in their leisure time” (Chapter 10), now that ...
However, because roles are changing the truth is in most families people are now negotiating about the work at home. According to David Molpus, studies show that especially among two-job couples there is an agreement about equal sharing at home when the man and the woman both work full time. Mothers and fathers find different ways to contribute to childcare and other household work. They like equal parenting and don't want to leave their children in the hands of strangers. Equal sharing at home gives the fathers opportunity to stay more with their children and to know more about their lives. To do so, working-class couples try alternating their work shifts, and middle-class couples try working at home for one or two days. They both share enjoyment and the sacrifices of their family.
The effects on individuals has thus far revealed only part of the whole picture. When focus is shifted to workers with family situations, reports are revealing that time constraints are also connected to the shared working time between parents in households, with dual-earner based households and single parents meeting intensified challenges. Among these parents, women are even today continuing to take on the biggest share of family based responsibility and caretaking. This is thus making women workers, or single fathers, feel even more pressure than their workforce counterparts who have no children. The separation between workers who have no children and mothers or fathers with caretaking responsibilities has led to yet another growing divide that demands a change in policy that will address the specific conditions of workers and their families.
Men are likely to get hired if they have children and tend to get paid more. In contrast, women are less likely to get hired even though they have more quality and children. This is when the gender inequality come in. In this article “The Motherhood Penalty vs. the Fatherhood Bonus” the author presented the role and the impact between the roles of the genders. Michelle Budig, a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst put it this way, “The inequality of gender role reveals when men get paid high for having children and women pay the biggest price for the low income” (Qtd. in Miller). According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, 71 percent of mothers are with their children working at home and 40 percent are the primary bread winner (Pew Research Center). In this perspective of women working at home and men working in career shift the qualification between them. The inequality is that employer sees the father as a commit worker and a mother as a distraction in workplaces because women have extra hours of work to do at home with their children and house chores. Claire Miller states that, “one of the worst career moves a women can make is to have children” (Claire Miller). As for the women in the United States, there are a lot of negative impact for them if they decide to have babies. The quality for them shrink to the corner while men hold the advantage of having
In the late 1920s, this started to change for good. More and more woman was becoming educated and finding work outside of the home. Woman were earning money and doing many of the same jobs as men when the 19th Amendment to the constitution gave women these rights. This changed how modern Parent balance work and family time. Should Women have to work or staying home? “Over the past generation, home prices have risen twice as fast for couples with young children as for those without kids… The average couple with young children now shells out more than $127,000 for a home, up from $72,000 (adjusted for inflation) less than 20 years ago (“Why Women…Work”).” This shows that now days it’s expensive to have kid and for couple’s more adjustment that both support each other economically. Many women and solo parent neglect to stay home because they decide that the cost is just too high, and the choic...
Barbara Schneider, a successful sociology author with eighteen years of experience in this educational field, acknowledges that most parents, especially those in the middle class, are anxious to improve their child’s academic and psychological advancement by being consistently involved in their lives (Schneider 107). For parents that must pick their children up from school, an afterschool program or relieve their babysitter by a designated time frame, these unwavering policies invite at-home conflicts and added stresses into the work environment. Those with infants or toddlers become sleep deprived and unproductive at work because of their fixed schedule that forces them to start all their parental needs once they’re shift has been completed. Children get hurt or sick when they’re developing. Rigid policies push parent workers into calling out to tend to their child’s emergency. Condensing 40-hour work weeks into four days or allowing parents to work part time will provide parents a balance for tending to the needs of their children and the demands of our business without jeopardizing our company’s attendance and productivity metrics. Working from home will allow parents to be more accessible to their children in case of emergencies or events that require them to be present. Most children live with either one or two employed
A contributing factor to this, according to Mary Brinton, sociology professor at Harvard University, is that women continue to balance family with the demand of work and being available all the time (Gender Inequality and Women in the Workplace, 2016). As a result, women take on a “second shift” when they get home from work and in choosing to progress professionally many are having less children or waiting longer to have children. There seems to be a correlation between gender equality at home and the workplace with lower birth
Like every other organization they all expect better performance and productivity, whereas people have their own expectations, such as; pay, promotions, enjoyment, and job satisfactions, all while maintaining their personal lives. Work influences the non-work life and vice-versa, the non-work life has a way of influencing work life. The benefits of achieving work-life balance is an increase in job satisfaction (Schleicher, Watt, & Greguras, 2004), which organizations aim at. If employees are satisfied with their jobs, then they will increase their level of efficiency. Organizations play a vital role in assisting employees find a balance between their work and family life. Many organizations have come up with ways or rather have implement strategies with the purpose to help the employee’s need, by starting up programs such as aftercare, elderly-care, flexi-time or even
Today, in a vast majority of families, both the wife and husband have a job. Many working parents are under stress as they have to try to balance the demands of their work, children and relationship. Over the past 25 years, women's and men's roles have changed dramatically. In fact, the world of work and home are not separate, research indicates a profound impact on work and home life.
There have always been various problems on how employees balance family life and work life. This is a problem that many employees from different organizations face. The challenge here is that they are not able to balance both lives. This in most cases leads to neglect of one life and giving too much attention to the other. This has been a major problem to many employees. They have always complained of how difficult it can be when a person tries to balance both lives (Philipsen & Bostic, 2010). This has been a big issue that should be tackled with a lot of concern. There has always been a need for people to be able to live comfortably with their families and to have a good working life in the work area. People should be taught on how to balance family life and work and to be able to give equal attention to both lives. This can be made possible by training and enlightening people on how these two can be achieved. There is need for all employees to learn how they ensure that they give equal attention to their family life and work life.
With the dawn of the 21st century, more and more women have created for themselves a spot in the paid workforce. This shift from a full-time mom to a career woman has led to new paradigm for women and their roles in society.
"The Harried Life of the Working Mother." PewResearch Social and Demographic Trends. Pew Research Center, 1 Oct. 2009. Web. 9 Dec. 2013.