UNIT A: Blog 4: Balancing Work & Family

Blog #4


Males and females who have a job and are responsible for family care are always caught between a balancing act of how they are going to accomplishing everything in so little time. The AFLCIO fact sheet states that 65 million women are now in the work force, more than ¼ of these women spend nights and weekends at there jobs and have different schedules as their spouse. Many adults are struggling to juggle work and family, barely get to spend time with their spouse, just getting by in proving health care, and 54 million of those people are caregivers. The question is how do these people balance their work life responsibilities and their home life responsibilities?

Over the past years family time has gone done by 22 hours a week since 1970 due to parents working. Parents are struggling with balancing a good home life with a productive and idealistic work life. This struggle is difficult considering parenting is a 24 hours/ 7 day a week job and the idealistic full-time worker is supposedly suppose to work around over 50 hours a week. Parents need to create a system, a way of dealing with juggling two lives, the life at home and the life at work. The problem is that there is no concrete system that everyone can follow. We are all different, we all have different issues, problems, different occupations, different pay, different number of people we care for and the list goes on, but caregivers need to take everything they have to accomplish in, analyze what needs to be done, how they are going to do it, what is the most important, and how or who is going to help them.

To be efficient and productive in balancing work and home a caregiver and parent must know what it takes to do this. To balance a home and work life it is very difficult and stressful. One of the best ways to balance them out and be productive is planning. When planning out your work day and family life the caregiver will realize depending on their responsibilities and financial situation that they are going to have to make sacrifices. An example of this is from the “Juggling Work & Family” video which talks about a family in where the father had to make a career change to work nights as a limousine driver in order to help the family. The mother would work days and the father would works nights in order to insure that their two children had 24/7 care. This was a great sacrifice in work, but the father and mother both get to keep jobs, and support and see the family. In order to do this they were very structured and organized because they only got one hour together from the time the mother got home from work and the father had to go to work. Even though they spent time apart this family was financial sound, organized, structured, happy they were working, loving, helpful, very close, nurturing, and cherished the time they spent together. These kinds of characteristics are necessary if a family wants a good family life while juggling work.

This balancing and juggling of work and home has become increasingly more difficult due to gender role changes. This gender role change is due to the fact that women started taking more and more roles in the work force. Before this change balancing work and family was more concrete because males were predominantly the bread winners who go to work and women were the care givers staying at home and taking care of the family. Now, with men and women at work both parents are changing their roles to help with the family. Since both parents are working they both have to make sacrifices. The issues that make the change in gender roles so complex are there is less family time, less time doing community organizational activities, less house work is being done, and many more issues that are dependent on individual situations. One of the biggest issues are the time spend with the children and the individual special care that these children need. Even though children are being putting in educational school it is important that each child be taught and cared for by the parents. Sometimes the situation is different such as single parent families. These parents are faced with working more, having less time for there kids, not being able to afford after-school child care forcing the kids to be home taking care of themselves, and financial difficultly putting great amounts of stress on them.

This brings the discussion into the factors that make the life and work balancing act hard to achieve. Some of the factors that make this balance difficult to accomplish are from the work which would include time dead lines, work hours, calls at all hours of the day, working in a greedy workplace, working over time to pay bills, and not making enough money to support family. Another issue comes from the home which would include feeling guilty from being away from your family, not being there for them, missing out precious family moments, and just not having the time to take care of them. There is a tug of war going on in these parents heads because they want to work to help support their family, but at the same time they feel guilty. It is a balance of power, a balance of work and family, which never stops. In some instances parents, if they can afford to, have to make a decision. In one case in the video “Juggling work & family” a mother was torn in-between her high paying career of being a lawyer and her two kids. After trying to work part-time which didn’t work, she decided to quit, stay at home and take care of her children. This family decided and had the luxury of having one parent stay at home with the kids supporting them and one parents working supporting them financially. Even though she is very happy to be with her children she feels unfulfilled from not working. In life nothing is concrete and everything you love must be taken care of and protected.

Every situation is different when dealing with juggling work and family life and everyone needs a helping hand once in a whole. When care givers are struggling just to fit everything into one day they look to their friends, family, and company in which they are employed for help. One great support system is the caregiver’s family. Family members and even their children can step in and help. When caregivers have help from their family and children it will help them all stay organized and taken care of. Taking care of a family is a group effort and works better when everyone is helping out. For example from the video “Juggling Work and & Family” we look back on the single mother with two kids. Her two children are in charge of making dinner a couple of times a week. This single and small act of helping the mom out helps the family greatly.

Another way in which care givers are looking for help is from their workplace. Although employees are working for the company the company should work and strive to work for its people. If the company can increase productivity while increasing satisfaction, caring, and flexibility to its employees then everyone wins. If employees are happy then work harder so the goal should be to make the employees happy. As notes from our PowerPoint slides “Workplace Flexibility” there are three ways in which employers work with time constraints of employees which are: Traditional Flextime, Daily Flextime, and telecommuting. Traditional Flextime lets the employee pick what time the start and end work. This accommodates the caregiver so work fits into their schedule and the employer still gets their work done. Daily Flextime lets the employee vary hours of work depending on the day. Telecommuting lets the employee work part-time off site. Employers should still be strict as they are running a business, but still need to be sensitive. We are all human and we all have family problems and issues at some point. An employer should be aware of this and be understanding of work and home conflicts. An employer should let the employee use their days off, sick days, work flextime opinions, and also give them “passes” within reason. Everyone deserves help, but should be aware and cautious so people do not over use them. Everyone is different and should be treated as such.