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An area of diversity currently receiving attention is the large proportion of the workforce with commitments to care for a family. Many organisations have introduced “family friendly” policies including parental leave, childcare assistance and reduced hours of work. But this tends to focus on mothers of healthy, young children. The intense, long‐term needs of disabled children can severely stretch the provision organisations make for parents. This article presents an interview survey of parents with disabled children. It argues that, while many of the parents experience problems establishing a work‐home balance, these are partly caused by blocks within the wider community. Organisations can certainly reap benefits from making special arrangements for employees with disabled children but there are limits to corporate responsibility in relation to non‐work barriers. The article highlights the need for diversity initiatives to look beyond the workplace and incorporate aspects of the wider context in which organisations operate.

This study analyzes the effects of gender and occupational status differences on parents’ work-to-family conflicts, comparing COVID-19 pandemic and pre-pandemic periods. It is examined whether this association is mediated by parents’ telework. Theoretically, we use the work/family border theory and flexible resource versus greedy role perspectives to shed light on the gender- and status-related use of telework and illustrate the influence of flexible working practices on parents’ work-to-family conflicts. Using moderated mediation analysis combined with bootstrapping, we analyze data from two waves of the German Family Panel (pairfam), covering pre-pandemic (2017/18, 2019/2020) and pandemic periods (2020) (N = 3,315). Our results show higher work-to-family conflicts for parents with higher occupational status as well as teleworking parents. Furthermore, we find supporting evidence for the mediation from occupational status to work-to-family conflicts via telework, with a slightly stronger relationship among mothers than fathers. Under the consideration of the pandemic, the mediating effect was only provable for mothers but not for fathers. However, the mediating effect of telework does not strengthen under the pandemic conditions. Our findings support the greedy role perspective, in particular for employees with higher-status occupations, and the assumption of a negative influence of work–family integration through telework for work-to-family conflicts.

As students increasingly incur debt to finance their undergraduate education, there is heightened concern about the long-term implications of loans on borrowers, especially borrowers from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Drawing upon the concepts of cultural capital and habitus (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), this research explores how student debt and social class intersect and affect individuals’ trajectory into adulthood. Based on 50 interviews with young adults who incurred $30,000–180,000 in undergraduate debt and who were from varying social classes, the findings are presented in terms of a categorization schema (income level by level of cultural capital) and a conceptual model of borrowing. The results illustrate the inequitable payoff that college and debt can have for borrowers with varying levels of cultural resources, with borrowers from low-income, low cultural capital backgrounds more likely to struggle throughout and after college with their loans.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate Finnish working mothers’ experiences of the effects of non-standard working schedules (NSWS) on family time in two family forms, coupled and lone-parent families. Furthermore the aim is to find out what meanings mothers with NSWS attached to family time paying particular attention to the circumstances in which mothers experienced NSWS positively.

Thematic analysis of 20 semi-structured interviews was used to investigate mothers’ experiences of the effects of NSWS on family time.

The key factor generating positive experiences was the ability to maintain regularity and togetherness, which was enhanced by specific features of work, such as autonomy and regularity, and successful child care arrangements. Also important were the values mothers associated with family time. The results highlighted the more problematic situation of lone-parent families.

The main limitation of this study was the small sample size.

The findings show how the parents of small children benefit from the regularity and flexibility in their working hours. Owing to irregular and varying working times, flexible around-the-clock childcare is needed. In Finland, an important question is how to organize the care of small school-aged children. Lone mothers, especially, may need services to help with domestic chores and childcare.

A non-resident parent can also be an important source of childcare. Therefore policymakers should take into account family type, including consideration of the rights to childcare of non-resident parents.

This study adds to the literature by explaining more in depth, through the richness of qualitative data, the circumstances in which mothers experience NSWS positively.

We model the conditions under which parents optimally reallocate time to childcare when an outside agent exogenously restricts the number of hours an employer can demand of a working parent. Theoretically, when the restriction binds, a parent's available time increases. We exploit a series of voluntary and mandated labor-market reforms in South Korea that regulated the statutory and maximum work hours of parents. The government implemented the laws in stages by industry and size of firms. This implementation process generates exogenous variation across families where one or both partners worked at jobs that were or were not affected by the reform. We show the reforms affected work hours and use the predicted changes to investigate the total amount they spent on paid childcare and whether or not they changed the relative use of market and parental care. When fathers get more time (work less), parents spend less money on childcare. A change in mother's work time does not affect expenditures. When parents get more time, they are more likely to spend money on paid childcare for school-age children and more likely to use private academies.

For many people, the word “family brings to mind the traditional stereotype—Dad goes off to work while Mom stays home to run the house and mind the children. However, in today's society less than ten per cent of all families fall into this category. The majority of families in the United States are composed of a dual‐income couple or dual‐income parents. While many books and articles glorify the new “super‐family”—Dad and Mom both work and manage the house, while the children troop angelically and obediently to day‐care or school, and everyone enjoys “quality time”—these superhuman figures do not exist in reality. In fact, many working parents suffer guilt and anxiety because they believe that the “super‐family” is an achievable goal. The average working parent is pulled by work and by family responsibilities, while struggling to maintain both sanity and a sense of self in the process.

This study aims to contribute to the literature by examining the gender gap effects of childcare restrictions. Specifically, not using professional childcare services due to issues like access, quality or costs. Additionally, we explore the long-run consequences of extended work interruptions for childcare.

Using a specialized cross-sectional module from the 2018 Spanish Labor Force Survey, we estimated a set of linear regression models to capture the short and long run effects of childcare restrictions in labor market outcomes.

We identify substantial gender gaps in labor force, employment, full-time employment and hours worked among parents facing childcare constraints. In contrast, parents without such restrictions experience much lower gender gaps. The long-run analysis reveals that mainly career breaks lasting 2 years or more significantly diminish the labor supply and employment rates of mothers.

Our study goes beyond examining the effects of childcare restrictions on mothers’ labor market behavior and explicitly studies the gender disparities related to these restrictions. Moreover, our database includes information on work flexibility for childcare, allowing us to explore whether such flexibility can help mitigate these gender gaps. Additionally, we assess the long-term effects of work interruptions due to childcare responsibilities on women’s labor outcomes.

This paper addresses revolutionary changes in the education, fertility and market work of U.S. families formed in the 1870s–1920s: Fertility fell from 5.3 to 2.6; the graduation rate of their children increased from 7% to 50%; and the fraction of adulthood wives devoted to market-oriented work increased from 7% to 23% (by one measure).

These trends are addressed within a unified framework to examine the ability of several proposed mechanisms to quantitatively replicate these changes. Based on careful calibration, the choices of successive generations of representative husband-and-wife households over the quantity and quality of their children, household production, and the extent of mother’s involvement in market-oriented production are simulated.

Rising wages, declining mortality, a declining gender wage gap, and increased efficiency and public provision of schooling cannot, individually or in combination, reduce fertility or increase stocks of human capital to levels seen in the data. The best fit of the model to the data also involves: (1) a decreased tendency among parents to view potential earnings of children as the property of parents and (2) rising consumption shares per dependent child.

Greater attention should be given the determinants of parental control of the work and earnings of children for this period.

One contribution is the gathering of information and strategies necessary to establish an initial baseline, and the time paths for parameters and targets for this period beset with data limitations. A second contribution is identifying the contributions of various mechanisms toward reaching those calibration targets.

A work orientation represents a person’s beliefs about the meaning of work – the function work plays in the person’s life and the constellation of values and assumptions the person holds about the work domain. Research has suggested that adults tend to favor one of three primary work orientations: job, career, or calling. Empirical studies have shown that adults with different primary work orientations tend to experience different work and career outcomes; however, scholars have not analyzed how or why an individual first develops a work orientation. In this study, we take a first step toward investigating the origins of adults’ work orientations.

We propose hypotheses drawing on extant literature on the development of work values and occupational inheritance. We test hypotheses using a retrospective research design and survey methodology, with a sample of working adults.

Work orientations are developed through socialization processes with parents during adolescence. There are different patterns of development across the three work orientation categories: stronger calling orientations are developed when both parents possess strong calling orientations; stronger career orientations develop in accordance with fathers’ career orientations; and job orientations are related more to the nature of the adolescent’s relationship with parents than with parents’ own work orientations.

This research provides the first empirical study of the origin and development of work orientations.

This research offers insight into ways generations are connected through the perceived meaning of their work, even as the nature of work changes. We encourage future scholars to use this as a starting point for research on the development of work orientations, and to continue exploring these questions using additional methods, particularly longitudinal study designs.

Using a life course perspective, we develop a theoretical model of how parents can influence their children's propensity to enter self-employment. We draw on the sociological, economic, psychological, and behavioral genetics literatures to develop a model in which parental influence occurs in different ways, depending on someone's stage in their life course. We review and summarize existing findings for parental influences on entrepreneurial entry using a three-part life course framework: childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. We also analyze new data from the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics on the extent to which children were involved in their parents’ businesses. From our review, we propose strong effects from genetic inheritances and parenting practice (during childhood); moderate effects from reinforcement of work values and vocational interests (during adolescence); and little influence from financial support but stronger effects from other tangible means of support (during adulthood).