`Dual career parents somehow manage to juggle their work and domestic lives every day–but at what cost?” asked Linda Waite, co-director of the Alfred P. Sloan Center on Parents, Children and Work at the University of Chicago.
Waite, who has a doctorate in sociology, is a nationally recognized expert on family issues, and she and the center’s co-director, Barbara Schneider, plan to find the answer through their research of 500 families nationwide.
In the study are dual career families with either a teenager or kindergartner or both. And they were thoroughly studied: “In addition to separate, intensive interviews, we did individual electronic monitoring of every family member for one week,” said Waite, author of “The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier and Better Off Financially.”
“Their beeper watches went off eight times a day and they were asked to fill out a log about how they spend their time. That way, we got the perspectives of everyone involved,” she added.
Though final results are not yet available, Waite says there are some preliminary–and very thought-provoking–findings of “costs.”
“In families where the wife works more than 40 hours a week, there is early evidence that the husband’s health suffers,” said the sociologist. Women typically take care of their husbands’ well-being, “but when a woman works super hours, her role as family caretaker suffers–and no one steps into the void.”
Another early finding is that teenagers whose mothers work show higher levels of depressive symptoms than youngsters whose mothers don’t. “They’re not depressed, but some have trouble sleeping, are lonely and feel sad,” Waite said.
And indications are there’s someone else in the family who clearly pays the cost. “Mothers who work full time have higher levels of stress than those who don’t,” the sociologist said. “Families do tend to be coping, but women still do the lion’s share of work around the house–at least twice as much housework as men–and when they’re at home, they’re more likely to be doing two things at once.”
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Waite adds that “teenagers aren’t doing a lot of housework, though they think they are–but not when you look at the beeper data.” And that means Mom does it.
Do these early results mean women should stop working? “Not at all,” Waite said. “We need to figure out ways to ease the burden on women, many of whom want to be the ones who make their families more comfortable, but not that they should return home. That won’t happen–the economy would grind to a standstill. Companies are discovering that if they want to keep talented women, they might have to make them a different deal.”
Jeanne Ulatowski, vice president and manager of work-life services at Northern Trust Corp. in Chicago, recognizes the costs of her job both professionally and personally. “The continual balancing act that I, my friends and my colleagues go through is tremendous–I just can’t go home and sit, even though my husband is truly helpful,” Ulatowski said.
She and her husband, George, a maintenance and engineering manager, have a daughter, Caitlin, 13. “The cost comes out in emotional and physical exhaustion, or stress, whatever you want to call it, because women still are the primary caregivers.”
Companies, she agrees, need to step in. “Northern is tuned into this problem,” Ulatowski said. “I couldn’t do what I do every day at work and at home if Northern didn’t have a family resource program with a broad array of services, such as financial and legal advice, on-site child care, elder care and flexible hours. We want to keep the employees we have.”
And there’s also a bottom line reason the bank is so supportive about reducing stress: “You can’t be the best you can be if you’re fragmented all over the place,” said the executive.
That would be another “cost.”