Blending Work and Family Discussion and Responses

 

 

After reading this week’s lessons and viewing the video below, please define work/family conflict. How does this dynamic impact families? How does it impact their jobs? Please provide at least 2 examples of each. How is this dynamic different for men and women?

Blending Work and Family:  You are not alone  https://youtu.be/X1v2W7ZoLeQ

https://apus.brightspace.com/shared/elf/chfd225/le…

Minimum 250 words answer

Classmate #1:

Hello classmates and Dr. Hubbs, this weeks forum really touched my heart because I constantly have felt like I am not a good mother because I have had to work so much and I am not a good worker because I am a mother. Being in the military, we are always away from our families and it really puts a strain on our relationships at home and at work. I feel blessed that I can take some time away from working before I go back to school full-time but for most that is not an option. According to Baxter, 47% of employed fathers and 62% of employed mothers have felt that they are either always or mostly rushed when it comes to work and home life events (2013). So, what is work and family conflict? It is an incompatibility between work and family pressures resulting in major stressors for both men and women. One of the ways these pressures impact families is through spillover. A spillover is a transfer of moods, feelings, and behavior patterns from work to home (CHFD225, Lesson 4, n.d.). A spillover can result in fights between the parents, children acting out or adopting these same behaviors resulting in negative outcomes for all involved. The second way that work/family conflict affects the family dynamic is through the conditions that one is working. A family member’s work hours, work site, required travel, and the different shifts someone might have to work (CHFD225, Lesson 4, n.d.). When you have two parents working different shifts and having to juggle the demands of outside events like childcare schedule, sporting events, school events, etc., parents are having a harder time balancing these conflicts. The ways that it impacts their jobs are one if there is no reliable childcare, they must take time off and could end up losing their job if it happens too often. Secondly, if they are too busy stressing about home life, they are unable to produce their best work. It also can affect their health which in the long run will affect their job. American businesses are losing over 300 billion dollars a year from employees not being able to work due to health-related issues (Trask, 2016). Unfortunately, more of the stressors are geared towards women then towards men. When it comes to wage differences between men and women, for every $10,000 men earn women only earn $8220 for the same type of work (Saylor Academy, 2012). Women tend to find themselves stuck under a glass ceiling compared to men being able to ride a glass escalator through promotions at work. Women are held to a higher standard then men especially when there are children involved. In dual income families, the expectation is women are to go to work, take care of the children and household chores and still satisfy their husbands at the end of the day. In 2015, a study showed that women on average spend 2 hours and 15 minutes a day doing household work while men spend 1 hour and 25 minutes (Bureau of Labor Statistics, n.d.). I know that this has been an issue for many years and the gap is closing but, in my opinion, women will always be held to a higher standard than men when it comes to juggling work and home life. I hope you all enjoyed my forum post and I look forward to your feedback.

-Kyla

“Average minutes per day men and women spent in household activities. Women totaled 2 hours 15 minutes while men totaled 1 hour 25 minutes.” (n.d.). [digital image] Retrieved from https://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/chart23.jpg.

Baxter, J. (2013). Families working together. Family Matters, 92, 77-83. Retrieved from http://web.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy2.apus.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=1d93c43c-88f0-44f3-b126-e1212cc03c54%40sessionmgr4007

CHFD225, Lesson 4 (n.d.). Family Adaption to Competing Pressures of Work and Family Life. Retrieved from https://apus.brightspace.com/shared/elf/chfd225/lesson4/index.html

“Dimensions of Gender Inequality”. (2012). Saylor Academy. Retrieved from https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_social-problems-continuity-and-change/s07-03-dimensions-of-gender-inequalit.html

Trask, B. S. (2016, December 21). Blending Work and Family: You Are Not Alone. [digital video] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1v2W7ZoLeQ&feature=youtu.be

Classmate #2:

This week’s lesson, “work-family conflict,” discussed how both work and family overlap with each other.  I want to look at how both work responsibilities and family responsibilities could take a back seat to work. In some cases, your family responsibilities could affect your work performance.

Family deal with spillover from behavior patterns changes between family and work, due to moods, feelings. The example used in the lesson was a husband come home from work frustrated about what is going on at work; he might take his anger and problems out on his wife and children. The flipside to that is that he could easily take his issues from home to work. If a person is dealing with something at home, the more the person deals with the problem, the more the problem is going to start effect there work behavior. The person isn’t going to focus as they should.

A second example is when a person makes work their life and forget their responsibility as a parent. With the increase of women working in the United States workforce, this has increased the opportunities for women that want to take a more active role when staying at home to raise their children. Unfortunately, men have to work full time, hard labor jobs because the stereotype is that man will be the provider for his family. In doing so, one must find a balance between work and family.

Work-family conflict seems to be an increasingly prominent stressor in an everyday working-class family. When attempting to balance both, it extremely hard to fulfill both work requirements and, more importantly, family responsibilities. With father and mother, both working families, families are more financially stable. The downfall could be that economically stable families have more issues in the rearing their child development. The kids feel entitled to certain privileges. They do not see the hard work, and they struggle it took to get there.  With that in mind, it is easy to see how this dynamic would impact families and the way they function.

Even though financial stability provides more opportunities for everyone in the family, work conditions are another way that work-family conflict impacts families. With many jobs today stating that you will travel as part of your job, this creates less time with the family. Family relationships then suffer. In the Army and the Marines, they say that if they wanted you to have a family, they would have issued you one in Basic Training, which means that you need to dedicate all your time to your job and nothing else. This mindset has burnt out many Soldiers, and they have become less productive in their daily duty. The idea has caused many marriages and careers to fail.

So in closing, the social roles for both men working more in the household and women working more in the workforce and not at home, there will continue to be a shift.  There is no perfect way to have a utopia that is desired.