Work and Family Life: Contemporary Realities, Current Expectations and Future Prospects

Abstract

The relationship of work and family life is increasingly complex. Many families are forced to create a complicated patchwork of child care arrangements to accommodate the demands of their work. The average hours worked per week are increasing and part-time and casual work are becoming the norm for many workers, particularly women. Recently, there has been a nostalgic appeal by some politicians and their constituents for a return to a simpler world where work and family life were less intricately interwoven. While appealing to its adherents, the call for a return to the comfortable nuclear family flies in the face of some fundamental contemporary demographic realities. This paper reports the results of a survey of the attitudes to caregiving and career of women enrolled in a university-based early childhood program. The paper is in two parts. The first sets the context for the survey, by exploring the origins of the contemporary patterns of relationship between work and family life. The second describes the survey and its results. The results indicate that attitudes to maternal care and career roles are more traditional among younger, less experienced students than among their older peers with greater experience of parenting and employment. The implications of the results and future trends in the relationship of work and family life are discussed, in the light of contemporary features of families and demographic trends.