Work Experiences and Family Functioning among Employed Fathers with Children of School Age

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate how job satisfaction and job stress were related to 4 domains of family functioning: individual, parent-child, marital and child domains. The effects of work on family functioning were tested using a sample of 657 Dutch men who were working full-time. The results showed that job stress and job dissatisfaction were related to individual strain, which mediated their effect on the parent-child, marital and child domains. Consequently, in promoting family functioning, more emphasis should be placed on employment experiences (e.g., through interventions designed to increase occupational well-being). Work and family represent two of the most central realms of adult life and, for many employed adults, balancing the demands made by these two areas is their most important daily task. Traditionally, these two domains of life have been studied independently. More recently, however, the interaction between work and family roles has been the interest of a growing number of work and family researchers. In general, this research suggests that the impact of work on the personal lives of workers is far reaching, affecting not only the workers themselves, but other family members as well (Barling, 1990; Menaghan, 1991; Menaghan & Parcel, 1990). Moreover, although less attention has been given to the other side of the work/family nexus, research suggests that the characteristics of workers' personal and family lives help determine how they respond to their jobs (Barnett, 1994; Crouter, 1984). In this article, the work-family interface is examined as part of a research program designed to portray the sociocultural context and inner familial relationships of Dutch families with children between 9 and 16 years of age (Gerris et al., 1992, 1993). The general purpose of this study is to acquire more insight into the interface of work and family by investigating the functioning of the family as a system in its ecological context. In this study, we concentrate on the relationships between subjective work experiences, job satisfaction and stress, and functioning in the family domain. Two viewpoints are emphasized in our article. First, the work-family interface is approached from the viewpoint of the a viewpoint that has not been emphasized as much as that of the mother in studies of work-family interaction. However, recent years have seen an explosion of research on men's familial experiences (Barnett & Marshall, 1992; Barnett, Marshall, & Pleck, 1992; Crosby, 1987; Hood, 1993; Voydanoff, 1984). This increase is due to the changing nature of work and family responsibilities as men are becoming more involved with their families. The new father, who is increasingly involved in parenting, has emerged. Second, workfamily connections are studied in panicular in the context of school-aged children in the family. Many studies have shown that parents with preschoolers have more difficulty than parents with school-aged children in balancing work and family demands (Izraeli, 1993; Loerch, Russell, & Rush, 1989; Voydanoff, 1988). In addition, according to Phares (1993), the popular belief that fathers become more involved with their children as the children grow towards adolescence has not been documented. For all these reasons, we can assume that the work-family connections found among fathers with school-aged children are likely not to be as strong as they might be, for example, among fathers with infants. The traditional, earliest research linking work and family was driven by the deprivation framework, which argues that the longer one is away from the family, the greater the negative effect of the work on the family (Barling, 1990). This starting point, according to which work deprives family members of time that the worker would otherwise have spent with them, is illustrated by research on the presumed consequences of maternal employment. Most such research simply contrasts employed and nonemployed mothers. …