Earlier in the olden days, women used to sit at home detached from the outside world. They use to manage home and look after children.The responsibility of earning income for the family was left to men. Withthe introduction of industrialization and technological development, the lifestyles of human beings started to change and needs got multiplied. People also started to adapt modern living style.In this process, women slowly started to move outside home. Women pursued education in equal terms with men and women literacy rate improved very much. Women started to think independently and participated equally in the outside world along with their male counterparts. Slowly and steadily discriminating women on the basis of gender decreased, as women started to prosper in all the fields of life including politics, sports and even in defense services.
As the times have changed, along with that standard of living has undergone drastic transformation. Needs of human beings have multiplied and in this process earning substantial income for maintaining a decent life has become the highest priority. With the changed circumstances the role of women has become so important in the society. For matching today’s standard of living and leading a respectful life, it became for both men and women to collectively earn income for the family.
Contribution of women in generating income for their families increased extensively. Women started earning income almost at par with their male counterparts. But home was still managed exclusively by women as in the past, without any change. Since men’s role remain unchanged only with income generation, it became a challenging task for women to manage both field of life, home front and their careers outside home. This particular situation has created many issues to the working parents of each family.
The care, love, protection and the guidance given by parents determines the psychological as well as the physical growth of the children. The quality of such aspects provided by working parents is different from the non working parents or single working parents. Apparently the non working parents and the single working parents have more time and facilities to be with their children and offer all the psychological supports required by the children. But in contrast even the working parents also can offer similar psychological support within the time available for them to spend with their children. Here the importance is given not for the time they have but the quality of how such time is spent with their children. Even though working parents have the option to spend their available time productively with their kids, many of the working parents fail to do so due to the work loads, stress, poor time managements etc. Such failure of the working parents ends up in many issues. These can be identified as the issues faced by the working parents as well as the consequences of the work – family conflict.
Psychological Issues
- Stress, low energy and burn out
- Low work and family life satisfaction
- Low morale and feel of guilt due to leaving their children alone at home
- Fear about leaving their children in the hands of nannies, relatives and day cares
Work Related Issues
- Poor work performance
- Absenteeism and turnovers, turnover intentions and intention to quit the work force
- Low career commitment
- Task avoidance
Other Issues
- Physical illness of parents (e.g. blood pressure, weak physic)
- Poor Children physical and mental development
- Unfulfilled family responsibilities
- Issues on the quantity and quality of the time spent with children
- Substance abuse
- Divorce or separations and misunderstandings
Just like the issues the reasons for such issues also can be separated based on its nature.
Family Related Reasons
Working parents who have many children who are small require more attention and support from their parents where they face higher work family conflict due to their inability to spend more time with their kids. Lack of supportive and understanding spouse would complicate the work family issues more.
Work Related Reasons
It was mainly associated with long working hours, work overload and lack of support from peers, which causes less time with their family. This will create a gap between the parents and the children. Workers who have inflexible working conditions: deadlines, conflicting co-workers, demanding managers, long hours, unsupportive boss, un-preferred working schedules are experiencing higher work family conflicts due to lack of balance between family and work demand. Jobs have changed constantly and which consume more energy, more unpredictable, and require longer hours to go to work. Due to this reason their normal times to spend with their family will get affected and feel tiredness and lack of care in family will induce the problems.
Personality Related Reasons
Lack of physical stamina and psychological strength creates stress and burn outs which will hinder the smooth going of the work and family life. Inability to manage the spillovers where work load of one domain affecting the other domain is visible in many families nowadays.
Ragulan Tharmakulasingam 