The Emotional Dimensions of Family Time and Their Implications for Work-Family Balance

The challenge of family gathering around the dinner table, once a major pillar of family life, is just one illustration of the serious time squeeze that many families are currently experiencing. It is not surprising that in light of the growing complexity of work and family lives, integrating the two has become difficult. Stress, feelings of overwork, role strain, and the wish to spend more time with family are at the heart of the work-family conflict. This chapter seeks to shed light on the emotional dimensions of family time. Family time can be a form of interactive togetherness or a contested terrain where antagonistic relations develop. It argues that generally being together is a positive experience that can be an important source of support for working parents. By decomposing family time, it seeks to reveal the emotional experiences associated with different family activities and their implications for parents' well being, particularly as they relate to their perception of balancing work and family demands. It describes the challenges of integrating work and family lives that has become especially acute for dual-earner families, a growing proportion of all families in the population, who need to orchestrate between three jobs, two at work and one at home. For this reason, it is important that social scientists treat the family as a whole unit of investigation in their attempt to describe and explain the impacts of work on family well-being and functioning. Consistent with this approach, contemporary research indicates that dual-earner families have experienced an important increase in their joint work.