Parental and occupational stress

M.A.Najeema Assistant Lecturer, Department of Management,Eastern University, Sri Lanka

Today’s society is busier than ever. Parents, in particular, are responsible for many different roles in their fast-paced lifestyles. These responsibilities range from child care giving, to household maintenance, to working outside the home.

Some of the roles are unavoidable, while others might be leisure or volunteer activities that cause extra strain. The problem is that the unnecessary stress parents experience due to the number of roles they choose or those in which they are required to engage. Dual-earner families experience more stress than single-earner families, and women experience more stress due to role strain than men.

The Dual-Earner Family is a family where each partner is a member of the general workforce and the partners share a common residence. Most parents, these days, do not spend adequate time in a calmed/relaxed state.

They bustle around from job to job, appointment to appointment, running wild and not taking the appropriate time off to care for themselves. The trend for couple-parented families is that they subconsciously double up the responsibilities and activities because there are two parental figures to help maintain; this puts strain on everyone in the family and leaves the parents drained, and without a release. Parents receive the blunt end of most deals when it comes to stress.

They run the household, care for the bills, meals, maintenance, work, school issues, decision-making, scheduling and planning, and the main task of trying to keep the pace flowing smoothly around the home. With a single parent this is obviously rough stuff, but even with two parents it is still inevitably going to hit the rocks sometimes.

The term “Stress” has evolved so much that it can be used to refer to both the source of some event and the reaction to it. Stress is a person’s adaptive response to a stimulus that places excessive psychological and physical demands on that person or a person’s response to an inappropriate level of pressure.

The dual-income earners’ struggle with the demand of balancing paid work and home responsibilities, that cause to the problem of parental stress. Work-family conflict has been defined as a “mutual incompatibility between the demands of the work role and the demand of the family role”. With the increase in dual-income families and employed single parents, conflict between work and family has reached a crisis. The terms “Dual Career Family” and “Dual Career Couple” (DCC) have become increasingly significant lifestyles. Work and family are the key domains of life to many people Work-Family Stress have been identified as a major problem for working mothers.

There are many roles involved in being a parent. Today’s parents are not only parents; they wear a variety of other hats: employees, employers, volunteers, friends, spouses, siblings. This large number of responsibilities contributes to the hassles they encounter in an average day. Common sense would indicate that the more roles a person plays, the more stress they will encounter.

The maintenance of multiple roles across work and family institutions is a source of strain. Role strain has been defined as “a transactional process reflecting an imbalance between demands and the resources available to cope with those demands”. This role strain is a direct result of taking on a number of responsibilities and not being able to successfully balance them. Although some stress can be positive (i.e., it can be stimulating and increase alertness), too much will ultimately affect quality of life. It is true that all people experience stress; research has shown there are instances that cause some people to experience an increased level of stress compared to others.

Workplace characteristics can also contribute to higher levels of work- family conflict. Researchers have found that the number of hours worked per week, the amount and frequency of overtime required, an inflexible work schedule, unsupportive supervisor, and an inhospitable organizational culture for balancing work and family all increase the likelihood that women employees will experience conflict between their work and family role. Researchers for example, found that women who had multiple life roles (e.g., mother, wife, and employee) were less depressed and had higher self-esteem than women who were more satisfied in their marriages and jobs compared to women and men who were not married, unemployed, or childless.

Researchers have found that trying to balance work and family roles can result in job and family distress, work-family conflict, job and life dissatisfaction, depression, anxiety, anger/hostility, and perception of a lower quality of life. There are also unhealthy consequences for the organization including absenteeism, tardiness and loss of talented employees.

“As women and men begin to face squarely the unforeseen anxieties of dividing the self into two important roles - one geared toward the family, the other toward the working world - the pressures are enormous and largely uncharted by past generations.” A common problem for adults in today’s society is increased responsibilities from work and family. With the addition of children to the family, care giving responsibilities increase dramatically. Parents are responsible for caring for the children’s best interests, education, wellness, housecleaning, clothing care, food preparation, and financial management.

The stress experienced by caregivers results from multiple roles, such as: child care, employment, and possibly caring for elderly parents. These roles are usually more stressful due to the increased number of demanding situations. Employed caregivers experience more stress in the areas of work, family, and health than employees without such responsibilities.

The possibility that parental work conditions such as work-time, job demands, job supervision, job satisfaction, and wage level may affect worker’s life satisfaction, their family life, and thereby their children’s school achievement have been suggested by many psychologists.

The effects of the job on individual health and well-being are found to be a potential source for workers and their families. Workers must accommodate their schedules to do their jobs more than their families.

Work hours affects parents’ involvement with their family depending on the size of the family, whether it is a single or dual-earner family, the number and ages of children, children’s gender, and parental occupational status. This statement suggests parental work conditions do affect their involvement in the family affairs and involvement in children’s school matters.

Three factors are related to mothers’ and fathers’ employment (employment hours, occupational status, and work flexibility) with parenting style, home environment, and child’s development.

Employed mother’ positive attitudes are reflected in positive parent-child interactions and in children’s school achievement. Although employed mothers spend less time in housework, studies reveal that they are more likely to share childcare responsibilities with husbands or other adults members in the family.

Based on level, there are three levels of factors contributing to parental and occupational stress: family background (Micro-system), parental involvement (Macro-system) and parental work conditions (Exo-system).

An increasing number of married women have entered the work force during the last several decades. One consequence of this change in employment patterns is that many married women and men combine substantial work and family obligations. Role overload and conflict resulting from increased roles and incongruent role expectations have been identified as common concerns among dual-income couples.

Types of conflicts between work, and family

Two perspectives on role conflict have emerged in the literature. One perspective emphasizes the problems, especially for women, of attempting combine work and family. The other perspective concentrates on the advantages of combining work and family, for women as well as men. There are two types of work-family conflicts:

1. Work-family conflict (WFC): stems from the interference of events in the work role with performance of the family role. For example, long work hours may prevent one from helping a child with his/her schoolwork, precipitating WFC.

2. Family-work conflict (FWC): on the other hand, stems from the interference of events in the family role with performance of the work role. For example, a child’s illness may prevent attendance at work, precipitating FWC. Regardless of the direction of the interference, inter-role conflict indicates an absence of fit between the work and family roles.

Factors contributing to parental stress, and occupational stress of dual-income families

* Role overload:

Role overload exists when the number of roles a person occupies cannot be handled adequately or comfortably because of finite amounts of time and energy. Dual-income couples experienced severe role overload from combining work and family roles. Role overload was the most frequently experienced daily stress.

The number of hours spent weekly in work activities has been shown to have a positive relationship with Work and Family Stress. Expectations held by superiors and co-workers for an employee to prioritize the work by assuming increased job responsibilities and extending performance of the work role beyond normal working hours have also been shown to contribute to Work and Family Stress.

* Role conflict:

Role conflict refers to the conflict that arises between the expectations of two different roles that a person adopts. For example, the dual-income marriage may create conflicting expectations for women. At work, a professional woman often is expected to be aggressive, competitive, and committed to her work.

At home, she often is expected to be nurturing to her children and compassionate and caring to her husband. These differing expectations may require a complex display of potentially incompatible personality characteristics at work and home.

Parental demand can affect work-family stress. Parents tend to experience more work-family conflict than non-parents as they need to spend a greater amount of time at home taking care of their children. Parental demand is measured by the number of children and their age. Younger children will demand more of their parents’ time. And large families are likely to be more time demanding than small families. Parents experience more work-family conflict than married couples without children.

* Individual problems:

Role overload and conflict place dual-income spouses at greater risk for both physical and emotional problems. Consequently, it is important to found out coping mechanisms in dual-income families that may diffuse or prevent potential deleterious effects of role overload and conflict on spouses’ physical symptoms and emotional affect. Negative mental and physical health outcomes have been related to high level of work-family conflict.

* Emotional Exhaustion:

Emotional exhaustion occurs to a person when these disturbed experiences go on recurring. When the role is not clear to him, a person might become aware that he will not be able to understand the role any better and that he cannot improve his performance, leading to exhaustion. Continuous exposure and inability to resolve role related conflicts also lead to such an outcome.

* Physical Symptomatology:

Physical symptoms connected to psychological events. Physical symptoms are particularly susceptible to the influence of psychological events.

-Anxiety and Tension: Anxiety can be defined as a phenomenal state of the human organism, as a psychological syndrome and as a theoretical construct invoked to account for defensive behaviour, the avoidance of noxious stimuli and neurotic symptoms. When an individual faces conflict and ambiguity regarding his work, he is likely to experience anxiety and tension concerning the performance of his role.

Coping mechanisms to overcome the parental and occupational stress of dual-earner families

There are many ways to coping with stresses stemming from family-work incompatibilities on the individual, couple, family or work level.

* Successful dual-earner families structure their lives around the following ten major strategies: valuing family, striving for partnership, deriving meaning from work, maintaining work boundaries, focusing and producing at work, taking pride in dual earning, prioritizing family fun, living simply, making decisions proactively, and valuing time.

* Dual-earner families have or can acquire the competences necessary to cope with the challenges of balancing work and family life in a proactive and self-directed way dual-earner families have or can acquire the competences necessary to cope with the challenges of balancing work and family life in a proactive and self-directed way.

* Family-friendly work places: The structure that helps to ease work family incompatibilities refers to family-friendly work places. The provision of part-time jobs (particularly for mothers) and flexible work schedules are only two items of a longer list of family-friendly measures that enable working parents to better integrate their work and family roles. In general, implementing family-friendly measures turned out to be a win-win situation for both employees and companies because, besides the positive effects for working parents, the higher job dedication and productivity of employed parents pay off for companies subscribing to family-oriented policies.

* The couple can eliminate or emphasize the less critical roles and help the couple stop attempting too many things. The couple then redefines themselves in a more realistic manner. Dual career couples are usually using time management skills.

* Introducing mind-body stress reduction also proves very helpful to many couples. This includes: exercise, sensible eating, and ensuring that internal energy is not depleted because of the great amount of externalizing in their dual roles. A counsellor can suggest co-joint career counselling to observe how work and home can best be balanced based on individual needs and developmental needs of the couple. Couples can define their own sense of equity within their relationship.