Work Demands of Dual-Earner Couples: Implications for Parents' Knowledge about Children's Daily Lives in Middle Childhood

Abstract

Repetti's (1989, 1994) argument that daily work stress leads parents to withdraw from family interaction was tested by examining parents' knowledge of their school-aged children's experiences, whereabouts, and activities in a sample of 181 dualearner families. Cluster analysis of husbands ' and wives' work hours, role overload, and work pressure produced three clusters: high mother demands, low demands, and high father demands. Parents were less knowledgeable when fathers' jobs were highly demanding and when they had younger boys or were less happily married. The negative effects of fathers' work stress appear to be exacerbated by poor marital quality and by having a younger son. Key Words: cluster analysis, dual-earner couples, middle childhood, parental knowledge, parental monitoring, work stress. Job-related stress is one characteristic of employment that has been shown to have negative implications for parent-child relations (Galambos & Maggs, 1990; Repetti, 1994, 1997; Repetti & Wood, 1997). Previous research examining work demands and parenting, however, has focused primarily on either mothers' or fathers' work characteristics. Such strategies do not fully portray the complexities in the lifestyles of dual-earner families (Crouter & Helms-Erikson, 1997; Crouter & McHale, 1993). For example, the effects of a father's stressful job may depend on the extent to which his spouse is supportive and facilitates the father's withdrawal from family activities (Repetti, 1989). In dual-earner couples, the level of compensation a husband or wife is able to provide may be contingent on the demands associated with his or her own job. The role of work demands is better understood when the patterns of both parents' work conditions are explored and linked to family processes. One such family process, parental monitoringsupervising, controlling, or tracking children's behavior-is an important predictor of children's and adolescents' psychosocial functioning (e.g., Chilcoat & Anthony, 1996; Dishion & McMahon, 1998). As children move into middle childhood and increase their participation in extrafamilial activities (e.g., Little League, Scouts), monitoring via direct supervision may be more difficult for parents (Collins, Harris, & Susman, 1995). Consequently, an important goal for parents is to remain knowledgeable about children's daily lives (Crouter, Helms-Erikson, Updegraff, & McHale, 1999), despite the fact that direct surveillance is less feasible than during the preschool years. In the study presented here, we first typologized dual-earner couples according to the demands of both spouses' occupations in order to delineate common patterns of work demands. We next examined how dual-earner couples' knowledge of their school-aged children's daily experiences and activities differed as a function of their cluster membership (i.e., the work demands of both mothers and fathers). We also explored the possibility that the relationship between work demands and parental knowledge differed as a function of marital quality or the sex of the target children. WORK DEMANDS Evidence is accumulating that parents' daily work experiences have an impact on family functioning (Almeida, Maggs, & Galambos, 1993; Parcel & Menaghan, 1994). Consistent with an ecological perspective (Bronfenbrenner & Crouter, 1982; Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998) and the notion of spillover (Staines,1980), stressful job conditions (the focus of our study) have been associated with less positive family dynamics after work, including reduced time spent with children (Greenberger, O'Neil, & Nagel, 1994) and more frequent marital conflict (Bolger, DeLongis, Kessler, & Wethington, 1989). Repetti (1989, 1994; Repetti & Wood, 1997) proposed that short-term, job-related stress results in workers' withdrawing from family activities when they come home. In Repetti's study of male air traffic controllers, high-stress days at work were followed by decreases in marital anger and parent-child involvement, as well as increased withdrawal. …