Pew Research Center published a study last week on how families with two full-time working parents balance their home and work lives. The study included 2,242 working parents in America.
According to U.S. Census Bureau data analyzed in the study, the number of families with two full-time providers has increased through the years. As of 2025, 52% of different-sex couples both work full time. A decade ago it was 46% and in 1975 it was 31%.
The toll working full time takes
The study found that 83% of families with two full-time workers believe the arrangement is beneficial to their family finances, while only 19% of families with a dad who works full-time and a mom who stays at home said the same. But despite the benefits of higher income, there are challenges that come along with two parents working.
In a survey of parents who work full time and either work from home “all/most of the time,” “some of the time” or “rarely/never,” close to 50% of each group agreed with these statements:
- Balancing their work and family responsibilities is difficult
- Having a job makes it harder for them to be a good parent
- They’ve felt like they couldn’t give 100% at home because they were juggling work and family responsibilities
“It turns out that parents who work from home and those who don’t are about equally likely to experience difficulty,” the study said.
Drivers of imbalance
From many of the survey responses, it was apparent that working moms “have a harder time finding balance” than working dads, per the study.
Dan Carlson, director of the Council on Contemporary Families and an assistant professor of family, health and policy in the Department of Family and Consumer Studies at the University of Utah, added some insight to the findings.
“It has become increasingly difficult for a single earner to support a nuclear family and achieve a middle-class lifestyle,” he said. “To keep up, women — mothers especially — now work for pay.”
But Carlson said that even though it’s now widely accepted that “women have as much right to a career as men,” it’s not believed “to the same degree that men should take on domestic responsibilities to compensate for women’s time in paid work.”
This imbalance, he said, “is part of the reason many parents experience work-family conflict.”
The responses in the study sang a similar tune. It was much more common to say that mothers did more parenting tasks and household chores than fathers among families with two full-time working parents.
One mom quoted by Pew said: “I’m supposed to work like I don’t have kids and supposed to parent like I don’t have a job.”
Finding balance
“There is no self-help book that can fix this problem,” Carlson said. He believes the solution will be found through cultural and structural shifts. “First, we need to lower expectations on what it means to be a good parent.”
Carlson said the standards for parenting increased around the same time mothers entered the workforce.
“Parenting has become increasingly intensive and this isn’t good for parents and may not even be all that great for kids. Mothers today spend more time caring for their children than they did in the 1960s and 1970s when far fewer mothers worked for pay. Dads are doing three times as much childcare while working just slightly fewer hours. Everyone is doing more work and care and that is leading to burnout,” he said.
According to Carlson, changing the culture around working and parenting as well as providing more resources for working parents will lead to better work-life balance.
The study asked working parents what workplace benefits and resources are available to them, and how helpful they would be.
- 84% said paid parental, medical or family leave separate from paid time off would be extremely/very helpful to them, but only 50% said it’s available to them.
- 71% said flexibility to choose when they work their required hours would be extremely/very helpful to them, but only 25% said it’s available to them.
- 71% said flexibility to work from home when needed would be extremely/very helpful to them, but only 23% said it’s available to them.
- 43% said onsite childcare at their workplace would be extremely/very helpful to them, but only 6% said it’s available to them.
“Changing the culture of parenting aside, the other thing we can do is help parents to be there for their kids by challenging ideal worker culture,” Carlson said. “Our business environment still operates under the assumption that workers have no family responsibilities and though that may have been true when the breadwinner-homemaker family was dominant, it is definitely not true today.”