Keep calm and work from home: strategies used by dual-earner households with school-age children

Abstract

We examine how dual-earner couples with school-age children who worked from home during the COVID-19 lockdown adjusted to the changes it brought to their lives. To do so, we conducted a qualitative study of 28 dual-earner households who had at least one school-age child, resided in China, Iran, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, or the United States, and worked from home during the lockdown. In each household, we interviewed the parents (56 in total), and we asked at least one child to draw their work-from-home experience and narrate the drawing. Informed by resource-based work-home interface and family stress models, we outline the resources and demands generated by working at home as a family, as well as the strategies families employed to manage their collective work-from-home. Families adopted collaborative, attentive, and relational strategies to fit their demands and their resources, while using delegative and negligent strategies to manage their unmet demands. We extend the work-from-home scholarship to a collective level, and wed it with the family stress model to explain the dynamics of collective work-from-home. At a practical level, the strategies presented in our work can inform employers of dual-earner couples and families experiencing similar dynamics.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Mina Beigi: orcid.org/0000-0002-4866-7205

ORCID for Chira Tochia: orcid.org/0000-0001-8025-5991

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