Introduction

In research and public discourse, the issue of the relationship between work and family life has largely focused on working parents, and the stress that they may experience from "balancing" their roles. There has been very little Australian qualitative research that explores the experience of family life for working families, particularly from the perspective of children.

This paper reports preliminary results from new qualitative research undertaken by the Australian Institute of Family Studies with 69 parents and 71 children from 47 families in Melbourne. In-depth one-on-one interviews about work and family were conducted with parents and their children aged 8 years and over. Among other questions, children were asked what they knew about their parents’ work, and about their perceptions of the impact of parental employment decisions on the family’s life. Parents were asked about many issues including their employment decisions and how they were influenced by their family responsibilities, and about the amount and nature of the time that they spent with their children

The research aimed to explore the way that children experience family life across a range of circumstances, with particular emphasis on their perceptions of the impact of the employment choices - or imperatives - of their parents on their lives.

Preliminary results from the research, particularly focusing on the responses of the children in the sample, suggest that it is not whether and how much parents work, but how they work and how they parent that matters. "Time" was a major and recurring theme in the interviews with children and parents, but the many meanings attached to the concept of time draw attention to the complex interaction between what parents do and how they do it. This paper reports in particular on the way that the theme of time emerged in the interviews, and considers how we might enrich current research and public discourse or conversation by thinking about the way the concept of time is used to over-simplify what is a complex issue.

A broad range of families took part in the study. Families were initially recruited from:

• primary and secondary schools in inner, northern, and eastern Melbourne
• workplaces, including a state government department, a large city legal firm, and two large public hospitals
• the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers' Union; and the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Workers' Union
• a community legal service

All families participating were encouraged to invite any friends or acquaintances to take part in the study. In this way a non-random sample of 47 families was recruited. From those 47 families 69 parents and 71 children were interviewed.

There were 18 single parent families, and 29 two-parent families. Of the single-parent families, 8 of the parents were in full-time employment, 7 were in part-time employment and 3 had no regular paid work. Of the two-parent families, 8 were families with both parents in full-time work, 16 had one parent in full-time work and the other in part-time work. In the remaining families, both parents worked part-time, or one had no regular paid employment. These classifications represent the families’ current employment patterns. In reality, most of the families have had different work patterns across the lives of the children, so current patterns of employment do not necessarily reflect the children’s experiences for their whole lives, or even the greater part of their lives.

Table 1: Family structure, employment patterns and ages of children

Most of the parents interviewed in the study were born in Australia (n= 55), with the remaining 14 born in South Africa, Italy, Fiji, England, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Egypt, Uganda, Vietnam and the Philippines. Only one interview was conducted with the assistance of an interpreter.

Parents ranged in age from 31 to 58, while children interviewed ranged in age from 8 to 21. 40 of the children were male, 31 were female.

Table 2: Age and Gender Distribution of Children Interviewed

The education background and range of occupations of parents reflected the breadth of the sampling procedure. While half the sample had either degree or post-graduate qualifications, 16 parents had completed Year 12 or lower, and 14 had trade, certificate or diploma qualifications.

Table 3: Highest Level of Educational Qualification of Parents interviewed

The range of occupations which parents were employed in was similarly broad, including professionals such as social workers, teachers, social scientists; and accountants; para-professionals, such as nurses and child care workers; tradespersons and apprentices, such as carpenters and cooks; clerks such as secretaries, receptionists, office administration workers; labourers; and machinists and drivers.

Just under half of the sample (21 of 44) had a family income of over $52,000 per year. The remaining families were earning less than $52,000 a year, with 6 families earning below $16,000 per year. Parents were also asked about how they felt they were managing financially. In the income categories over $26,000, the most common response was "doing alright", except for the over $78,000 category where the same number said they were living comfortably. In the income groups Below $26,000, more families described themselves as "just about getting by" and "finding it quite difficult".

(Table over page.)

Table 4: Estimated total household income and subjective financial status

The interview schedule used in the present research was based on Galinsky’s (1999) original one-on-one interview schedule, but incorporating aspects of the quantitative questionnaire used in her survey of nationally representative samples of parents and children. These questions and themes were then restructured and represented from an Australian perspective, with some additional material added, including some questions taken from a study called "The Child’s Eye View of Family Life" conducted by AIFS in the mid 1980s (Ochiltree and Amato, 1985).

Semi-structured interviews were conducted in the homes of the families in all but four cases, and were usually conducted in the evenings. Interviews with each adult took approximately one hour, and interviews with each child took approximately half an hour. In most cases both parents agreed to take part in the study. In most cases any children aged over 8 in the family took part in the study. Families were paid $50 for their participation.

The adult interview schedule covered the following areas:

• Parent’s Employment — current paid work undertaken; reasons for working; hours worked; preferred hours to work; enjoyment of work; work as job or career; how decisions were made by the individual and/or within a couple about who would work, and how work would be managed; whether the way the respondent thinks about work changed after having children.
• Family’s Typical Daily Routine, particularly before and after work
• Experiences of Using Non-parental care — current; prior to school entry; when children are sick; during school holidays; the respondent’s sense of children’s views about such care.
• Time spent with children — everyday activities undertaken; organized versus hanging around time; how much parent knows about child’s life; ease of focusing on child; whether parent has enough time with children;
• Parenting Self-Efficacy — whether and when parent feels he/she is doing a good job; whether and when parent feels he/she is doing a bad job; impact of work on such feelings.
• Children’s Knowledge of Parents’ work — whether parent talks with children; whether it’s important that children know what parents do or why parents work; whether children think that parents like their work and whether it matters what they think.
• Parent’s Working practices — bringing work home; rules for working at home; travel for work; whether children wait because of work; whether parent is distracted by work at home; whether children are aware of a parent’s bad or good days at work and what they do differently.
• Perceptions about Impact of work on family — whether working has an impact on children, in general and in own case; what "balance" means and whether this is how the parent thinks of it; whether children or parents have missed out on anything because of parent’s work; parent’s own experiences in family of origin.
• Final overview questions — "If your family had all the money it would ever need, would you want to change anything about your work?"; advice to other working parents; what parent wishes someone had told them.

The children’s interview schedule covered the following areas:

• Family’s Typical Daily Routine — morning and afternoon routine; everyday activities; level of responsibility; whether parents’ work status affects responsibility.
• Children’s Knowledge of Parents’ Work — do parents work; do parents talk about work; what children know about jobs; do parents like working; visits to workplaces; do parents work too much, too little or the right amount.
• Experience of Non-parental Care — experiences including pre-school, before and after school care, care when child is sick and holiday care; what carers should be like.
• Time Spent with Parents — activities undertaken with each parent; whether each parent spends too much or too little time with child; favorite family activities; organized activities versus hanging around time; "being there"; parents ability to focus; parents helping; how much parent knows about child’s life; parents involvement in child’s life at school and in extra-curricula activities.
• Parents’ Working Practices — whether and how parents work at home; think about work at home; travel for work; awareness of parents’ bad or good days and what they do differently.
• Perceived Impact of work on Family — perceived consequences of parents’ working; best/worst thing about having working parent/s; good or bad that parents work; differences that might follow from different circumstances.
• Overview question — "all the money in the world" question.
• Child’s Future plans — future career; family plans; work and family plan.

The finding reported in this paper will focus mainly on the responses of the children, who, it should be remembered, are aged 8 years and over. While some of the families in the sample had younger children, the research focuses necessarily on the experience of family life for children aged from the middle primary school years to adulthood.

Children were asked specifically how they felt about their parents’ working hours and whether their parents spent enough time with them. All potential patterns of employment and satisfaction with family time were represented in the sample. There were parents working full-time whose children felt that they worked about the right amount of time, and with whom they spent enough time. There were parents working part-time whose children said that they worked too much, and with whom the children would like to spend more time. Between these two extremes, all other possible combinations were represented.

In terms of hours worked, more than two thirds of the parents were described by their children as working about the right amount of time. Of those children with 2 parents working full-time in this sample, nearly all described their parents as working about the right amount of time. In two-thirds of single-parent families where the parent worked full-time, the children described it as the right amount.

When asked the reasons for their judgements, most of the children referred to the direct impacts that they perceived parents’ working hours had on them, such as whether they had to go to after-school care or not. Regardless of their overall judgement, most of the children talked about the impact that work has on the time that parents spend with them.

This was the first time in the interview that the notion of having enough time was introduced, and it was in relation to the working hours of parents, so those children who mentioned time spent with parents as an issue were raising it without prompting from the interview.

Some of the older children supported their opinion that a parent worked too much because of concern about how stressed or tired parents were.

A number of children explicitly referred to unpaid domestic labour in their judgement of their mothers’ working hours, either in terms of what she does, or what she should do.

Even allowing for some concern about difficulties experienced by parents, it is clear that most of the children in this sample evaluated this question from the perspective of how their parents’ working hours impact directly on them. This is a naturally self-centred view. Even so, their evaluations are not just about the number of hours that parents work. Children appear to be reflecting on their relationships with their parents. Some said this quite explicitly when explaining that the hours their parents work are alright "because it doesn’t impact on me". They seem to be saying that the number of hours that their parents work is not the most important determinant of their relationship with their parent. The children appear to interpret a question that on the surface is just about time spent at work in terms of a global impact on their lives.

Further evidence that many children judge parents’ work hours by their direct impact on the children’s own lives came from some of the children whose parents worked irregular hours.

The lack of a strong and direct correspondence between time worked and satisfaction with relationships with parents for many children was further evidenced in responses to a question about how the children felt about the amount of time that their parents are spending with them. The responses were divided roughly evenly between those saying that they wished their parents spent more time with them and those who said their parents currently spent enough time with them. It is notable that the children who talked about wanting more time together tended to speak of wanting "a bit more" or "a little more". When asked about what they might do with the parent in the extra time they would have together, most of the children talked about activities such as going shopping, going out for lunch, playing ping-pong and chess, swimming, going to the park, and talking. In general the children talked about these everyday activities — not extravagant holidays or special outings.

Parents' judgements about whether they had enough time with their children were also not necessarily directly related to hours of employment. Some parents working full-time were very satisfied with the amount of time they had, while some parents working part-time felt that they would like more time with their children. Just under a third of the parents overall said that they would like more time with their children. Of those parents working full-time, about two thirds said that they’d like more time with their children.

The perceptions of children and their parents often differed on this question of time spent together. Fewer than half of the parents of children who had expressed a desire for more time with them had the same opinion as their children. A similar number of parents felt that they didn’t have enough time with their children, although their children said that they spent enough time together. Part-time working parents also expressed different views to their children. Once again all combinations of hours wokred and satisfaction were observed.

Parents also talked about the kind of time that they would like to spend with children. They were strongly in favour of having time that was spent in directed or focused activity, and time that was just spent hanging around. Most parents considered that their children needed both kinds of time, and that one could not necessarily have one without the other. Some parents talked about the differences between their children, and themselves, in terms of personality and preferences for time spent together. Some parents also talked about wanting to have more one-on-one time with each of their children. While the term "quality time" was not used by many parents, there was no other term that emerged as particularly popular either. One father talked about "Isolating ourselves from other things. So I can concentrate on being with them."

Some parents talked about the nature of the time they spend with their children being negatively influence by the need to meet the extra-curricula commitments that their children have. One mother who deliberately contains her working hours to within school hours considered the time spent with her children to be sufficient in quantity, but not ideal in nature.

Some parents considered that as long as there was some shared enjoyable family time, the fact that at other times it might not feel like enough time was acceptable.

Some parents expressed the idea of certain everyday events being an essential part of family life and considered their absence as clear indication that something was not right about the relationship between work and family.

While actual hours worked did not necessarily relate directly to feelings about time spent with children, many parents talked about the value to them of any job flexibility they had, which allowed them to spend critical time with children. Often they referred to themselves as "lucky" that they had the flexibility to be able to respond to special circumstances or demands. For some parents, there was no day-to-day flexibility, and this seemed to influence their feelings about their job more than the actual number of hours they worked.

Many of the parents in our sample had made significant changes to the way that they work during the lifetime of their children. Some of these changes were induced by circumstances, such as marriage breakdown, but many were changes that parents made in an effort to better manage work and family issues. Some parents had changed jobs to reduce pressure, although they lost work status and income. Some rejected jobs that involved too much travelling. Some parents who had chosen shift work as an ideal arrangement when their children were young because it meant that children were always cared for by parents, had re-evaluated the suitability of such work as their children got older.

For most parents the theme underlying their change was a search for more flexibility to allow them to meet family obligations. This increased flexibility was associated with reduced levels of stress for many parents.

Of course, there were some parents who expressed dissatisfaction with their working hours, but who said that they could not afford to change. About a quarter of the parents indicated that the hours that they were currently working were not their preferred hours. All but two of these parents said that they would like to spend more time with their children. Some of these parents said that their jobs could not be done part-time, others worked jobs that were only done as shifts, or long hours, but for most of these parents the financial need to keep working meant that they continued despite their feelings of dissatisfaction.

Not all parents were reducing hours or down-shifting the kind of jobs they do. There were a number of parents in the sample who were increasing their hours of work as their children were getting older. Some parents were also studying with a view to future full-time employment or career changes as they perceived their children becoming more independent. Some talked about working so that they would have a broader experience of the world which they could share with their children as they became more independent. The parents in this study reveal what a dynamic process the navigating of work and family is, and how many will make changes to their employment status in response to the perceived needs of family life.

It is generally considered that a family that is functioning well will be characterized by positive interactions between family members. One of the consequences of a relationship with not enough interaction, particularly of a kind that supports communication, might be that parents know little of their children’s lives. In the interviews children were asked whether they thought their parents knew much about their lives. Most kids said that their parents know "a fair bit" — often described as as much as the child wants to tell them! The younger children in the sample who were in middle primary years were more inclined to believe that what their parents know about their lives is directly influenced by the amount of time that parents work, however a couple of children attribute their parents’ level of awareness to other factors.

Once again, these responses highlight the idea that factors other than work will influence the parent-child relationship. The older children in particular said that parents would not know any more if they were working less "because I wouldn’t tell them about the other little bit."

For the younger children in middle primary years, the perceived impact of work seemed particularly to relate to access that parents had to their school day, including this as a key time of access to children’s friends. This was reflected in responses to questions about whether parents participated in children’s school life. It was clearly the case that many children in primary school prefer to have parents participate actively in their school lives. Some of the younger children who were interviewed expressed this directly, and openly acknowledged that they felt bad if parents did not participate. Some parents were aware of their younger children’s feelings, and tried to respond to their children with extra efforts to attend.

By the time they were in late primary school, some of the children were expressing more ambivalence. Whereas many of the older children said that they don’t mind if their parents can’t come to activities and events at school, they usually still indicated that they preferred them to come. Older children were also more likely to express the view that perhaps it was not appropriate for parents to come to secondary school. For ambivalence about work preventing her parents from coming to school events, the following response from a 12-year old girl is perhaps the most extreme example.

The reason that children might like their parents to be present at school events was clear from several responses. One older boy could articulate the benefit that can flow from parents being at events.

This theme of the significance of parents sharing their children’s notable events came out in another way also. Although their parents couldn’t come to school assemblies, several children from different families described the way that their parents responded to success that they learnt about later, or major events happening.

Whether they have consciously planned it or not, these families have developed strategies to deal with the restriction they experience from working, and the children seem to appreciate it. Parents may not have a physical presence, but they acknowledge the importance of the events in their children’s lives. Of course, part of the success of strategies like this depends on having a reasonable level of communication in place so that children tell parents about events as they happen.

As a final perhaps cautionary note to the potential benefits of parental involvement in children’s school lives, one older child made the extremely astute observation that it was not just that his mother helped out at school that was important. Clearly it is not sufficient to say simply that parents should help out at school.

Responses to this question suggest clearly that it is important to children that parents share significant moments in their lives. In middle primary years, children seem to feel a need to have parents physically present to witness key events and participate in activities. Older children seem to want an acknowledgment of the importance of the events and can accept that parents will not always be physically present.

A lack of understanding of the conditions of some parents’ employment was displayed in the responses of some children who expressed the view that parents could come if they really wanted to. They do not necessarily understand the lack of flexibility that many parents experience in their workplace, instead interpreting parents’ failure to come as a lack of interest or lack of will. Younger children in particular may not realise that their parents, as the power brokers in the home, do not have that degree of power in their role as worker.

While they had preferences for how much time they spent with parents, and the nature of the time spent with parents, none of the children thought that parents should be present in their lives all the time. Virtually all the children accepted the need for and/or desire of parents to work, and all could identify the benefits of parental employment, particularly in the case of their own experience.

Most children mentioned that their parents’ working brought money that paid for the homes they lived in, the food they eat, the schools they go to (for some), and other things that are bought for them. Some children talked about positive consequences related to their every-day lives, such as enjoying being babysat by a grandmother, or having the house to themselves after school before parents came home from work. Some children again talked about lack of time spent with their parents as a negative consequence of their parents working.

Some of the older children talked about other less tangible outcomes of their parents’ working such as confidence and responsibility gained from not having parents around all the time, learning about what work means, and that one has to work in order to be able to provide things for your family.

When asked whether parents’ working was good or bad for children in a general sense, nearly all the children responded sensibly with conditional statements such as "it depends". Nearly all the responses referred to the financial benefits that working brings, but also to the potential cost of children not having enough time with their parents. The fact that the children in our sample were rarely overtly critical of their parents’ employment choices when asked reasonably direct questions about their own experiences, may reflect an unwillingness to criticise. If so, questions expressed in fairly general terms may be more revealing of the overall evaluation of the impact of parents’ work on children. Time is a strong theme again, with nearly all the children referring to the impact of work on time spent with children. While these children have a general acceptance of their individual circumstances, and work is not perceived as an evil, these children are still clearly indicating that they like and want to spend time with parents.

When the responses of some children are considered in order of chronological age, it is clear that the same themes are being presented, although the expression of them becomes more sophisticated.

Based on the future intentions of the children interviewed for this study, the issue of how families navigate work and family is going to remain high on the agenda in the future. The children were asked whether they had plans for future employment and family.

Responses to these questions revealed particularly fascinating insights, because they don’t require a child to criticise their parents’ own choices, but they do allow them to incorporate their evaluation of those choices into their own intentions. It is notable that nearly all the children in this sample say that when they have children they intend to work. They clearly have a sense of the personal importance of working. More than this, however, they have very clear ideas about how they want to work. Most of the children, both boys and girls, say that they will work not at all or part-time for at least the early part of their children's lives, perhaps returning to full-time work as their children get older. Nearly all the children referred to being able to spend enough time with their children. Supporting the earlier observation about the centrality of school as a key access point for the middle primary years, several children mentioned being able to pick up children from school at least some of the time as a primary aim of any work schedule.

One child talked about monitoring the impact of work on her children. She referred also to the differences in the way that children can respond to parents working full-time.

Some children were quite explicit about planning the way they would work when they had a family by considering what they liked or disliked about their own experiences.

These children are fairly united in their view of the ideal way to work and have children, in that they expect to work and to have time with their children. Their attempt to quantify the way that they will achieve this goal is usually referred to in terms of working part-time. Any more specific attempts to quantify these things can be wildly inaccurate and give a reminder that measuring such concepts with children should be undertaken cautiously. Sometimes it is necessary to interpret what they say. Consider this child’s view of the cost of bringing up a family, and the impact it has on her judgment of whether her father works too much, too little or about the right amount.

She has no idea of the real cost, but she knows it is a lot and that is what she means by her attempt to quantify.

In drawing conclusions from this research, it must be remembered that all the children who were interviewed were aged 8 and over. This research cannot comment on the experiences of families with only younger children. It should also be noted that very few of the parents worked extremely long hours, with only a couple of families having a parent who reported working more than 50 hours per week.

Having talked to 71 children from 47 families, one of the clearest conclusions to be drawn is that parents may gain new insights into the way that they are navigating work and family if they talk to their children. Children have opinions about whether the amount of time that parents can spend with them feels like enough, and they have opinions about what they would like to do in the time that parents are available to them. These opinions are not easily predicted by the hours that parents work. It is clear that in this sample of children aged 8 and over, children by and large accept their parents’ work status, but even when judging parents’ work hours as "alright’, they also express a need to have parents available, especially for particular kinds of time. The variety in the patterns of the children’s responses to the questions about how much parents work and how much time they spend with children reveals the potential harm that could result from reducing analysis of the work-family relationship to purely the number of hours worked by parents.

When there is discussion about parental employment and children, it is often assumed that time itself is the key variable — that more time is better, and that parents and children should all want more time together. This research suggests that children and parents both use the concept of time to refer to much more than either just the quantity of time, or what they do in the time they share. Neither parents nor children report that work has a negative influence on every aspect of family life or parent/child interaction. Very few of the children in our sample reported that they had trouble getting parents to focus on them. Very few reported having to wait for parents because of their work. Very few reported that their parents worked at home in such a way that the children felt they were unavailable to them. Similarly very few parents reported that work interfered with their capacity to pay attention to children, nor did many parents report work as a contentious presence in the home — at least as far as the children were concerned. Both parents and children did talk about other factors that influence the relationship between work and family. For example, some parents talked about needing greater flexibility at work in order to exert more control over the impact that work may have on their capacity to be available to their children.

The way that parents and children talked about work and family in this research is consistent with both models of work and family interaction, and models of parent-child interactions. There are many aspects of a job that impact on how parents feel about working. Galinsky’s model emphasizes some of these factors, including job demands, job quality and support at work. Other factors which Galinsky acknowledges but gives less emphasis to, such as how much parents are paid, and what kinds of family friendly initiatives are available within the work place, also appear to be important. All of these aspects of work can affect family functioning and parents’ relationships with children.

Within families there are internal and external factors that will have an effect on how work and family impact on each other. Children have different needs that vary with their temperament and developmental stage. Parents differ in their capacities to provide the different kinds of attention and interaction that children need. Some of this difference in capacity comes from individual personality and adjustment, and some from external resources such as financial capacity and social supports. Some comes from differences in parenting skills, which may be enhanced through practice, effort or training. Some parenting roles require continuous quantities of time, and some parenting roles require regular commitments of time. Some parents in the study talked about being "better" at focused activity rather than time spent "dagging around", and vice versa. Work may impact both positively or negatively on parents’ internal and external resources, thus affecting their capacity to parent well, but the effect of work will also be mediated by these same internal and external resources. For every parent and every child in each family, the patterns will be slightly different, so there will never be a one-solution-fits-all answer to managing work and family.

The question that needs to be addressed is whether the family is functioning well or not, and there is every indication from most of the families interviewed for this study that it is possible to function well in a wide variety of circumstances. The children who were interviewed revealed themselves to be very adaptable. Some of the parents are having to compromise in terms of their ideals about how they would work and parent, but, even so, most of the parents in this sample are actively pursuing strategies that make their families function well with the constraints that they face. The fact that parents and children can adapt so well to less-than-ideal circumstances is something that is not acknowledged enough by society or within families. Many parents need to be less critical of themselves, and feel less guilty about the way that they are navigating work and family. However, the reality of this adaptability should not be used as an excuse for society to avoid making circumstances easier for families wherever it can. We should also bear in mind that parents who are not coping with these challenges are unlikely to have volunteered to take part in a study such as this, so this study cannot articulate their needs.

Parents should talk with their children, but all of us should be very careful about how we use the concept of time when we talk about work and family, both in the public discussion we have, and in the private conversations we have in our families. Children will mean different things when they talk about wanting more time with parents. Some will mean that they need someone to drive them somewhere, some will want to avoid after-school care, some will want to have the opportunity to have friends over, and some will mean that they want to spend more time talking and playing because it is fun. All of these may be legitimate desires and parents will need to decide whether they need to change the way they work to deal with them. In general, children in this sample expressed a desire for more family time to do more of the everyday things that they already find enjoyable. A few children who say that they want more time with a parent may mean that they are not happy with their family life. If the latter is true, then work may be one of many variables that is causing this feeling, but it is unlikely to be the only one, and it may not be about the number of hours that parents work. Some of the children in this sample were also coping with significant changes to family structure, and issues of time for these children often related to time spent with separated parents or re-partnered parents.

This research cannot give any answers to questions of children's outcomes. Children may not like homework supervision that a parent at home after school provides, but such monitoring and supervision may help them in the long-term. Similarly, an older child may not like having to be at home alone after school, but may gain independence and confidence through the experience. While it cannot comment on outcomes, this research can provide a guide to the kinds of questions that parents should ask themselves, and should ask their children, when evaluating the current state of family functioning. It is notable that all the parents who participated in this research are responding to the issue of how they manage work and family responsibilities in an active way. Many parents had developed strategies to improve the quality of family functioning. Some of these strategies involved changing jobs, cutting back hours, or making use of flexible conditions of employment, while some were related to parenting itself and how life at home is managed. The fact that there is such a lively discourse about work and family in both the media and the community reflects the fact that parents are aware of the issues. However, this research encourages us to include children in that conversation. To do this we need to reframe the way that we talk about family and work with "time" as only one of the critical factors that influence quality of family life, rather than using the concept of time as a summary for many factors. By doing this it should be possible to enrich debate, and make it easier for families to find solutions to their particular challenges.

The issue of how to label the process of what it is that parents are doing when they make decisions about employment was raised with parents in this study. Parents were asked how they thought about the process, and whether the word "balancing" captured that process for them. Most of the parents that were interviewed in this study spontaneously talked about balancing work and family. Those who did not still tended to endorse it as the best option. A few mentioned juggling, and one talked about a jigsaw.

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