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Work-family balance or work-family fit

As promised in the introduction, here the post on work-family or work-life balance. The concept of work-family or work-life balance covers our ability balance work and family or life responsibilities. For example, we have a full-time job and have to show up in the office from 9-5 Monday through Friday. We might be parents and also have to take care of our children. We have to drop them off at day care or school and if they are sick, we might have to stay home with them and are not able to show up in the office. Some of us also have to take care of aging parents and we might want to engage in our hobbies or volunteer activities. This means we all have different and at times competing responsibilities. The Covid-19 pandemic has been a recent event that pushed the issue of how to meet work and family obligations to the forefront again. School closures for example amplified the struggle for parents to meet work and family demands. At the same time, opportunities to work remotely supported some families to meet both work and family responsibilities. News outlets cover regularly the struggle to achieve work family balance or talk about the importance of work life balance for younger generations. Employers now offer work-life supports and try to meet employee’s demands for better work-life balance. These are great developments, which hopefully continue to lead to changes in public policy, workplace cultures, and community resources. And I think the idea of work-family or work-life balance might be misleading. According to the Cambridge dictionary, balance is “a situation where different things are given equal importance, or are considered or divided equally or fairly”. This fits to the image that comes to my mind when thinking about balance. I imagine equal weights, a seesaw balanced in the middle. This image can be limiting when thinking about our participation in work and the rest of life. Is the goal really to have a 50-50 balance between work and family roles? Should work and life have equal weight? And would this 50-50 balance be appropriate across our whole life course? And would it apply to individuals and families? When I talk and listen to families who care for a child with a disability, I hear that this balance can be easily pushed out of equilibrium when facing a crisis or when trying to manage day-to-day life even without a crisis. And I know that from my own life, there are different seasons and sometimes work might be 75% and other times family takes up 75% of my time. I therefore prefer integration and fit over balance. Trying to balance a lot of balls in the air can get us easily out of balance and overwhelmed but trying to fit pieces of a puzzle together can create a beautiful whole. At times in our life, we might prioritize our careers at other times we might focus more on our family responsibilities, depending on our own individual situations. Unfortunately, the puzzle pieces don’t always fit together. For example, the promotion at work would require more travel, but I have children, and I have to be at home every evening. This is challenging for most parents and families but caring for a child with a disability can add some additional challenges to the mix. This is called exceptional care responsibilities, and I will write more about this in my next post.