10 Proven Ways to Balance Family and Work
Does it sometimes feel challenging to create a team approach at home?
Here are some words of wisdom from a post Catherine Aponte, a long-time ThirdPath community member, wrote that captures 10 strategies couples use to successfully navigate family alongside of two careers.
She based this post on a research study that was done with 47 middle-class, dual-earner couples to help identify key strategies for successfully managing family and work balance. Each strategy is right no target, and also described using the couples own words.
1. Valuing Family. Successful couples stress the importance of keeping family as their highest priority. They create family time such as “pizza night” on Friday, or bedtime stories every night. It is not uncommon for these couples to limit work hours… or make career changes… to keep family as the number one priority.
H (Husband): …Every night, one of us reads with our son for about 20 minutes.
W (Wife): …David was going to go to medical school…. creating eight-plus years of being an absentee father…. we said no…. we needed to pursue something else.
2. Striving for Partnership. Being partners means being equally valued.
H: …My job is both earning and caring, and so is hers.
H: …If I win and she loses, then we both lose.
W: …We continue to talk about career…where do we want to be?
3. Deriving Meaning From Work. Successful couples experience enjoyment and purpose from their careers and jobs.
W: …We both really like our jobs…they’re stressful at times, but we…feel good about what we are doing.
H: …I get a great deal of satisfaction from my job.
4. Maintaining Work Boundaries. Successful couples make a commitment to maintaining control over work, not allowing careers to dictate the pace of their lives.
W: …We both like our jobs, but, when it’s quitting time, we’re out of there.
W: …When you’re at home, you’re at home; and when you’re at work, you’re at work.
H: …We’ve always said “no” to jobs that required long hours…weekends, lots of overtime.
5. Focusing and Producing at Work. Being productive at work is important to successful couples. Setting limits on their careers has not adversely affected their productivity.
H: …We both pull our weight at [our] jobs. [No one] has felt we’re slacking off or getting off easy because we’ve got kids.
W: …I don’t mess around. When I’m there, I’m working.
6. Prioritizing Family Fun. Successful couples use play and family fun to relax, enjoy life, stay emotionally connected, and create balance in their lives.
H: …I think a lot of our family bonding revolves around these excursions, going on lots of hikes or bike trips…sometimes fishing, concerts…the three of us.
W: …Once in a while, we’ll just try and do stuff off the cuff; one night we had a camp night in front of the fireplace.
7. Taking Pride in Dual Earning. These couples believe dual earning is positive for all members of their family and do not accept negative societal message about their family arrangement.
W: …Of course [children] fulfill you, but they can only fulfill a certain part of you.
H: …One of the nicest gifts that Patty has ever given me is to go to work and to bring home a good income.
8. Living Simply. These couples consciously simplifying their lives.
W: …We don’t go out to eat. We don’t need cable. We don’t need to sit in front of the TV anyway.
H: …We don’t use credit cards. We can’t have fancy cars where the payments just eat you up.
9. Making Decisions Proactively. Being proactive in decision making is most important. Successful couples are vigilant in not allowing the pace of their lives control them.
W: …If you define success as what you do at work, then that is all you will do…if you define success as having a happy family and a happy marriage and [being] happy at work, then you make all those things happen.
H: …We talk a lot during the day…[about] anything from getting the oil changed in the car to who is bringing plates over to mom’s house. There’s not much I don’t know about.
10. Valuing Time. Successful couples try to remain aware of the value of time.
W: …I think you are almost forced to make better use of the time that you have together by the nature of the fact that you work.
H: …We try to do a lot of our [house] work during the week, so that the weekends are free.
To learn more about this study, find the full post on Psychology Today.
Listen to our recent Thursdays with ThirdPath live podcast to discover how you can strengthen your partnership at home as you navigate work and family. Our guests were Kate Mangino (author, Equal Partners) and Kristin Maschka (author, This is Not How I Thought it Would Be), two additional ThirdPath community members who are experts in helping couples share the mental load at home.