We were all in it together: Managing work from home as dual-earner households with school-age children

We examine how professional 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 that had at least one school-age child, resided in China, Iran, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, or the United States, and worked from home during their local lockdown period. In each household, we interviewed the parents (56 total), and we asked at least one child to draw their perception of their parents' work-from-home experience and narrate the drawing (31 total). Informed by work-home interface and family stress scholarships, 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. We extend work-from-home scholarship beyond the individual level by accounting for the roles of all collective members in the work-from-home experience. We complement the research that has studied individual- and couple-level work-family strategies by theorizing the supportive, attentive, relational, delegative, and compromising strategies families adopted to generate changes in resource-demand dynamics. In doing so, we introduce family adaptive capability for the context of adjusting to work from home and define it as a collective ability to initiate strategies to meet remote work demands with resources generated from the new work arrangement. At a practical level, the strategies presented in our work can inform employers of dual-earner couples and families experiencing similar dynamics.

Automated summary

We conducted a qualitative study to examine how professional dual-earner couples, with school-age children, adjusted to the changes brought by working from home during the COVID-19 lockdown. By interviewing parents and asking children to draw their perception of their parents' work-from-home experience, we identified the resources, demands, and strategies employed by families to manage collective work from home. Our research extends the existing work-from-home scholarship by considering the roles of all family members and theorizes the supportive, attentive, relational, delegative, and compromising strategies families adopt to generate changes in resource-demand dynamics. We introduce the concept of family adaptive capability, which refers to the collective ability of families to initiate strategies to meet remote work demands with resources generated from the new work arrangement. The strategies presented in our work can be helpful for employers of dual-earner couples and families experiencing similar dynamics.