Mothers’ work-family strain in single and couple parent families: the role of job characteristics and supports
Jennifer Baxter and Michael Alexander
Australian Institute of Family Studies
Contact Email:   jennifer.baxteraifs.gov.au

For parents there can be negative aspects of how work ‘spills over’ to family and how family ‘spills over’ to work. This analysis focuses on these aspects of work-family strain for mothers of young children, in particular exploring how work-family strain differs for single and couple mothers. While there has been increased focus on the work-family strains of mothers, less is known about single mothers and their experience of work-family strain. We might expect that single mothers would have more difficulty in combining work and family, given that they do not have the support of a partner to assist with childrearing responsibilities.

This paper explores the relationships between work-family strain and a number of demographic, employment and supports factors. We examine whether there are distributional differences, such that single mothers have different types of jobs or different levels of supports than do couple mothers. We also consider whether associations between the measured factors and work-family strain are different according to family form; that is, whether certain factors make the work-family balance significantly worse or better for single mothers than is for otherwise similar couple-parent mothers.

We use the 2004 Growing up in Australia: the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). This dataset contains detailed family and child data for around 10,000 families, all with at least one child aged 5 or under. With such a large sample size, the number of single mothers is sufficiently large to enable more analyses than is often possible from survey data.

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