How Your Race Plays Into Beliefs on Work-Life Balance

Parents who work full-time are used to juggling deadlines and school drop-offs— but not everyone views the difficulty level of such a balancing act the same way. And according to the results of a new Pew Research Center survey, there’s a clear racial divide, with white parents more likely than those who are nonwhite to say that it’s hard.

The gap is largest between fathers, with 57 percent of white working fathers saying it’s difficult to balance everything, compared with 44 percent of nonwhite dads. As for working moms, 65 percent of white mothers say it’s hard to do it all, while only 52 percent of nonwhite mothers who work say the same.

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The survey, conducted between Sept. 15 and Oct. 13, asked 1,807 U.S. parents with children under 18 about how working mothers and fathers shared the load at home. It found that in nearly half of two-parent households — 46 percent — both parents work full-time, up significantly from 31 percent in 1970, while the number of families in which only the dad works full-time has declined, to 26 percent, compared with 46 percent in 1970. Other findings: Even in households in which both parents work, 54 percent say that Mom does more at home (though the specific perceptions, unsurprisingly, vary by gender); and working mothers (60 percent) are a bit more likely than fathers (52 percent) to say it’s difficult to balance career and family.

But perhaps most interestingly are the racial differences — similar to a recent finding by a Yahoo Parenting survey, which found that white moms (90 percent) feel more judged on their parenting skills than moms of other races, particularly black moms (76 percent).

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In her New York Times essay “What Black Moms Know,” Ylonda Gault Caviness, author of Child, Please, wrote about the cultural divide between black and white parents, which may serve to explain some of the percentage gaps in both of the aforementioned issues.

“One thing that makes it easier for us is that, unlike many white women, most black women in America come from a long line of mothers who worked outside the home and have long been accustomed to navigating work and family,” she wrote. “My mama worked, as did her mama and her mama before that. According to the University of Maryland sociologist Bart Landry, the author of Black Working Wives: Pioneers of the American Family Revolution, black middle-class wives, long before the feminist movement of the 1960s and ’70s, rejected the cult of domesticity for a threefold commitment to family, career, and community. These families ‘ushered in a more egalitarian era’ and a lifestyle their white counterparts adopted decades later.”

In other words, Gault Caviness tells Yahoo Parenting, working moms “is an accepted part of our culture — and not just in black poor families but middle class too. … So there’s a different expectation level.” If you’re not expecting anything different, she posits — and working or not working is not based on preference but need — then perhaps you’re less likely to feel burdened by it all.

The sense of ease among nonwhite parents is not all that hard to believe for Philip Cohen, a sociologist with the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland, who has extensively studied the division of labor within families. “It is a long-standing observation that black couples have a more equal division of household labor between husbands and wives than white couples do,” he tells Yahoo Parenting. “So the pattern is not surprising. It makes sense that when household labor is more equally shared, the balance is easier to strike.”

And Roberta Coles, a sociologist at Marquette University who focuses on race and family, tells Yahoo Parenting that she can only speculate on the reasons for Pew’s race-based findings, at least when it comes to black versus white. “African-Americans, on average, have higher poverty and lower level types of jobs (such that perhaps when they leave the workplace at night, they no longer have work responsibilities), higher religiosity, and are twice as likely to live in extended-family households,” she says. “All of these things can make caretaking easier — job responsibilities that don’t seep into your home life; other family members who are present to help take care of the kids; higher expectations for and longer life experience with family caretaking responsibilities generally, such as having to watch out for a sibling or [children] take care of Grandma.”

Another possibility, Coles says, is that maybe “whites feel freer to say they are stressed by [parenting]” while nonwhites do not.

This rings true to Gault Caviness, who says that black women, in particular, can be stoic, which is also why they may feel less judged than white moms. “There’s this thing with black moms, and it’s not necessarily healthy,” the author says, “which is that we’re so strong, we just hold it all inside, almost to a pathological extent. We feel a pressure to uphold that and to make sure we’re not too vulnerable. So even if we do feel that, do we let it show? Probably not.”

Photo: Ariel Skelley/Getty Images