Satisfaction with Work-Family Balance for Parents of EarlyAdolescents Compared to Parents of Younger Children

Abstract

This paper explores aspects of how parents of young teenagers experience balancing work and family demands, compared to parents of younger children. It uses data from Waves 1 and 3 of the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey and from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey (TUS) 1997. It assesses whether satisfaction with work-family balance differs for parents of adolescent children compared with parents of younger children, the extent to which parents of adolescents use non-parental child care, experience difficulty in finding child care or provide personal supervision of their children after school, and whether satisfaction with work-family balance of parents with adolescents is affected by access to family- friendly workplace measures.