The experience of combination of work and family in employed mothers with younger children

Abstract

This article focuses on the experience of employed women's lives from the combination of native roles with employee roles. The required data were collected through in-depth interviews with 28 married women with children lower 10 years of age in Tehran city in 2017. The findings are in the form of two core categories, eight sub-themes and 19 concepts that have been extracted from 580 words. The findings showed that employed mothers, due to having at least one child less than 10 years of age who needed more care and support. Their common sense of combination of work and family is perceived conflict between work and family. In this situation, their understanding of the family environment is relatively supportive; the workplace is indifferent and contradictory, the community environment is the low social support. The strategies women use to reduce conflicts are mostly individual, and the result of this is a form of compulsory adaptation with the under categories of the feeling of sacrifice (self or spouse and child), double-effort to compensate for remaining work, reduce fertility, and reduce responsible social responses. Despite the pleasure of employed mothers to feel empowered and helpful because of multiple roles, less supportive structures make them less likely to benefit from out-of-home employment. The study's results are widely used in policy making to facilitate the combination of work and home affairs and increase the participation of women in economic activities and promote the country's development goals.

Keywords

• role conflict
• employment
• motherhood
• fertility
• undesirable social adaptation