Mothers' work-to-family strain in single and couple parent families: the role of job characteristics and supports

For parents there can be negative aspects of how work 'spills over' to family. This analysis focuses on mothers of young children and considers how aspects of work-to-family strain differ 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 resident partner to assist with childrearing responsibilities. This paper explores the relationships between several demographic, employment and supports factors and work-family strain. It also examines whether these associations are different according to family form; that is, whether certain factors make the work-family balance significantly worse or better for single mothers than for otherwise similar couple-parent mothers. The analysis is based on 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.