blueprints
The First Years Out
Juggling Lessons
Careers, marriages and familes present demanding balancing acts
by Kathleen Kearns
Ttough when it comes to building a career while
also nurturing personal relationships. In these
he transition from college can be particularly
trying economic times, the challenge can get even
tougher, as economic demands add pressure to keep
charging ahead without neglecting family.
Hard times or not, many young Carolina alumni are
figuring out how to keep romantic relationships alive and
raise kids while moving ahead in their chosen careers. In
this edition of “BluePrints,” three couples and an expert
on social trends share their perspective on those challenges and some tips for coping.
The Expert
Ron Rindfuss, Robert Paul Ziff Distinguished
Professor of sociology at UNC
In these “demographically dense” years, “there’s a lot going
on for them compared with people in their 40s.”
The Challenges
Balancing work life and home life — whether home
means a spouse, a significant other or children — is not
a new challenge for young adults. Ron Rindfuss calls
the first decade or so after college “demographically
dense” because those years are so packed with major
life events. “This is when they start working full time,
when they’re most likely
to migrate, to marry, to
become a parent, to
divorce, to remarry. So
there’s a lot going on for
them compared with
people in their 40s.”
The current economic crisis makes the
balancing act only more
challenging, he says. “If
the Great Depression is
an example, the longer
this [downturn] continues, the longer people will postpone getting married and having kids, and the more
likely they are to experience marriage dissolution. If
you had a choice of picking a historical time to be a
young adult, these are not the times you’d choose.”
Finding time to
support demanding careers and
nurture personal
relationships is
one of the biggest
stresses people
face.
The Coping Strategies
Cultural changes have made it easier to balance
work and family these days than it once was, Rindfuss
says. “The attitudinal climate in the U.S. has shifted.
The question of whether a preschool child suffers if its
mother works — there’s less and less agreement with
that item. There are a wide variety of options for getting some sort of day-care help. It’s not necessarily
inexpensive, but it’s available. We’re seeing men more
involved in both child care and household tasks today
than was the case a generation or two ago.” Women
still do more child care and other household tasks than
men, he adds, but time spent on household tasks has
declined substantially in the past 30 years.
Rindfuss also points out that it’s easier to balance
work and home responsibilities in the U.S. than in
some other countries. “I’m saying it’s easier, not easy,
especially for those who’ve finished a college degree,
especially for women if they want to pursue both a
career and raising children.” Though this country
doesn’t have a family policy per se, part-time work and
work hours other than 9 to 5 are more available, and
there are such options as day care for sick children.
“Unlike Germany or Japan, where it’s difficult to get
back into school once one has left, in our education
system — like in the Scandinavian countries — it’s
possible to have children and then go back.”
Technology in the form of laptops and the Internet
also can help people juggle work and home life, though
Rindfuss points out that because the tasks that telecom-muters do require concentration, parents who work at
home also can need day-care help.
Then, too, “if you have multiple family members
working at home, it changes the nature of what home
is,” he said.
“The availability of e-mail at the workplace and
Web things make it easier to stay in touch with family
members,” Rindfuss notes. “The flip side is that more
people bring work home because most people have e-mail at home or have a BlackBerry with them.”
