As increasing number of married women participate in the work force, the number of dual-income families and nucleus families increases. Working parents experience more difficulties in playing multiple roles as employees, parents, spouses and individua...
As increasing number of married women participate in the work force, the number of dual-income families and nucleus families increases. Working parents experience more difficulties in playing multiple roles as employees, parents, spouses and individuals in between the work and the families. One of the most severe strains and conflicts that a working mother experiences is child care. One of the best solutions to child care, especially for mothers with preschool childreen, is to increase the number of employer-supported child care and their quality.
Based upon the current situation, this research has two objective: 1) to compare work functioning, individual functioning, family functioning and work-family functioning in between users of employer-supported child care centers and users of the same child care centers who work for other employers, and 2) to find realationship between child care issues of working parents that use employer-supported child care, and their perception on quality level of their own lives.
The specifics of this research are as follows.
First, to find out whether employer-supported childcare helps working parents play multiple roles, comparisons were done between users of employer-supported child care centers and users of the same child care centers who work for other employers with 4 sub-problems. Job functioning includes the levels of job satisfaction, job commitment and job involvement; and individual functioning includes the levels of perceived stress and life; and family functioning includes the levels of parental and marital satisfaction; work-family functioning includes the levels of perceived role over-load.
Secondly, to find out the relationship between child care issues of working parent perception on quality level of their own lives, we exmined the relationship between the child care variables such as satisfaction with child care, work-child care conflict, difficulties with child care and responsibility of child care, and job satisfaction, life satisfaction, parental and marital satisfaction of working parents, and perceived role over-load.
The subjects of this research include 193 working parents who has preschool children in 11 employer-supported child care centers in Seoul that are open to non-employees as well as employees. Among them, 88 parents work for employers who offer child care centers and 105 parents work for other employers.
Questionnaire used in this research is one based upon the measurement tools used by Picard-Lessard (1995), with some modifications done after a pretest. Analysis tools used include frequency, percentage, standard deviation, t-test, Pearson's correlation and x²-test.
The main results of this study are summarized as follows.
1. There is no significant difference between users of employer-supported child care centers and users of the same child care centers who work for other employers in job satisfaction, job commitment and job involvement. There is also no difference in the levels of perceived stress, life satisfaction, parental and marital satisfaction, and role over-load between users of employer-supported child care centers are equally beneficial to the two groups, indiating that they should be more open to the publics, if possible. Such openness would generate almost the same effects as constructing new child care centers.
2. Satisfaction with child care has ositive correlations with job satisfaction, life satisfaction, parental satisfaction and marital satisfaction. Responsibility of child care has positive correlations with parental satisfaction and marital satisfaction. On the other hand, difficulties with child caare have negative correlations with life satisfaction, parental satisfaction and marital satisfaction.
Therefore, since the child care variables have correlations with positive and negative sides of parent's perception on quality level of their own lives, should be addressed in understanding working parents, who have to play multiple roles.