Work-Life Balance Gets Harder for Working Moms

By Brittney Helmrich
Being a working mom may be more stressful than you realize, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible.
A new report from eMarketer found that while the majority of mothers in the United States work (7 in 10, according to the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics), many of them feel stressed by the struggle to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
Thirty-eight percent of mothers who worked full time, along with 25 percent of mothers who worked part time, said that it was “very difficult” to balance work and family, according to a survey from Care.com and Yahoo Parenting, eMarketer reported.
And results from another poll from Ketchum and BlogHer show that this stress may be getting worse. According to the poll, 44 percent of mothers who were their household’s primary earner said they were more stressed than they were five years ago.
Despite the stress working mothers face, the majority of working mothers still feel that it’s possible to succeed as a working parent. In fact, 78 percent of American mothers who use the Internet said they believed it was possible to succeed at parenting and in their careers, according to a recent CareerBuilder survey. However, 17 percent of these working mothers said that being a parent caused their professional work to suffer, and 25 percent admitted that their jobs have negatively affected their relationships with their children.
Working fathers, on the other hand, seemed to experience less of that stress. Eighty-three percent said they believe working parents can achieve success in their career and in parenting, while only 9 percent said their professional work has suffered from parenthood and 13 percent said their jobs negatively affected their relationships with their children.
As a result of the stress working mothers feel, many are moving further from the idea that they need to be perfect homemakers, too. Kelly Skoloda, a partner and director of global brand marketing practice at Ketchum, said their research found that, across the board, working mothers have resigned themselves to having a less perfect household.