Historically, the responsibility and concept of winning family bread were bestowed on a man as the head of the family for generations. The man was required to go out, hunt, and get food for the family, while the woman was required to maintain the family’s bond by preparing food and bringing family members together. As such, women were not considered to be obliged to go out and earn a living. All these events were happening when gender imbalance was predominant, but after the gender equality awakening, women started to come out, work, and earn a living for their families as well, just like their men did, creating families with dual earners. Over the past three decades, the number of dual-earning couples has increased substantially, thereby increasing families with dual-earning couples. Arguably, dual-earner couple family support strategies and efforts, their use of reduced work hours, the existence of reduced depression and conflict, work-family balance, and higher career satisfaction contribute to improved family life while utilization of workplace support programs and breadwinning obligations for male earners negate improvement of family life.
The increase in dual-earning couples continued to improve family life over the years, given that dual earners have been shown to manage and work successfully. According to Haddock (445), dual-earning couples have created strategies that they use to manage their families. These set of strategies have been identified to include mutual collaborations, identifying and working on family values, ensuring family members have fun occasionally, proactivity in decision-making, and demarcating work boundaries for each. Collaborating in family matters has led to sharing of both financial and personal attendance responsibilities such that any partner can pay for bills, and at the same time, any of them can attend to urgent family demands as convenience may dictate. Becoming proactive in making decisions for the family has been shown to create solutions to problems that would have complicated family existence in the future, thereby improving future family status that would have been critical. On the other hand, finding time to have family fun increases family bonding and, thus, improves family connectedness. All these strategic efforts prove that the increase in dual-earner couples has managed to improve family life and wellbeing in several aspects.
Recent research evidence indicates that dual-earning has led to the reduction of work hours as well as the creation of flexible work schedules. School and Verbruggen (30) found out that within organizations, those employees whose significant others used reduced work hours were not pressured by home demands, and thus, there was a low likelihood of family conflict escalating. Similarly, those who adopted and used flexible work schedules were found to receive substantial social support, thereby improving social relations. The reduction in family demands and associated pressure for dual-earning couples can be interpreted to mean that family pressures on couples have reduced significantly, thereby implying that with low family pressure, the quality of family life has substantially gone up or improved. The improvement of the partner’s quality of life in the family can only be translated to mean that the continuous increase in dual-earning couples has significantly improved the quality of family life for both partners. Therefore, the increase in family life over the years has led to an increase in the improvement of family life and the subsequent wellbeing of family members, including the children.
Further pieces of research evidence have indicated the existence of a correlation between work-family conflict and the levels of depression that couples experience. On that note, dual-earner couples have been found to experience reduced levels of depression, as a spillover effect, due to shared responsibilities that lessen work-family conflicts that arise out of demands for meeting responsibilities (Hammer et al. 138). The spillover effect studied included the identification of how emotions were transferred between couples in dual-earning families, the strength of affection between partners, and how subsequent frustrations were shared. Positivity in spillover indicated high affection, transfer of good emotions, and reduced frustrations among couples. These findings clearly indicate that the transfer of good emotions, reduction of shared frustrations, and subsequent increase in the show of affection among dual-earner couples have all contributed to the improvement of family life among family couples.
Furthermore, it would not be sufficient to consider family improvement for couple earners if the work-family balance is not evaluated. From the dimension of work-family balance, a study was conducted to find out the impact of the increase of dual-earning couples on balancing between work and family. While work is undertaken by one couple, on the one hand, family is supported by both couples on the other end using various means such as financial and leadership support. Following this perspective, Adisa, Osabutey, and Gbadamosi (351) found out that dual-earner couples experienced lower or reduced hardships in financial burdens in their family lives and, thus, shouldered lighter burdens on family financial responsibilities. While the application of this assumption in extension cannot be guaranteed, the revelation that couples reported lighter financial obligations was sufficient to deduct that dual-earning couples have fewer financial responsibilities in the report, indicating that there is a significant improvement in family life among married couples.
From a career satisfaction perspective, the increase in dual-earning couples over the recent years has been attributed to the emergence of career satisfaction, lower family issues, and better family life in general. Specifically, Harrington (28) observed that when dual earners are supportive of each other, there tends to arise higher career satisfaction, reduced family or couple conflicts, better family relations among all members, and improved collective family experience. The level of support mentioned herein was not specific, but it should include all domains of support in the family or between couples, which should constitute the affective, financial, and cognitive dimensions. With such improvements noted, the increase in dual-earner couples has led to the overall improvement of family life and wellbeing, because both the partners and children tend to experience better times and relations among themselves.
On the contrary, it is only sometimes the case that family life improves when there are dual-earning couples. A favorable dimension of exploring the negative impact of the increase in dual-earner couples on family life is the utilization of workplace support programs and provisions meant for married working couples. In the provisions, married couples can take advantage of these programs for the purposes of their families. A study conducted by Hammer et al. (799) found that the utilization of workplace support programs did not automatically translate to positive outcomes of improving family life, and instead, the opposite was documented for dual-earner couples. Partly, the use of workplace support provisions tended to favor wives over their husbands and could be translated as being helpful to female couple earners while leading to a detrimental impact on male earners. With one side experiencing a positive impact and the other one undergoing negative consequences of workplace support programs, it becomes apparent that the increase in dual-earner couples over the recent years does not automatically mean that family life will improve, given that male earners become suppressed when using workplace support programs meant for dual-earner couples.
Lastly, while several aspects have been noted to lead to improvement, the sharing of financial responsibility has been documented to be relatively miscalculated and wrongly documented for family couples. Raley et al. (11) note that despite the existence of dual-earning couples, statistical shreds of evidence have pointed out that among 64% of dual-earning coupled under scrutiny, 39% of the cases were men contributing fully to breadwinning, indicating that a majority of men still are breadwinners in dual earner-couple relationships. Men tended to provide much more assistance to family maintenance than women, despite receiving similar paychecks and even when women received higher pay. The implication is that the increase in dual-earner couples only sometimes leads to improvement in family life when men remain pressured to shoulder much of the breadwinning responsibilities.
Overwhelmingly, the increase in dual-earner couples over the years has been associated with a continuous increase in the improvement of family life in several aspects, despite there being instances of no improvement in family life. Family support strategies and efforts, the use of reduced work hours, reduced depression and conflict, work-family balance, and higher career satisfaction have all been shown to lead to the improvement of family life as dual-earner couples increase over time. However, the utilization of workplace support programs and the continuous demands for men to remain breadwinners have negatively impacted the wellbeing of a man or husband and, thus, negated the potential of improving family life when the man’s life is suppressed.
Works Cited
Adisa, T.A., Osabutey, E.L.C. and Gbadamosi, G. (2017). “The implications of work-family balance among dual-earner couples: The case of medical practitioners in Nigeria,” Career Development International, Vol. 22 No. 4, pp. 351–371. https://doi.org/10.1108/CDI-09- 2016-0154
Haddock, Shelley A. et al. “Ten adaptive strategies for family and work balance: advice from successful families.” Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, Vol, 27, no. 4, October 2001; 445-458
Hammer, L. B., Cullen, J. C., Neal, M. B., Sinclair, R. R., & Shafiro, M. V. (2005). The Longitudinal Effects of Work-Family Conflict and Positive Spillover on Depressive Symptoms Among Dual-Earner Couples. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 10(2), 138–154. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.10.2.138
Hammerb, L. B., Neal, M. B., Newsom, J. T., Brockwood, K. J., & Colton, C. L. (2005). A Longitudinal Study of the Effects of Dual-Earner Couples’ Utilization of Family-Friendly Workplace Supports on Work and Family Outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(4), 799–810. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.90.4.799
Harrington, Brad. “The New Dad: Caring, Committed and Conflicted.” Boston College Center for Work and Family, February 2011, pp. 1–32.
Raley, Sara B., Marybeth J. Bianchi, Mattingly, and Suzanne M. “How Dual Are Dual-Income Couples? Documenting Change from 1970 to 2001”. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, Vol. 68, no. 1; 2006, pp. 11-28
Schooreel, T., & Verbruggen, M. (2016). Use of family-friendly work arrangements and work–family conflict: Crossover effects in dual-earner couples. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 21(1), 119–132. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039669
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