Long before having kids, I fancied my future self as a cool working mum. It didn’t cross my mind that work and family didn’t have to be separate and opposing entities; that I could have a fun, fulfilling career not alongside or despite kids, but with / thanks to / for them. 

Yet here I am: sharing a desk with my five-year-old and his felt-tip pens; prefacing Zoom calls by saying “you might hear a toddler or two in the background”; editing an article from my parents’ couch after a family reunion; attending a (pre-COVID) scientific conference abroad with my beloved while our eldest spends a few hours at the host institute’s crèche; bringing my mum and firstborn at a work retreat’s pub lunch (with no one batting an eyelid); writing stories for work inspired by my own family life.

I’m not saying it’s easy or blissful to blur boundaries between work and family: I’m saying it’s happening. 

[Case in point: I just heard my beloved exclaiming: “Don’t go in there, mum’s working”, and my son started crying]

Blurred Lines

Fast internet, smartphones, lockdowns and forced homeschooling have only muddied the lines further. “I do think that flexibility is the future of work, and I generally think that’s positive,” says Jessica Wilen, a leadership coach and consultant focused on working parents, based in Connecticut. But we need to be careful that we don’t “trade increased autonomy for the expectation of near-constant availability,” she says. 

Yes, the fading boundaries often stink. It takes effort, time, and support to stay sane and present to different roles. But I also appreciate being able to bring these important parts of my life together, rather than having to downplay my family self—and my personal life, more generally—at work (happy events, childcare constraints, ailing relatives, whatever).

Wilen warns against this “hiding and minimizing” (1) in her newsletter A Cup of Ambition:

“What would it look like if we stopped apologizing for being parents? What if we set firmer boundaries, said ‘no’ more often, and owned the fact there is more to our lives than work (and that this very fact has the potential to make us more empathic and effective leaders)? What do we have to gain if we stop hiding one of our most important identities? What do our colleagues gain? Our daughters and sons? And, more importantly, what do we (and they) lose if we don’t?”

Family Motivation

“There is lots of research on work-family conflict, saying that it complicates things, that it’s a stretch overall,” says Jochen Menges, a management professor at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. There’s also growing research on work-family enrichment, but as I write this, the former (105,000 search results on Google Scholar) dwarfs the latter (just 8,900 hits).

Menges conducted the first field study on family motivation at work, published online in 2016 and in print in 2017. In a study of 97 women with monotonous, low-wage jobs in a Mexican factory, he found that “family motivation enhances job performance when intrinsic motivation is low—in part by providing energy, but not by reducing stress” (2). 

This means that “you can do well in a job that is otherwise monotonous and boring, if you see the job as a conduit to something greater,” says Menges. And it’s not just about being a breadwinner: “a lot of [the workers] wanted to be a role model for their kids. They took pride in having a proper job and an honorable life”—like work is an extension of their caregiving.

This also means that bosses could help motivate staff by letting them bring their family life into the workplace, he adds: letting employees display pictures of their kids; inviting family into work occasionally; or acknowledging family members when an employee is rewarded for her performance.

In their own way, Menges and his colleagues brought their family motivation into their research paper: in the biographies section, they listed their sources of motivation just after academic credentials and research interests. For instance, for second co-author Danielle V. Tussing: 

“Her workspace is heavily decorated with photos of her supportive husband, inspiring mom, and other family and friends.”

And my favourite, from the biography of last co-author Adam Grant: 

“His wife, two daughters, and son have motivated him to work a lot less.”

The Downsides

I asked Menges about potential abuses of family motivation. It’s easy for me to talk about this concept from the comfort of a job that I’ve chosen, with genuine flexibility, interesting tasks, and decent money. Couldn’t family motivation be misused to compensate for exploitative job setups—as if family picnics with your boss could make up for dismal work conditions? 

Of course, employers should provide good wages and work conditions, Menges says; they should give employees as much autonomy as possible, and try to minimize monotonous tasks. “Employers need to do much more, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to understand family motivation,” he says.

In 2020, another study based on samples of hundreds of both low-wage textile workers and higher-income white-collar employees in China argued that family motivation is a double-edged sword that both energises and weakens performance. 

Family motivation pushes employees to see their jobs “as a means to gain financial support for their family, rather than an end in itself, which is associated with lower levels of creativity,” the paper says. So when they’re doing it for the kids, employees tend to play it safe. And the higher the family’s financial pressure, the higher the employees’ family motivation, especially for women. 

Science-fiction?

As I researched this post, I kept thinking about this quote by paediatrician and parenting author Carlos González, who says that blending parenting and work is not only inevitable or desirable, but necessary. He writes (3):

“Our current economic organisation is too stressful, it clashes too much with our biological necessities. Of course, there are many workplaces where it would be dangerous or impossible to bring a baby. But in many other places, children are banned out of habit, not for any rational reason. One day, the hotel receptionist, the tax office employee, the woman at the cinema’s ticket office, or the travel agent will attend to us with their baby in arms. […] One day, our grandchildren will be surprised to see old movies where people went lots of places without their children. And it will only be a first step, because one day fathers, too, will get the opportunity to reconcile, for real, our work and our life. One day children will run around offices and shops, just like they used to run around fields or workshops in the olden days.”

When I first read this paragraph five years ago, that tableau seemed far-fetched; two years into the pandemic, much less so. 

As Menges told me: “Work has such a dominant role in people’s lives; maybe it’s time for family to come into work.” 

FOOTNOTES

1. Wilen links to this Atlantic piece by Brown economist and parenting author Emily Oster, who lists similar examples.

2. Family motivation is one type of prosocial motivation: being motivated to do work because it benefits other people. I wrote about this in #9: Can everyone afford intrinsic motivation? (Part 2)

3. This is from González’s book Breastfeeding Made Easy, which is available in English. I translated the excerpt myself from the original in Spanish.

More about ‘Intrinsic Motivation’

Tania Rabesandratana

Science Journalist & Attuned Writer Fellow 2021