but then reverts right back to the same. (Deutsch, 1999, pp. 50, 53)
Ethan, Peg’s husband who works 60 hours per week in the biotechnology business, recognizes the inequality but explains it differently: “[Peg] just naturally jumps in where I kind of wait for her to take the initiative…. Maybe I’m not helping as much as I could because I feel like that” (Deutsch, 1999, p. 51). Ethan’s response implies that “helping” with the children in the morning is an option for him—something he can opt out of if he does not feel like participating.
One explanation for the differences between women and men in the ways they experience everyday hassles focuses on the extent to which individuals interpret their involvement in family labor to be freely chosen or voluntary. In an exploration of the contextual conditions surrounding family members’ experience of emotions, Larson, Richards, and Perry-Jenkins (1994) were the first to discover how married spouses’ perceptions of choice played a key role predicting fluctuations in their moods throughout the day. Their rich data on the contrasting moods of husbands and wives at work and at home highlighted how differently men and women experience these contexts and the everyday hassles they encounter. For example, employed wives recorded their most positive moods while at work and an emotional decline at home during the evening hours, which were filled with housework and childcare. In contrast, husbands recorded their most negative emotions in the workplace; at home their moods lightened, in part, because non-work time included leisure activities. However, even when men performed housework or childcare, their moods while doing these tasks were more positive than were those of their wives when they performed the same activities. Further analyses revealed that performing housework and childcare tasks elicited more positive reactions from husbands than from wives because the husbands perceived that they had more choice regarding their involvement in these domains than did the wives.
The reverse is true for paid work. Husbands in Larson et al.’s (1994) study reported low levels of choice while at work, potentially related to constraints associated with gendered expectations for men to be providers. Employed wives reported more positive moods at work than did employed husbands. For many (but not all) women, an unhurried work pace and a friendly work environment contributed to their positive moods while on the job, demonstrating the importance of social support in the workplace for women’s mental health. Collectively, these findings suggest that the transfer of women’s and men’s routinized experiences in the workplace or at home to emotional distress is a gendered process. The translation of work and family experiences into emotional health or distress may depend, in part, on the degree to which the individual perceives the activity to be freely chosen and whether it provides opportunities for positive social interaction, rather than the characteristics of the activity per se.
In sum, the studies reviewed above suggest that scholars may achieve a better understanding of everyday hassles by considering the ecological contexts in which the hassles occur. A family’s construction of gendered expectations is one such context (Allen & Walker, 2000) and contributes to differences in women’s and men’s perceptions of and reactions to daily hassles. In addition, research has shown that a family’s socioeconomic status (Grzywacz, Almeida, Neupert, & Ettner, 2004; Maisel & Karney, 2012), exposure to chronic stressors at work or at home (Serido et al., 2004), nonstandard work schedules (Almeida, 2004), increased use of ICT, and minority stress linked to individuals’ race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or immigration status (Lincoln & Chae, 2010; Riggle, Rostosky, & Horne, 2010; Trail, Goff, Bradbury, & Karney, 2012) may exacerbate (or buffer) the impact of everyday hassles on family well-being. For example, aspects of the larger sociopolitical climate including anti-immigration policies and deportation enforcement initiatives enacted by the United States Department of Justice under the direction of the Trump administration have increased fear and stress, including risk for and fear of deportation and separation, among immigrant families in the United States. Increases in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, efforts to build a border wall between the United States and Mexico, the weakening of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and the practice of the detention and separation of families at the U.S. border impact everyday hassles for Latinx immigrant families regardless of their legal status (e.g., Dreby, 2015). As spoken by a Mexican immigrant wife and mother who experienced immense anxiety about deportation, “Sometimes I dream that I go get [my daughter] at the school and there I find all the other mothers who tell me, ‘Don’t go back to the apartments.’ … Or sometimes I dream that my husband gets arrested by the police at work; they call me and tell me that he is in jail” (Dreby, 2015, p. 38). As this example illustrates, everyday hassles are embedded in a larger context that amplifies the impact that seemingly minor irritations (e.g., picking up a sick child from school, a traffic stop for a broken taillight) have on family and personal well-being. Laws and policies that institutionalize discrimination are an important dimension of context that scholars have begun to study and address via publicly disseminated policy statements documenting their harmful effect on families (e.g., American Psychological Association [APA], 2019; Bouza et al., 2018; Vesely, Bravo, & Guzzardo, 2019).
Adaptive Processes
According to the VSA, the processes that family members use to cope with everyday hassles have important implications for how those hassles affect family interactions. In general, two different patterns of responses have been identified following workdays characterized by heavy workloads or negative interactions with coworkers: (1) increases in marital or parent–child conflict and (2) social withdrawal. These patterns, however, vary across studies, within couples, and by reporter.
In one of the first daily diary studies of married couples with children, Bolger, DeLongis, Kessler, and Wethington (1989) found that on days when husbands experienced an argument at work with a coworker or supervisor, they were more likely to return home from work and argue with their wives, but not with their children. For wives, however, the researchers found no significant associations between arguments at work and subsequent arguments with spouses or children. In contrast, another diary study conducted by Story and Repetti (2006) found that wives, but not husbands, reported more marital anger toward their spouse and were more withdrawn from family interaction following workdays characterized by heavy workloads and unpleasant social interactions. In an interesting twist, husbands’ reports of their wives’ behavior suggested that husbands did not notice their wives’ displays of anger or withdrawal on these same days. This may be partially explained by the finding that everyday hassles at work were found to contribute to wives’ negative moods, which in turn colored wives’ perceptions of their interactions at home. Although husbands did not perceive their wives to be more angry or withdrawn following difficult days at work, wives perceived that they were more irritable and less emotionally available, in part, due to their negative moods. For some families, daily stressors experienced at work may also spill over into interactions with children. For example, Repetti’s (1994) early work demonstrated that fathers engaged in more expressions of anger toward children and more harsh discipline following days characterized by negative social interactions at work. In addition, both mothers and fathers have been shown to be less behaviorally and emotionally engaged with their children following busy workdays (Repetti, 1994; Repetti & Wood, 1997a).
Daily relationship stress—or hassles related to the sharing of housework, different goals, and partners’ annoying habits—may also be important in understanding the link between everyday hassles (e.g., at work) and couple functioning (Falconier et al., 2014; Ledermann, Bodenmann, Rudaz, & Bradbury, 2010). For example, a study of 345 married and unmarried Swiss couples found that the everyday hassles that partners experienced impacted their overall relationship quality and communication effectiveness via elevations in daily relationship stressors (Ledermann et al., 2010). In a second Swiss study of 110 couples, Falconier et al. (2014) found that women’s daily hassles predicted their own physical well-being and anxiety and both partners’ relationship stress. Women’s relationship stress, in turn, was related to women’s depression and both partners’ relationship satisfaction. Men’s daily hassles were related to their own relationship stress, depression, anxiety, and physical well-being. Men’s relationship stress predicted their own depression and relationship satisfaction. Taken together, these findings suggest that although daily hassles are inherently beyond couples’ control, couples who adopt effective strategies to reduce relationship