communication (Boswell & Olson-Buchanan, 2007). Additionally, a recent study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that increased access to technology is related to higher expectations from employers that workers remain engaged in work and available at all times (Chelsey & Johnson, 2015). These new demands represent additional everyday hassles that families must learn to manage. One adaptive process involves setting intentional boundaries and limits regarding work-related technology use at home (e.g., turning off notifications) which reduces ICT interruptions and subsequent work-to-family conflict (Fenner & Renn, 2010). Setting boundaries in this way may be difficult, however, as many individuals report feeling pressure to stay connected to work. A recent study reported that 50% of workers complete work tasks during nonwork hours (e.g., at home, on vacation; Madden & Jones, 2008).
Enduring Vulnerabilities
Individual differences or enduring vulnerabilities in personality and emotional functioning can both contribute to everyday hassles and affect how family members adapt to them. For example, enduring vulnerabilities play an important role in determining how family members process, interpret, and react to the everyday hassles they encounter. In addition, the extent to which individuals possess relatively stable traits can render them resilient or vulnerable to the transfer of stress from everyday hassles. For example, studies have found exaggerated stress responses to hassles among individuals with higher levels of negative affectivity, neuroticism, type A personality traits, depression, and introversion (e.g., Almeida, McGonagle, Cate, Kessler, & Wethington, 2002; Falconier et al., 2014) and lower levels of mastery and self-esteem (Almeida, McGonagle et al., 2002; Pearlin, 1999).
Gender differences may influence the extent to which enduring vulnerabilities moderate the links between daily hassles and family stress may differ for men and women. Almeida, McGonagle et al. (2002) asked 166 married couples to complete daily diaries for 42 consecutive days. In each diary entry, participants responded to a short questionnaire about a variety of daily stressors, including arguments with their spouse, as well as a questionnaire designed to assess psychological distress. The analyses addressed the moderating effects of psychological characteristics (i.e., neuroticism, mastery, self-esteem, and extraversion) on the link between marital arguments and psychological distress. They found that the extent to which wives felt distressed following marital arguments was exacerbated by high levels of neuroticism and attenuated by high levels of mastery, self-esteem, and extraversion. In contrast, self-esteem alone moderated the link between marital arguments and psychological distress for husbands. Almeida, McGonagle et al. (2002) suggested that because personality has been shown to be particularly salient for coping with stressors that are highly threatening or uncontrollable, the different patterns that emerged for husbands and wives in their sample imply that wives may perceive marital arguments as more threatening than do husbands.
Intervention: Toward a New Family-Responsive Policy Agenda
Feminists argue for gender equity in daily tasks as a solution to the disproportionate burdens that mothers, wives, and daughters carry in families (Allen, Walker, & McCann, 2013), but they also warn that even with gender equity, many contemporary families would still have too many hassles to manage on their own (Coontz, 2015). In contrast, those ascribing to structural-functionalist views suggest that families function best when women focus on children and home management and men focus on breadwinning (Popenoe, 2009). Rare among scholars but quite prevalent in popular culture are self-help perspectives that frame the link between everyday hassles and family well-being as a private matter that individuals can solve by using time more efficiently. Still others emphasize government- or employer-subsidized child- and eldercare services as mechanisms for outsourcing many of the everyday hassles associated with caregiving while also acknowledging that government and workplace policies may actually amplify sources of hassles if ineffectively administered (Bogenschneider, 2000, 2014).
We argue that contemporary American families need better opportunities both at home and in the workplace to meet family members’ diverse needs without inadvertently creating additional stressors for individuals already living in chronically stressful situations (Perry-Jenkins et al., 2013; Roy et al, 2004). We support Moen’s (2003) conclusion that we must “re-imagine and reconfigure work hours, workweeks, and occupational career paths in ways that address the widening gaps between the time needs and goals of workers and their families at all stages of the life course on the one hand and the time available to them on the other” (p. 7). For example, some families may want to devote more time to paid work outside the home and therefore need ways to simplify aspects of their daily home lives and outsource everyday tasks to readily available, high-quality substitutes. As Valcour and Batt (2003) note, for parents who want to focus more of their time on family obligations, flexibility in the workplace is of paramount importance. They quoted a mother of three children (including 4-year-old twins) who has been married to a business administrator for 15 years:
I was lucky to work out a job sharing arrangement because there was another woman in my department who did the same thing as me and was also struggling after she had her second baby. So we went to the human resource person and she was supportive but said the company doesn’t have this in place. So we did the research and went to the president of the division and we went through a couple of struggles, but eventually they accepted it. I’m so glad it worked out, because it has been great for me and my family. (p. 320)
As this woman’s experience illustrates, workplace policies that enable family members to care for the needs of their members without jeopardizing their financial security or jobs are likely to be particularly beneficial for families caring for young children or sick or aging family members.
Although the needs and desires of family members in diverse family forms are likely to change over the life course, they exist in a sociohistorical context that has seen little development in family-responsive workplace policies (Perry-Jenkins et al., 2013). For example, the everyday hassles that today’s families encounter are situated in a society that is still predicated on a breadwinner-husband–homemaker-wife script in which the breadwinner is assured an adequate wage for family provision and a full-time, linear rise up the occupational ladder, and the homemaker manages the everyday non-work aspects of her husband’s life as well as the daily hassles of managing a home and family (Coontz, 2000; Moen, 2003). This outdated script contrasts starkly with the contemporary reality that the majority of American families (e.g., single-parent and dual-earner families) experience as they work in an economy where family-wage jobs are reserved for the highly educated, secure manufacturing jobs are few, job growth is limited to low-wage 24/7 service-sector positions with little security or hope for advancement, and income gains are disproportionately situated among more advantaged individuals (Autor & Dorn, 2013). Further, relative to high-wage workers, low-wage workers are less likely to be employed at firms large enough to entitle them to health insurance and family leave, and also less likely to be able to afford the insurance premiums and 12 weeks of unpaid leave (Perry-Jenkins et al., 2013). In addition, existing government and workplace policies have been slow to recognize that working family members have legitimate family demands on their time that may require greater flexibility in the workplace. As long as the culture of the workplace equates work commitment with overwork and fails to recognize the legitimacy of family caregiving as an employee right, those seeking a reasonable balance between work and family life are likely to be penalized (Jacobs & Gerson, 2005). This point is documented by a father of two children (ages 8 and 14) who is employed as a manufacturing production supervisor and married to a part-time educational coordinator:
I wish there were more flexibility, especially in our production environment. I’ve worked all my life around a rotating-work schedule, but this year alone I lost three excellent employees. They had each become single parents for one reason or another, and there’s no way you can get child care in off hours and weekends. It just breaks my heart. Traditionally production has been a male-oriented thing, where one partner stays home with the children and the other one works crazy schedules…. the world is changing and the schedule is not. (quoted in Valcour & Batt, 2003, p. 310)
The mismatch between the work environments that family members inhabit and the needs of contemporary families creates a context in which everyday hassles emerge and multiply (Perry-Jenkins et