New Study (2014) Says Women More Stressed By Home Than Work
But so many Christians portray stay at home wife and motherhood as being bliss for women. Come to find out, women don’t always enjoy being SAHMs.
(Link): Why You’re More Stressed by Home Than Work
Excerpt:
- by Belinda Luscombe
May 22, 2014
A new study out from the Council on Contemporary Families suggests that contrary to most surveys, people are actually more stressed at home than at work.
Three Penn State researchers measured people’s cortisol, which is a stress marker, while they were at work and while they were at home and found it higher at what is supposed to be a place of refuge.
“Further contradicting conventional wisdom, we found that women as well as men have lower levels of stress at work than at home” writes one of the authors, Sarah Damaske, assistant professor of labor and employment relations, sociology and women’s studies at Penn State (the italics are hers).
In fact women even say they feel better at work, she notes. “It is men, not women, who report being happier at home than at work.”
Another surprise is that the findings hold true, says Damaske, for both those with children and without, but more so for nonparents. This is why, the authors conclude, people who work outside the home have better health.
What the study doesn’t measure is whether people are still doing work when they’re at home, whether it’s household work or work brought home from the office. For many men, the end of the workday is a time to kick back. For women who stay home, they never get to leave the office.
And for women who work outside the home, they often are playing catch up with household tasks.
With the blurring of roles, and the fact that the home front lags well behind the workplace in making adjustments for working women, it’s not surprising that women are more stressed at home.
But it’s not just a gender thing. At work, people pretty much know what they’re supposed to be doing: working, earning money, doing the tasks they have to do in order to draw an income.
The bargain is very pure: employee puts in hours of physical or mental labor and employee draws out life-sustaining moola.
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Related posts:
(Link): The Changing American Family (article)
(Link): The Jetson Fallacy – Much longer lifespans could explode the nuclear family (article)
(Link): 5 Scientifically Proven Reasons It’s Better To Be Single
(Link): More single dads than ever head US households
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