Who Really Wants Work-Family Balance?

Even in time of recession, work-family balance is still a popular topic. As is this recent study from the British Equality and Human Rights Commission. They surveyed over 2,200 British fathers about issues related to work, to childcare and household responsibilities, and to differences between mom and dad.

Some of the findings:

• Fathers do want to spend more time with their children, and want to make their children a priority. 54% of dads with children under the age of 1 year felt that they spend too little time with their child.
  
• More mothers (34%) than fathers (23%) believe that child care is the primary responsibility of the mother.
• There is still a big gap between what flexible working options are available to fathers, and to what extent fathers are actually using those flexible work solutions.

This begs the question - do fathers continue to feel that using flexible work options is potentially damaging to their career? Or are there larger more diverse sets of reasons that fathers don't take the leave available to them?