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It is a feeling almost every working parent knows: the school nurse calls in the middle of a meeting, or you are answering a work email while your kid tries to show you a drawing. A new survey from the Pew Research Center has put numbers to that constant tug of war, and the picture it paints is one of widespread strain. Two thirds of working mothers say they cannot give 100 percent at home, and just over half say they cannot give their all at work. Among fathers, half say they fall short at home and about a third say they fall short on the job. For the millions of American families with two parents working full time, the survey confirms what daily life already tells them. There is simply no way to be in two places at once.
What the Pew Survey Found
The Pew Research Center surveyed 2,242 working parents, focusing primarily on households where both a mother and a father work full time. The central finding is that the boundary between work and family has become deeply blurred. Seventy percent of parents said they deal with parenting demands while they are working, and 59 percent said they field work matters while spending time with their kids.
“We see that parents are facing lots of demands from both work and family, and that the boundary between those is often blurry,” said Pew senior researcher Rachel Minkin.
The strain is not evenly shared. Working mothers reported a harder time finding balance than fathers and tend to carry more of the load at home. About half of full time working parents said their job makes it harder to be a good parent. At least half also said they do not have enough time for hobbies, friends, exercise, relaxing, or even time with their spouse.
The survey lands at a moment when the juggling act involves more families than ever. In 1975, just 31 percent of families had a mother and father both working full time. A half century later, that share has climbed to 52 percent, according to Pew’s analysis of census data. Meanwhile, the share of families with a father working full time and a mother at home fell from 42 percent in 1975 to 23 percent in 2025.
The Reality Behind the Numbers
Statistics can feel abstract until you hear how they play out in a real household. NPR profiled Amber Petersen, a legal assistant at a small firm in Mason City, Iowa, who described the daily pull between her job and her three children. “I feel like that tug of war is constantly on my mind of where I need to be, if I am missing out as a mom, or if I am disappointing somebody at work,” she said. “There’s just no way to be two things at once and give 100 percent at both.”
Petersen is grateful that her employer lets her leave quickly when a child gets sick, a flexibility her husband, who works in a factory, does not have without risking future raises. But that flexibility comes at a cost. She is paid only for the hours she works and has no paid sick leave, so leaving to care for a sick child means losing pay. Her family relies on two incomes and has no emergency fund. “It’s a hard time that we’re living in right now,” she said.
Her experience mirrors a key survey finding: more than half of lower income parents, and single mothers in particular, said they are highly worried about losing pay if they unexpectedly have to leave work for a family issue. Black and Hispanic parents reported worrying about this more than white and Asian parents.
What Could Actually Help
The Pew survey did not just measure the problem. It also asked what kinds of support would make a difference, and the answers point to concrete policies rather than vague encouragement to find balance.
Paid sick leave stood out. For parents like Petersen, the ability to care for a sick child without losing a day’s pay would ease one of the sharpest pressure points. The survey found that lower income parents are the least likely to have access to benefits like paid time off or health insurance, which deepens the inequality.
Affordable childcare was another clear need. Petersen pays 180 dollars a week for her four year old’s care and decided her two older daughters could stay home alone together a little sooner than she would have liked, because a summer program would have cost a couple thousand dollars. The survey found that nearly half of working parents who needed care for school age kids had trouble arranging it for the summer.
Workplace flexibility also ranked high, though the survey complicated the popular assumption that remote work solves everything. Most full time working parents see the ability to work from home as helpful, but only about a quarter said they actually have much flexibility to do so. Roughly three quarters have no work from home option at all.
Working From Home Is Not a Cure
One of the more striking findings is that remote work, often held up as the answer to work life balance, does not erase the struggle. “Working from home doesn’t ease all the challenges of balancing work and family,” Minkin said. In fact, parents who work from home reported the most overlap between their work and family responsibilities. Close to 40 percent of those who work from home all or nearly all the time said they frequently handle parenting tasks while working, and about a third said they frequently deal with work while spending time with their children.
In other words, flexibility can blur the boundary further rather than restore it. The parent at home is the one who answers the door for a delivery, comforts a sick child, and toggles between a spreadsheet and a snack request all afternoon. The lesson is not that remote work is bad, but that it is not, on its own, a complete solution to a structural problem.
What This Means for Families
For parents reading this survey and nodding along, the most useful takeaway may be the simplest: the strain you feel is real, common, and not a personal failing. The data shows that more than half of working parents are wrestling with the same impossible math. That reframing alone can lift some of the guilt that comes with feeling stretched thin.
On a practical level, the findings suggest a few moves worth considering. Get clear on what benefits your employer actually offers, including any paid leave, flexible hours, or backup care, since many parents underuse benefits they did not know they had. Plan childcare gaps, especially summer, as early as you can, since affordable spots fill fast. And where you can, lower the bar on the things that do not truly need 100 percent, so you can protect the moments that do. Some families also find it helps to divide the mental load of scheduling and appointments more deliberately between partners, rather than letting it default to one person.
The Bigger Picture
This survey resonates because it names a tension that has quietly become the norm for American families. Over fifty years, the dual income household went from the exception to the majority, but the support structures around working parents, paid leave, affordable childcare, predictable schedules, have not kept pace. The result is a generation of parents trying to meet two full sets of expectations with one set of hours in the day. The findings also arrive amid broader conversations about family size and affordability, with many parents saying that the cost and intensity of raising kids shapes whether they feel able to have more. For more on that pressure, see our coverage of summer childcare costs and what parents say about wanting more time with their kids. The struggle the Pew survey documents is not a sign that parents are doing it wrong. It is a sign that the system around them was built for a different era.
The Gender Gap Persists
One thread runs through nearly every layer of the survey: mothers and fathers are not experiencing this strain equally. Two thirds of working moms said they cannot give 100 percent at home, compared with half of dads. Just over half of mothers said they fall short at work, versus about a third of fathers. Working mothers also reported taking on more at home and having a harder time finding balance overall.
These gaps reflect a long standing pattern in which women shoulder a larger share of caregiving and household management even when they work the same hours as their partners. The invisible work of remembering the dentist appointment, signing the permission slip, and knowing which child outgrew their shoes tends to fall disproportionately on mothers. For two parent households, the survey is a prompt to look honestly at how that load is divided and whether it can be shared more evenly. Naming specific responsibilities and trading them deliberately, rather than assuming one parent will simply absorb them, is one of the few levers families can pull without waiting on a policy change.
None of this means parents are failing. It means the expectations placed on them have outgrown the supports available, and that recognizing the imbalance is the first step toward easing it, at home and in the workplace.