Balancing Stepparenthood and Employment

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By Dr Anneke Schaefer- Manchester Metropolitan University

The UK has made strides in promoting flexible working, with recent legal changes allowing employees to request flexible working from day one, amongst other ways of protecting workers recently introduced by the new Employment Rights Bill. Flexible working can be a valuable tool for creating inclusive workplaces. However, many Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) policies still focus on legally protected traits like gender, age, and religion (Vincent et al., 2024). This leaves some groups overlooked in workplace policies. This relates for example to the case of stepparents in British workplaces. This oversight is significant given the growing number of stepparents in the UK workforce.

According to the 2021 census, 8.8 per cent of dependent children in England and Wales lived in a stepfamily arrangement at that time (Office for National Statistics, 2024).

The Impact of Being a Stepparent on Employment

In my research with Dr. Laura Radcliffe and Prof. Caroline Gatrell, we investigate the challenges stepparents face in balancing work and family responsibilities. For example, we note how stressful the transition to stepparenthood can be, as the stepparent has to navigate complex family dynamics, such as building relationships with stepchildren and figuring out how they fit into parental arrangements.

Many stepparents step into a parental role, either by contributing financially to the family and/or by providing care for their stepchildren. This may take the form of doing the morning school run or taking a day off work to stay home with their sick stepchild. This has implications for their employment and can lead to work-family conflict if a stepparent cannot, for example, adjust their start and finish times to match with their new school run responsibility.

Organisational policies, such as flexible working arrangements might prove a key source of organisational support for stepparents to reduce their work-family conflict and support them in managing their numerous, often complex, work-family responsibilities.

Moving Forward: Advocating for Change

Flexible working arrangements (FWAs) have become an essential component of modern employment practices, aimed at helping employees balance their work and family responsibilities (Atkinson and Hall, 2009). However, stepparents may not view FWAs as available to them. This is because, unlike biological parents, stepparents are often not formally recognised as parents by laws or public policy. In the UK, they may have parental responsibility and can theoretically access public policies such as parental leave, but only if this is agreed by all biological parents (ACAS, 2024). However, such agreement may be unlikely in many stepfamilies, where co-parental arrangements are known to often be subject to ongoing conflict between co-parents, especially in relation to children and their care (Cartwright and Gibson, 2013). Thus, stepparents’ lack of parental legitimacy and clarity of their parental responsibilities in a work context may impact how entitled they feel to use such policies, and we suggest that this may lead to low uptake of FWAs (Schaefer, Radcliffe and Gatrell, 2020).

Hence, many stepparents may struggle balancing their stepparent role and employment. This may have negative outcomes for the individual (e.g. in terms of stress and mental health) as well as for employers, e.g. if an individual leaves their job due to unresolved work-family conflict.

My co-authors and I suggest that supporting stepparents will benefit employers in various ways, e.g. by improving job satisfaction and retention rates among this group (Schaefer, Radcliffe and Gatrell, 2020). To achieve this, employers need to acknowledge diverse family circumstances and move away from stereotypical notions of ‘the family’ (i.e. the nuclear family).

To enable employers in developing appropriate policies and practices and train line managers to offer support to stepparents in the workplace, we have written a case study, available on request for practitioners to draw upon.

Join us at the forefront of reshaping the future of work for modern families. This groundbreaking research is a key part of our research-led toolkit, designed to help organizations future-proof their workplaces by providing essential support to today’s working families, a free resource, which you can download below.

References

ACAS (2024) Taking parental leave. Available at: https://www.acas.org.uk/parental-leave (Accessed: 22/10/2024).

Atkinson, C. and Hall, L. (2009) ‘The Role of Gender in Varying Forms of Flexible Working’, Gender, Work & Organization, 16(6), pp. 650-666.

Cartwright, P. and Gibson, K. (2013) ‘The effects of co-parenting relationships with ex-spouses on couples in step-families’, Family Matters, 91, pp. 18-28.

Schaefer, A., Radcliffe, L. S. and Gatrell, C. J. (2020) ‘Lone Parents and Blended Families: Advocating Flexible Working to Support Families in Transition’ ‘, in Norgate, S.H. and Copper, C.L. (eds.) Flexible Work Designing our Healthier Future Lives. London: Routledge, pp. 196-212.

Vincent, S., Lopes, A., Meliou, E. and Özbilgin, M. (2024) ‘Relational Responsibilisation and Diversity Management in the 21st Century: The Case for Reframing Equality Regulation’, Work, Employment and Society, . https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170231217660