The Association between Work-Family Conflict and Parenting Stress: Focusing on the Mediating Roles of Marital Conflict and Co-Parenting Quality

Backgrounds: With increases in dual-earner parents and extremely low fertility in South Korea, dual-earner parents’ work-family conflict and its implications for parenting has increasingly gained research and policy attentions. Parents’ work-family conflict can influence parenting stress through multiple mechanisms. According to family systems theory, parents’ inter-role conflict between work and family can lead to heightened marital conflict, which in turn aggravates the quality of co-parenting practices and intensifies parenting stress. However, there is a research gap on identifying the mediating mechanisms of how work-family conflict influences parenting stress among dual-earner parents. Understanding the mediating process would offer multiple intervention points to address the harmful effects of work-family conflict on working parents. Therefore, our study explores the association between work-family conflict and parenting stress and whether marital conflict and co-parenting practices mediate this association among working mothers and fathers with a child in the 1^st grade of elementary school in Korea.

Methods: Data is drawn from "8th Survey of the Panel Study on Korean Children (PSKC)" in Korea. PSKC is the representative child data that investigates children's growth and development process from birth to child aged 15 in 2023. The final sample included 1210 cases of dual-income parents raising an eight-year-old child with valid information on key variables. Work-family conflict was measured with 15 questions from the scale 'Work-family strengths and gains’ (Marshall & Barnett, 1992). Marital conflict was measured with eight questions from the marital conflict scale (Markman et al., 2001). The quality of co-parenting was measured with 16 questions from the scale of co-parenting (Mchale, 1997) (e.g., helping a partner to play with a child and complementing a partner when accompanied with a child). Parenting stress was measured with eleven questions (e.g., I do not feel confident to be a good parent). To explore the relationships between work-family conflict, marital conflict, quality of co-parenting, and parenting stress, we tested sequential mediating effects using Model 6 of Process macro 4.2 (Hayes, 2013). Control variables included parents’ education, household income, the number of households, and child gender.

Results: We found that work-family conflict was associated with increases in parenting stress among both parents. The mediating analyses show that marital conflict and co-parenting quality had sequential mediating effects in the relationship between parental work-family conflict and parenting stress for both mothers and fathers. We also found that co-parenting quality did not directly mediate the association between work-family conflict and parenting stress; it only mediated through marital conflict, suggesting the importance of marital relationship on the process transferring work-family conflict to parenting stress.

Conclusions: Our findings suggest that work-family conflict increase marital conflict, in turn lower co-parenting practices, and contribute to increases in parenting stress, confirming the sequential mediating process of marital conflict and co-parenting for both parents. We discuss policy efforts to reduce work-family conflict and parenting stress among dual-earner parents in Korea, such as providing martial counseling and parental education about co-parenting as well as offering workplace flexibility and expanding the option of parental leave to parents with school-age children.