Fragmented lives: how do teleworking parents juggle work and children care?

Teleworking, when full time employees give up dedicated space in a central office and work from home using telecommunications technologies, is a new form of work. Many researchers and practitioners hope that teleworkers can enjoy a more unitary and less fragmented life style. To learn how parents juggle their paid work and child care when they work at home, this paper draws on material from a subgroup of 21 teleworkers with children under age 12. They work for the same large telecommunications firm. We find that teleworking is not a unitary pattern of work, and the ways people do their work greatly affects how they take care of their children. The structure of their job, their interdependence and communication with co-workers and clients affect the control over the time and place of paid work. Those employees with more control over their immediate work conditions can do a wider range of child work than can those whose work is controlled by others in their work network. In sum, control over the time and place of paid work determines the ways they do their child care work