Better work-life balance through Digital Parenting

Purpose: The study explored how working parents utilize personal technology to manage parenting responsibilities and identifies how technology use might help to support work-family balance. Research Design: In-depth telephone interviews with U.S. and U.K. working parents with children under the age of 18. Findings: Findings suggest that personal technology can facilitate work and family activities and reduce work-family conflict by enabling parents to perform certain parenting duties remotely. However, parental attitudes toward technology and children’s rights to privacy influence both technology use and work and family outcomes. Originality: While substantial research has been conducted on employee use of work-enabled technology to facilitate work-life balance, less attention has been paid to how working parents are using personal forms of technology to achieve this same outcome. This exploratory study establishes certain parenting functions that are facilitated by personal technology use and identifies some parental attitudes that influence technology adoption. Research Implications: By better understanding employee personal technology use, and how this use facilitates reduced conflict between work and family roles, organizations might look to creatively expand their benefits offerings to include access/discounts to personal technology platforms that support parenting activities (e.g. Uber One, Amazon Prime, DoorDash, etc.)