ABSTRACT
The goal of this chapter is to merge two important substantive areas in the scholarship on families, namely, the literature on the division of family work and the literature on family communication. Although these topics have been the subject of considerable theorizing and research in their own right, few attempts have been made to explore the intersection of these two fields of inquiry. In light of the dramatic demographic shifts that have occurred over the past few decades, namely, the increase in women’s employment and the concomitant rise in dual-earner families (Perry-Jenkins, Repetti, & Crouter, 2000), the ways in which family members divide up and negotiate family work have become hotly contested terrain in families. Thus, the question of how familymembers confer and create their new roles and responsibilities has taken on new importance for family scholars. One aim of this chapter is to examine key areas of overlap between the communication and family work literatures with the purpose of demonstrating how the combined expertise from these two areas can further our understanding of how families copewithwork-family challenges. We also propose some new directions for future inquiry into how families communicate about family work as well as discuss the potential implications of this process for marital and parent-child relations.
