How to Help Your Roles Enrich Each Other
An introduction to "work-family enrichment"
My bread-and-butter has long been the study and treatment of relationships between people. But when I became a working parent, it occurred to me that our life roles also exist in relation to one another.
Like relationships between people, the relationship between our most demanding roles are complex and multilayered. Sure, there’s conflict. But there’s more to it than that, too. And most of us want a life with multiple roles—worker, parent, partner, friend, community member, pet guardian, and so on.
The fact that the modern public discourse pretty much only talks about role conflict seemed to be missing something. And when I dug into the science of the relationship between roles, I got confirmation: Roles don’t just conflict; they also enrich each other. And various pockets of social science can help us learn how to amplify that enrichment.
This was the genesis of my book, Work, Parent, Thrive, and it’s the topic we’ll dig into in today’s newsletter. (If you’re interested in checking out the book, you can message me to receive a free chapter.)
Introducing “work-family enrichment”
We often think and talk about the relationship between our most demanding life roles as being a conflictual one. Hence the term “work-family conflict.” But there is another relationship between those roles that scientists have cleverly (hah) dubbed “work-family enrichment.”
This was science I was invited to share last week during the annual retreat of an incredible non-profit called Questbridge. Their mission is to connect “the nation’s brightest students from low-income backgrounds with leading institutions of higher education and further opportunities.” Check out the student stories on their website if you need a dose of inspiration. And as much as they inspired me, they also seemed taken with the concept of work-family conflict, motivating me to spend time today digging into the science.
Role tension: a fixed or expandable pie?
Here I am at the Questbridge retreat, presenting a slide of two ways we might think about the relationship between our roles. On the left side, you can see the common “fixed pie” perspective, where we think of our roles as fighting for our finite resources. Whatever one role gets is a loss for the other. You go to work, your kids miss out on time with you. You stay home on a day that your kid is sick, your colleagues lose.
Cue the guilt. And the fatigue. And the resentment that social policy, our workplaces, and our partnerships don’t do more to make this whole situation more tolerable.
None of this is a figment of our imaginations. The conflict is real and the science confirms that life roles do, indeed, compete for our finite resources. But a zero-sum competition isn’t the entire story.
To the right of the “finite pie” sits the “expandable pie,” represented with the Taoist symbol of yin-yang. This symbol shows how forces that seem to conflict with one another often do something else, a something that we might enjoy more: they foster a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. This is what is meant by work-family enrichment. And it, too, is a real experience that many of us have.
The trouble is that when we focus on work-family conflict, we may overlook experiences of enrichment. And can miss out on opportunities to use role tension in ways that benefit us. In fact, an abundance of research shows, how we think about the relationship between roles helps to shape how we experience it.
The Yin and Yang of Role Tension
So let’s reflect on how we can think about the tension between roles from an expansionist perspective. One that doesn’t deny the reality of finite resources, but which does offer opportunities to take advantage of role tension when and where it’s possible.
Consider, first, how according to Taoist philosophy, yin and yang lie at the core of a natural order. Yin-yang can be translated as “positive-negative” and graphically represented as dark and light intertwined shapes each containing a dot of the other. The two fish shapes sit in opposition to one another, yet the force they exact upon each other can foster greater harmony.
From a Taoist perspective, tension between opposing forces is integral to harmony, balance, and effectiveness. With this in mind, we can consider the tension between our most demanding life roles as a force we can use to foster greater success and happiness.
Three Pathways of Enrichment
There are three unique pathways for working parents to experience enrichment, according to a scientific review and informal analyses I did of the dozens of interviews I conducted for my book.
The Transfer Pathway.
The transfer pathway reflects that whatever roles we need to step into are likely to offer some kind of skill, perspective, or knowledge in a different area of life that can helpfully feed back into whatever role you’ve stepped away from. That realization not only keeps you on the lookout for ways that your roles can offer gifts to each other, but also helps to alleviate the guilt when you do need to step away.
In Work, Parent, Thrive, I dive deep into the science of creativity and how pressure to step from one role to another offers opportunities to adopt fresh perspective on problems (consider asking your kids what they think of your work challenges. They may offer something surprising!).
Creativity also gets activated when we stop consciously focusing on a problem. Ceasing to focus on a given problem allows a part of your brain known as the default mode network to wake up. It is in this brain region that some of our most creative thinking happens. So, while it can feel frustrating to need to end a work day right in the middle of a task, it may be that you get a creative benefit by stepping from one role into another.
From skill-building, perspective getting, or creativity, the possibilities for the transfer effect are really endless when we remain on the lookout for them.
The Buffering Pathway.
Having multiple roles involves lots of different places to be. This offers an opportunity to have stress in one part of life complemented by a different (sometimes even positive!) experience in the other. On the most painful of days, your bumpiest role will get interrupted when you need to step into a less-rotten role.
This pathway also offers us an opportunity for something that burnout researchers call “psychological detachment,” a fancy way of describing fully turning off a role. Studies on psychological detachment roundly show that burnout decreases when we routinely detach. And studies also show that it’s easier to turn off one role when we step into another one that is either physically or cognitively demanding (I discussed this in an earlier newsletter with author of Rest, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang).
We can grow deliberate practices that help us psychologically detach as we step from one role into another. For instance, we can put our phones away for pockets of time while we are with our family or friends. And we can use mindfulness practices to bring our attention to work tasks when our minds drift to other role demands.
The Additive Pathway.
Multiple roles pull us in many different directions. And that’s a good thing (even though can be overwhelming)! Participating in multiple meaningful roles contributes to greater breadth of life experiences and greater opportunity to create meaning through living.
The well-being benefits of having many life roles was first published in the late nineteenth century by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim researched various social factors that contributed to suicide, collecting data from across Europe and grouping people in various ways: by soldier versus civilian status, religious affiliation, gender, marital status, and so on. No matter how he grouped the data, individuals who had more obligations and constraints were less likely to commit suicide. Having more roles, despite the greater number of obligations, is a good thing (this is a general rule—there are, of course, extents to which this no longer applies).
We can find benefit in the science-backed strategies of rest and subtraction to help prevent overwhelm. But even as we manage the “too-muchness” of a life with multiple demanding roles, we can appreciate that a happy life is a full life.
A powerful mindset shift.
We are inundated with messages that roles necessarily conflict with one another. It’s a depressing message—and an inaccurate one.
When it comes to a life involving multiple demanding roles, there is sure to be conflict. But if we adopt a work-family enrichment mindset, we may see opportunities to transform that conflict into something that works better for our families, our jobs, and our own life satisfaction. In one study, researchers conducted an experiment in which they exposed female employees with young kids to either a fixed pie or expandable pie perspective. They found that exposure to the expandable pie perspective made it easier to appreciate the possibilities of combining life roles more positively.
That is not to say that a work-family enrichment mindset can undo crummy days of overwhelm. It can’t. Still, thinking about the way that role tension can foster enrichment opens a whole new world of possibilities. I’ve been told by organizations I’ve presented for, book readers, and the dozens of working parents that I interviewed that getting curious about how role tension can offer enrichment helps to shift mindsets. It helps people to notice and amplify their own work-family enrichment.
What do you think? Do you find yourself pondering ways that your various roles help each other out in ways you’ve not previously considered? What are those ways?
If your interest is piqued, you can buy the book (below) or message me for a free copy of the first chapter.
Elsewhere on the Internet…
Some relationship content I was moved by this week:
Grief is something we don’t talk enough about in our society, leaving grievers feeling more alone. But the science of what happens to the brain can normalize the process, and it can help those not grieving understand how to offer better support. Check out this terrific Washington Post piece for more.
This was a fascinating Wall Street Journal article on why frequently asking kids “how they’re feeling” can be problematic. The research here is fascinating, with “a raft of studies shows that people who fixate on how they feel moment to moment are not only less likely to complete tasks but also more likely to struggle with self-control, with higher rates of alcohol consumption and less success with dieting.” Important food for thought not only on asking others how they’re feeling, but also asking ourselves.
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LOVE the idea of the fixed pie vs the adjustable pie!!! brilliant