ABSTRACT
Paid work and family life are becoming parallel life priorities for which people may have different motivations. Studies about the role of men and women in paid work and the family confirm, from a structural point of view, that the family has a constraining influence for women in the sphere of paid work, while paid work strongly limits the men’s participation in family life. Positive psycho-social influences, however, go both ways, that is, from family to paid work and vice versa. Social relations with family members are as important as relations with workmates also for more than half of the respondents in the Slovenian sample and half of the respondents in the Hungarian sample. Patterns of interaction between paid work and the family are complex and changing due to singular and interactive effects of broad social, cohort-specific and life-cycle-specific changes and processes of personal development. Women organise and are responsible for most of the household tasks.
