Did the Pandemic Reduce Work–Life Conflict? It Depends on Whether You Had Young Children
When lockdowns shut down social life and brought work into the home, the tension between work and the rest of life shifted in unexpected ways — but not for everyone equally.
What we studied
Work-life conflict is the feeling that your job prevents you from concentrating on important things in your personal life, that you don't have enough time or energy for the people you care about, or that work keeps you from doing what you would otherwise want to do at home or with friends. Before the pandemic, this was a familiar source of stress for many working Canadians.
Then the pandemic hit. Overnight, social life outside the home nearly disappeared — restaurants, gyms, gatherings, events. At the same time, many workers began working from home, and schools and daycares closed. We had tracked a nationally representative sample of Canadian workers since September 2019, which put us in a rare position: we had data on work-life conflict from before the pandemic, and we could follow those same people into April and June 2020 to see what changed.
The core question was simple: did the pandemic increase or decrease work-life conflict — and did that depend on whether workers had children at home?
What we found
Overall, work-life conflict decreased during the early months of the pandemic. With social and personal life outside the home largely shut down, there was simply less for work to compete with. We call this the restricted life spheres effect: when life contracts, so does the friction between work and life.
But not everyone benefited equally. For workers with children under 13 at home, the relief never came. New caregiving and educational demands cancelled out whatever pandemic-era reduction in outside commitments other workers experienced. Teens could manage more independently, and by June some social restrictions had eased — but parents of young children were left carrying the same burden as before, or more.
The pandemic created a "tale of two households." For workers without young children, the lockdown effectively reduced work-life friction. For parents of children under 13, the new pressure inside the home cancelled out that relief. There was less "life" outside the home for work to interfere with — but inside the home, children represented a potent countervailing force.
The study also found that workers who regularly did their job from home — those with high work-home integration — experienced these patterns more intensely. For them, work and family demands were completely overlapping in the same space at the same time, amplifying the conflict for parents of young children while delivering a larger relief to the child-free.
One finding that surprised the research team: gender did not clearly change these patterns. Both mothers and fathers with young children experienced the same lack of relief. While other research documents that mothers bore a disproportionate share of pandemic caregiving, this study's measures of work-life conflict did not detect clear or consistent gender differences — a finding the authors treat with caution and flag as a direction for future research.
What this means
Three evidence-based suggestions follow from these findings.
Recognize that "working from home" does not mean the same thing for everyone
This study shows that remote work during a school and daycare shutdown was a fundamentally different experience for parents of young children than for workers without children at home. Policies and expectations designed around the idea that remote workers have undivided working time can create invisible burdens for parents. Employers should build in explicit recognition of caregiving demands — through flexible scheduling, reasonable output expectations during periods of school disruption, and genuine accommodations that go beyond formal policy.
School and childcare closures are a work policy issue, not just an education policy issue
One of the clearest implications of this study is that the closure of schools and daycares did not simply shift childcare to families — it shifted it directly into the middle of the working day for employed parents. When institutions that normally provide care and education during work hours close, the burden lands on working parents in real time. Any future emergency planning that involves school or daycare closures should treat the labour market consequences for parents — and particularly parents of younger children — as a central consideration alongside public health goals.
Work-life conflict is not just a "parents" issue — but parenthood of young children makes it distinctly harder
The finding that workers without children at home experienced a meaningful decrease in work-life conflict during the pandemic challenges the assumption that work-life conflict is primarily about family. Restricted social life, fewer commitments, and fewer demands outside the home reduced friction for many people — including those without children. Understanding work-life conflict as something shaped by the full range of life demands, not just parenting, gives a fuller picture of who struggles and why — and points toward more inclusive workplace and policy conversations about how all workers manage the boundary between job and life.