Mum and dad both work in nearly half of US families

What hasn’t changed: the difficulty of balancing it all. The median income for families where both parents work full time is $102,400, according to the recent Pew survey.

There’s an education gap in how parents view their ability to balance work and family life.

Yet, USA policy lags behind most other developed economies when it comes to supporting households where both parents work – or where just one parent is working and holding everything together.

“This is not an individual problem, it is a social problem”, said Mary Blair-Loy, a sociologist and the founding director of the Center for Research on Gender in the Professions at the University of California, San Diego. It’s also possible that kids of college-educated parents might be involved in more activities because the family has more resources. Yet today, families mostly figure out the juggle on their own.

Pew’s survey of more than 1,800 parents across the country, conducted this fall, found both men and women struggle to balance job responsibilities with family life. More than three-quarters of mothers and half of fathers in the United States said they had passed up work opportunities, switched jobs or quit to tend to their kids. When both parents work full time, the woman is the top earner 22 percent of the time. Still, figuring out how to manage work and parenting has been hard. “You’re not spending as much time with your baby as you want, you’re not doing the job you want to be doing at work, you’re not seeing your friends hardly ever”. Horowitz said that men and women both said they were equally focused, although 60 percent who said that also noted that the father earns more than the mother. “It’s also good for each of them as individuals, as well as for their children”.

Parents don’t have time for bad journalism.

More than 80 percent of working parents say they feel rushed at least a few of the time.

This rings true to Gault Caviness, who says that black women, in particular, can be stoic, which is also why they may feel less judged than white moms.

Historically, white and black mothers have been more likely to work outside the home than Asian and Latina mothers, and foreign-born mothers have been particularly likely to stay home, Pew has found. Same-sex parents were included in the survey but were too small of a sample to break out separately, a Pew spokesperson said.

Fathers, for their part, put in more time at work, but here, too, the difference is modest.

The shift has economic implications. Just 26 percent of households fit the “traditional” model of parental labor, in which the father works full time and the mother does not work outside the home.

“As they’re being squeezed harder at work, the pressures for egalitarian parenting are increasing at home”, Blair-Loy said. “African-Americans, on average, have higher poverty and lower level types of jobs (such that perhaps when they leave the workplace at night, they no longer have work responsibilities), higher religiosity, and are twice as likely to live in extended-family households”, she says. “It is a long-standing observation that black couples have a more equal division of household labor between husbands and wives than white couples do”, he tells Yahoo Parenting.