"Like being pecked to death by a chicken": Resilience and work-family equilibrium in teacher/mothers

Teachers are helping professionals for whom caring work is a significant aspect of the job. Conflicts between work and family demands arise from various antecedent work, home, and personal features and have been linked to negative effects on mental health and quality of life, as well as increased rates of burnout. This research investigated whether mothers and non-mothers differ in their reported experiences of wellness at work and home. Using teachers as a proxy for helping professionals, this research used mixed methods to explore whether there might be observable differences between the experiences of women who are parents with children at home, compared to those who are child-free. A sample of British Columbia teachers (n = 182) was surveyed to seek quantifiable within-profession differences in measures of stress, work/life conflicts, and/or resilience between groups of K–12 teachers, based on whether or not they had children at home. These surveys also provided opportunities for participants to share stories of challenging experiences and the resilience strategies they used to work through them. A subsample of the survey group of teacher/mothers analyzed and made sense of the collected stories in light of the quantitative results and their own experiences as part of the process of Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI), which comprised the qualitative portion of this research and resulted in suggestions of many strategies. Statistically, it appears parent and non-parent teachers may differ only in the greater extent to which the former report family demands to interfere with the time and effort they can spend at or on work. In general, teachers reported similar challenges regardless of whether they were mothers and may use similar resilience strategies (such as self-efficacy) to support them in their caring work. Formal elucidation of these strategies may facilitate the translation of this research into meaningful supports and strategies to facilitate equilibrium between work and home for all helping professionals.