The Trap of Flexibility in ‘family-friendly’ Professions: Assessing Teachers’ Quality of Family Time Through Temporal Indicators

Using time use diary data collected among 2603 teachers from the Flemish community of Belgium, this article investigates the ‘family friendliness’ of the teaching profession by exploring the family time of teachers in couple households with children. Teachers are an interesting case as the teaching profession is heavily feminised and considered to be a ‘family friendly’ occupation; it allows to synchronize the workers’ schedule with their children’s. Flexible work arrangements such as schedule or work-place flexibility function as so called ‘boundary-spanning strategies’. However, research on the impact of flexible work on work-life balance has shown mixed results. This paper develops a number of time-use based indicators to measure the quality of family time and validates these by relating them to work-life balance. Subsequently, it is assessed how teachers’ use of work time flexibility affects the quality of family time to evaluate whether this flexibility can be understood as a resource for increasing work-family balance. Results show that teachers with children have a better quality of family time and subsequently a better work-life balance if they work on standard hours rather than using their schedule flexibility to optimize the amount of family time.