The struggle to balance work and family life is stressing out working dads almost as much as it’s stressing out working moms, leaving many parents with young children feeling like they are always rushed.

A new report from Pew Research Center finds that 56 percent of working moms and 50 percent of working dads with kids under 18 say they find it difficult to balance both their work and their family responsibilities.

That’s leaving many parents feeling like there just aren’t enough hours in the day. The report, based on a survey Pew completed in late 2012, found that 40 percent of working moms and 34 percent of working dads feel like they are always rushed.

The findings come as more moms are taking on the working role that more typically fell to dad a generation or two ago, and more dads are taking on the household responsibilities that mom mostly took on in the 1960s and 1970s.

Brett Deering for msnbc.com

Dustin Baylor, seen here in 2012 with sons Paxton, left, and Garrison, has struggled to balance his responsibilities as a doctor and a dad. A new Pew study finds that nearly as many dads as moms find it hard to juggle work and family responsibilities.

Meanwhile, women such as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter are sparking a refreshed debate over how, or if, women can “have it all.” That's something plenty of dads have told TODAY they struggle with as well.

One thing seems clear: Most parents want to spend time with their kids, whether they work or not.

Mom and Dad are spending significantly more time on child care than in the 1960s, and yet many dads especially think that it’s still not enough. The Pew data found that 46 percent of dads think they spend too little time with their children, while 23 percent of moms feel the same way.

That may be because, although roles are converging, moms are still spending more time on family and home life, while dads are spending more time at the office.

Pew Research Center

As roles change, everyone is getting stressed out.

According to Pew’s analysis of the Census Bureau’s long-running American Time Use Survey, moms with kids under 18 typically spent 13.5 hours a week on direct child care in 2011, compared to 10.2 hours a week in 1965. Dads spent 7.3 hours a week on child care in 2011, up from 2.5 hours a week in 1965.

The analysis also found that moms with kids under 18 are spending 17.8 hours a week on housework, down from 31.9 hours per week in 1965. Dads are spending 9.8 hours a week on housework, compared with 4.4 hours in 1965.

Not all parents with kids under 18 are working outside the home. But among parents who are employed, moms spend an average of 33 hours at work, dad spend an average of 41.4 hours at work.

The weak economy appears to have prompted more moms to say they would like to work full time, even though few Americans think that is what is best for children.

The Pew survey found that 32 percent of moms with kids under 18 say they would like to work full time, up from 20 percent in 2007, the year the nation went into recession. The nation has officially been in recovery for more than three years, but economic conditions remain challenging and unemployment is still higher than most would like.

Meanwhile, the share of moms who said they don’t want to work at all fell from 29 percent in 2007 to 20 percent when the most recent survey was conducted in late 2012.

Working part time remained the most popular option, with about half of moms saying that’s what they’d like to do best both in 2007 and now.

That’s also the situation that the biggest chunk of Americans think is good for kids. The Pew survey found that 42 percent of adults think it is best for mom to work part time, while 16 percent say it’s ideal for mom to work full time.

The remaining approximately one-third of adults surveyed thought that it was best for mom to be home full time with the kids.

Related:

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• Working women respond to Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’ revolution

For many women, having it all is less of a choice and more of a necessity. Bills need to get paid, kids need to be mothered and dirty clothes need to be cleaned. The weak economy may have even made things even worse: Government data shows that more married women are even becoming primary breadwinners.

While women may be working more and perhaps even earning more than the men in their lives, chances are a lot of the responsibilities of home still fall on their shoulders. Forget balance; many women are simply striving for work-life survival. Luckily, in this technological age, there are many technological solutions available to help a working gal have it all without completely losing it.

Outsource it

From cleaning the house to picking up the dry cleaning, there are a lot of mundane chores that need to get done. While you’d have to be a 1 percenter to outsource all those pesky tasks, you still may be able to unload a few time-consuming chores from your plate.

But why not pretend like you’re a 1 percenter and get yourself a personal assistant, if only on an occasional basis? Websites like DoMyStuff.com, GetFriday.com and AskSunday.com might be able to get you the help you need.

DoMyStuff.com allows you to post jobs you need done, whether it’s picking up supplies for your daughter’s birthday party or finishing a project around the house. People bid on the job, you review the applicants, pick a winner and off you go. GetFriday.com and AskSunday.com are truly outsourcing -– to India. GetFriday.com offers you a virtual assistant for $15 an hour plus a $10 per month fee. AskSunday.com’s basic plan gets you 10 hours of assistance per month for $119. People have used these services for everything from planning weddings and vacations to researching work projects.

If a personal assistant from India feels too foreign for you, you can always turn to the web to find help outsourcing other tasks and jobs. Sites like SitterCity.com offer access to babysitters. Find a dog walker or housekeeper on craigslist.org.

Get organized

Those niggling chores swirling in your head often increase your stress. A simple to-do list often helps clarify what needs to get done. There is a slew of apps and websites that can help you organize everything from grocery lists to busy family calendars.

One of the most popular is cozi.com, a free website that allows family members to access and update a shared calendar. Cozi also offers to-do list and shopping list managers, which can all be accessed on your smartphone. Cozi CEO and co-founder Robbie Cape noted that families spend a lot of their time communicating logistics. If you can streamline that, family time is freed up for more meaningful conversations.

Scanning all of your important documents and organizing them on your computer can help cut down on both clutter and search time when you need it. Everything from the preschool phone tree to receipts you need for taxes can be scanned and stored electronically.

Stop wasting time updating your Rolodex and let your contacts do it for you. Victoria Ransom, co-founder and CEO of Wildfire, a social media marketing company, advises workers to join the professional networking site, LinkedIn. “Staying connected on a professional level is so important,” Ransom said.

Multi-task

Why flip through an old issue of Good Housekeeping while waiting for the doctor when you could be ordering your groceries or paying bills on your smartphone? Most banks have decent apps for accessing and managing your accounts from your phone. Sites like drugstore.com and Amazon.com allow you to order life’s little necessities and have them delivered to your door. If you take a bus or a train, just imagine all of the tasks you can check off your to-do list during your commute. 

Go virtual

Go virtual or go home. Wait, staying home is the point of going virtual. For those who can swing it, working remotely can have huge benefits. Gone are the commute times and travel costs. Money spent on lunches out and work clothes are significantly reduced, all stress savers.  Kim Burchett, senior manager of adoption services at Vidyo, has been working remotely for years. “Working from home has relieved stress. I still have a professional career and I don’t have to miss out on raising my family,” Burchett said via videoconference. As videoconference technology has improved and costs have dropped, more companies are willing to allow employees to work remotely, at least part of the time.

Videoconferencing doesn’t just allow you to stay connected to the office from home; it also allows you to connect to home when you’re away for work. Burchett recounted a time when her husband was in China for business, forcing him to miss their daughter’s swim meet. Burchett set up a videoconference on her iPad, allowing him watch the whole race in real time.

Join an online group, which can easily hook you up with helpful recommendations and resources. Yahoo! Groups have many moms and professionals groups to join, where you can ask online acquaintances for advice on everything from daycares to plumbers, saving you valuable time.

Schedule downtime

Log onto Outlook and schedule yourself a couple of 15-minute breaks every day. You’re more likely to step away and get a short, much-needed break if you get a reminder for it. Take a walk or do something to clear your head. Sometimes, stepping back for just a few minutes can help give you clarity and renewed energy.

Dana Macario is a Seattle-area writer who’s always looking for ways to make the juggle easier.

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An intriguing new study suggests that men are happier and less stressed when they do more of the housework.

Published as part of a new book, the study looks at how household chores are divvied up in families and at how that division of labor affects the well-being and stress of moms and dads. The study scrutinized data collected by the European Social Survey.

Cambridge University researchers Jacqueline Scott and Anke Plagnol suspected that men would be less happy when they took on more of the housework, which they defined as cooking, shopping and cleaning. “Engaging in housework may be more demeaning for men,” they wrote.

So it was a big surprise to them when it turned out that men were actually happier and less stressed when household chores were equally shared by men and women. “Our findings indicate that our expectation is completely wrong,” the researchers wrote in the book, “Gendered Lives: Gender Inequalities in Production and Reproduction."

The researchers were also surprised by the number of dual-income families that shared household chores equally: almost one in five. And another 9 percent reported that most of the housework was being done by men. Nevertheless, Scott and her coauthor found that more than 68 percent of families were still reporting most of the housework being done by women.

When the woman was the breadwinner, more men were stepping up to the plate. A full 22 percent of those households reported that men were doing most of the housework, with 15 percent reporting an equal division, vs. 57 percent where the woman did most of the household chores.

Men, as it turns out, reported more work-family conflict when women did most of the household chores. And their scores for well-being were also lower. Interestingly, the researchers reported, “the well-being of men is significantly reduced when housework is done mainly by women, but this is not the case for women.”

Though there were no data to explain why men were happier and less stressed when doing more housework, the researchers have their theories. “Men who leave the chores to women may be subject to more complaints than men who do their share of home chores,” the researchers suggested. “It is also plausible that some men want a more equitable role in the home and their well-being is reduced when the pressure of their jobs gets in the way.”

Scott and Plagnol suspect that men might be more willing to share housework equally if they knew there were benefits to the arrangement.

“Our study points to wider benefits for men who do their fair share of the housework,” they wrote. “Men today play a far greater role in home and child care than their fathers or grandfathers. It might help change move faster if the benefits of a more equitable divide became more widely known.”

Linda Carroll is coauthor of "The Concussion Crisis: Anatomy of a Silent Epidemic."

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Britt Erlanson / Getty Images

Over the last two decades, work and life have transformed so radically that the language we use (e.g. “balance") and the beliefs we hold about the decisions we “should” or “can” make are often out of date.

Here are three examples of work-life assumptions that are frequently wrong -- and costly:

Wrong assumption No. 1: When a woman has a baby, she will want to work part-time (or not at all), and won’t want to take on more responsibility or travel.

Unfortunately, some leaders, managers and colleagues of women in the workplace still make this assumption.

This bias is based on beliefs that continue to influence behavior, even though they no longer broadly apply. For example, Gayle Lemmon recently wrote an article in The Atlantic about research that showed some men in traditional marriages still unconsciously overlook women in the workplace for promotion, etc. because of their assumptions about women and the role they play. In reality, only 29 percent of children have a stay-at-home parent. The rest either live in a single parent home or both parents work for pay.

• Why it’s costly: It costs women in that it reinforces the well-documented “motherhood penalty” that affects their career advancement and earnings. It’s costly to employers because the business doesn’t have access to or develop the talent of some of its best employees.
• Assumption update: Don’t assume. Discuss preferences which each individual woman. After having a child, some women will want or have to work full-time. They’ll be happy to travel and welcome additional responsibilities. And even if they don’t, women who choose to scale back their career may want to only for a certain period of time. Not forever.

Wrong assumption No. 2: Men don’t care about work-life issues.

This is an extension of the previous inaccurate assumption. The bias is that work-life is a women’s issue, or more specifically, a mothers’ issue.

From my experience working inside companies, most men care quite a bit about how they manage their lives on and off the job and want to be invited into the conversation. In fact, research shows that men in dual-earner couples are experiencing more work-life conflict than women.

• Why it’s costly: It costs men because they don’t feel that they have permission to get the support and flexibility they need to manage their work and life better and smarter. Employers lose the productivity and engagement from unnecessarily stressed and overwhelmed men.
• Assumption update: We all need to manage our work-life fit everyday if we want to see our friends and family, stay healthy, etc. That includes men and women. And all of us will experience major life transitions that will require a more formal reset of our work-life fit, whether it’s becoming a parent, caring for an aging relative, relocating with a spouse, going back to school or semi-retiring.

Wrong assumption No. 3: You can’t have a life and start a successful business.

 Whether it’s Steve Jobs’ complete devotion to Apple at the expense of time with his family, or Tony Hsieh’s expectation that Zappos employees spend 10 to 20 percent of their time outside of work with one another, the assumed gold standard of successful entrepreneurship is 100 percent work to the exclusion of everything else.

• Why it’s costly: It scares off many women and men with great business ideas but want to tuck their kids in on occasion and maintain a relationship beyond the people at work. The economy as a whole loses because jobs that are badly needed are not created. It costs potential entrepreneurs, especially women, because they don’t have access to as much capital to grow their businesses.
• Assumption update: No one will ever have “balance,” but you can grow a successful business and still have some life outside of work. There are plenty of examples of people doing it and doing it well. This includes the mothers leading successful entrepreneurial ventures who were featured in a recent New York Times article written by Hannah Seligson. Is it hard work? Yes. Can it be done? Yes.

The answer is to assume nothing when it comes to how we want and need to manage our lives on and off the job in a busy, flexible, hectic modern world. Not only are our assumptions often wrong, but they can be costly to both the individual and the business. Instead let’s keep talking to each other. Learn the facts and come up with unique answers that meet our personal needs and the needs of our jobs.

What are the incorrect assumptions that you see people making about work and life? What’s the cost and how can we update those beliefs to match today’s reality?

Cali Williams Yost is the CEO and Founder of the Flex+Strategy Group / Work+Life Fit, Inc., flexible work and life strategy advisors. Her second work+life fit book,” Tweak It: Small Changes, Big Impact—Make What Matters to You Happen Every Day” will be published  in January, 2013. Connect with Cali on Twitter @caliyost.

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The debate over whether working women can have it all and who’s to blame if they don’t is getting lots of attention this week because another high-powered woman entered the fray.

“I believe that we can ‘have it all at the same time.’ But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured,” writes Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former U.S. State Department official, in an article titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” in The Atlantic this week.

Courtesy of Princeton

Anne-Marie Slaughter

Slaughter is a Princeton politics professor who left her job last year as director of policy planning in the State Department in part to spend more time with her family. Her essay has brought the issue to the forefront nationally, creating a dialogue that could be a watershed moment for the work-life-balance wrangle.

With women now making up about 50 percent of the workforce, working mothers are brushing aside the mommy wars and finally asking hard questions about whether the 1950s "Company Man" model needs a serious retooling. Given that women still make less than their male counterparts and hold fewer than 20 percent of the corner office seats, everyone is wondering when equity will finally come to the workplace and make it more friendly for working women.

Slaughter sees her piece as a call to action.

"What we know about culture change is that there are tipping points," she told the New York Times' parenting blog Thursday. "Norms can change dramatically. On the one hand, it’s harder because we can’t point to very specific things and say, change that, but once it starts changing, it’s likely to change much faster than we’d expect. I’m basically trying to give people the space to start demanding those kinds of changes." 

The key question, what needs to change? 

Two well-known successful women with divergent thoughts on the issue are at the heart of this debate.

In one corner is Slaughter, who believes working moms have been sold a bill of goods when it comes to work-life balance. In the other corner is Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, who’s gotten work-life-acclaim for her candid views during an Internet video TED Talk in 2010, and subsequent speeches, on how women can juggle it all if they work hard enough.

Mike Segar / Reuters

Sheryl Sandberg

From Slaughter’s article:

“I still strongly believe that women can ‘have it all’ (and that men can too). I believe that we can ‘have it all at the same time.’ But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured.” 

From Sandberg’s talk:

“If two years ago you didn’t take a promotion and some guy next to you did. If Three years ago you stopped looking for new opportunities, you’re going to be bored because you should have kept your foot on the gas pedal. Don’t leave before you leave. Stay in. Keep your foot on the gas pedal until the very day you need to leave to take a break for a child.”

Slaughter actually called Sandberg out on her statements, writing: “Although couched in terms of encouragement, Sandberg’s exhortation contains more than a note of reproach. We who have made it to the top, or are striving to get there, are essentially saying to the women in the generation behind us: ‘What’s the matter with you?’”

On Friday, the New York Times weighed in on the issue with its own piece titled “Elite Women Put New Spin on Old Debate Over Balancing Work and Family” by Jodi Kantor.

Slaughter’s article, Kantor writes, “added to a renewed feminist conversation that is bringing fresh twists to bear on longstanding concerns about status, opportunity and family. Unlike earlier iterations, it is being led not by agitators who are out of power, but by elite women at the top of their fields, like the comedian Tina Fey, the Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg and now Ms. Slaughter. In contrast to some earlier barrier-breakers from Gloria Steinem to Condoleezza Rice, these women have children, along with husbands who do as much child-rearing as they do, or more.”

While women like Slaughter and Sandberg have the prominence to get their voices heard, are they really speaking for average working women? 

We’d love to hear from all of you on what you think needs to be done to accommodate women in the workplace today. Please share your ideas with us on how your employer can better help you juggle work and family. 

We hear a lot these days about how we’re working harder than ever and struggling with work/life balance. So we were surprised by a new survey finding that most vacation goers actually plan to leave work at the office this summer.

The survey - conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of jobs website Glassdoor - found that around 65 percent of workers who are taking a vacation this summer expect to check out of work completely.

Only 13 percent of the vacationing employees said they are expected to work while on vacation, and another 18 percent said they’d only have to work in an emergency.

The figures excluded people who said they were self-employed. The survey of around 2,000 people was conducted online in June.

OECD

We talk a lot about being workaholics here in the United States, but it turns out we've got plenty of competition when it comes to keeping busy.

A study of 34 countries has found that Mexican, Japanese and Portuguese nationals spend the most time each day on work, studying and household chores.

Belgians, Danes and Germans spend the least amount of time on both paid and unpaid work, according to the study from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

And as for us Americans? Despite our reputation for being all work and no play, we ranked ninth, after countries including Austria and Canada.

The OECD said the research was broken down into two categories: paid work and study, and unpaid work such as cooking, cleaning and shopping. The organization used time use surveys and other data to come up with the rankings of its 34 member countries.

It looked at people’s time commitments over all seven days of the week, including holidays, and included both employed and unemployed people ages 15 to 64. That explains why the daily tallies may seem relatively low.

Although Japanese and Mexican people worked most, the breakdown between paid and unpaid work was slightly different.

The researchers found that Mexican people spent nearly 10 hours per day on working, studying and doing chores over the seven-day week. That included about 5.7 hours a day on paid work or studying, and the rest on chores.

Japanese people spent slightly more time on paid work or study --  6.3 hours per day -– but  less time on chores.

In the United States, people spent about 8.2 hours per day on paid and unpaid work, including 4.8 hours each day on the job or studying.

The Belgians seem to have really figured out this work/life balance thing. The researchers said they spend about 3.8 hours each day on work and study, plus another 3.3 hours on other chores.

The OECD, formed in the wake of World War II and funded by its member countries, seeks to promote policies that will improve people’s economic and social well-being.

Tip of the hat to Business Insider, which first reported on the study.

Looking back years from now, 2010 will probably not turn out to be the year when lots of employees focused on their work/life balance.

The uncertain economy and high unemployment rate left many Americans nervous about the job market and anxious to hold onto their jobs. For many, it also meant doing more work and perhaps even taking less personal time, according to a survey from the jobs website Careerbuilder.com.

About half of the more than 3,000 workers surveyed in August and September said their workloads had increased in the past six months. A little more than one-quarter said they had not taken a personal or sick day in the past few years — the same amount that reported health issues tied to work stress.

We all know that cell phones, laptops and other devices are blurring the line between home and work, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many people are working even when they aren’t at work.

About one-third of workers surveyed said they bring home work about once a week, and about one quarter said they still think about work when they are at home or out socially.

Many also seem to be staying late at the office. About half of those surveyed said they work more than 40 hours a week.

Of course, for some of us, focusing more on work and less on home may have been a welcome trend. For 15 percent of respondents, being at work was preferable to being at home.