Analysis: U.S. cities with the hardest-working parents

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Parents have always had to juggle a lot of responsibilities, including careers, children, personal relationships and hobbies. The workload on today’s parents has only increased in recent years as a result of the growing size of American families and the rise of dual-income households.

After falling for many decades since the mid 1980s, the average family size in America has inched higher. Among families with children under 18, the number of kids increased from a low of 1.81 per family in 1987 to 1.9 per family in 2018. Middle-income parents will spend $233,610 raising a child through age 17 (for a kid born in 2015), according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That doesn’t even include college.

Even while families have grown, so has parental participation in the workforce. Compared to decades past, today’s two-parent families are more likely to both work full-time, according to Pew Research.

In 1970, both spouses worked full-time in only 31% of two-parent households; by 2015, that number was 46%. According to 2017 Census data, over 78% of parents are employed in some capacity and 64% work full-time, among families with children under 18 (including two-parent and single-parent households).

It’s worth noting that Americans today tend to work fewer hours and have more flexible schedules. That said, technology has transformed the way we work, when we work and what qualifies as work.

According to Gallup’s 2017 State of the American Workplace report, 43% of U.S. employees work remotely at least some of the time, a four-percentage-point increase from 2012. While telecommuting offers workers more flexibility, it also creates pressure to bring work home.

Research from the University of Toronto found that about 50% of people bring their work home, leading to higher stress and interference in personal life. Always being “on call” blurs the distinction between work and home and affects the time families spend together.

With these trends in mind, researchers at Fabric wanted to find which cities have the hardest-working parents. To do this, they analyzed data from the U.S. Census on parents with kids under 18. They created a composite score—referred to below as the “work index”—based on the following factors:

Average total working and commuting time for parents
Percentage of parents employed full-time
Percentage of parents not employed
Average number of children under 18

In addition to looking at employment and commuting statistics—a reflection of workload outside of the home—Fabric considered the average number of kids in each household as an indicator of workload at home. Only metropolitan areas with at least 100,000 people were included and metros were grouped based on population size.

First, they identified small and midsize cities where parents work the hardest.

Then, they crunched the numbers to identify the top ten big cities with the hardest-working parents. Here’s what they found.