Home Relationships and Work Behaviour, Part I: Family Relations in the Multi‐Worker Family

In many studies of the family there is an assumption that the family unit consists of the father as the principal (or even sole) wage earner and contributor to the family finance, with the mother having a subordinate role in earning; the children are usually seen, in this idealised account, as living at home and being financially dependent on the parents. Dennis, Henriques and Slaughter, for example, describe the family as “normally a group of father, mother and children all dependent upon the wage of the father”. The family, however, is not static, but changes in structure and function over time. In a very early study, for example, Rowntree suggested that, after the financial difficulty of the child rearing phase, there came a stage of relative affluence when unmarried children are working, still living at home, and contributing to the total family income.