3rd Annual Family Research Conference

Introduction: 

Dual-earner households are now the norm across urban and peri-urban Kenya. Yet, public discourse still treats work and family as separate worlds. One is public and demanding. The other is private and secondary. 

New research involving 41 working parents suggests this picture is wrong on every count. Many working parents are not failing to balance two domains. Instead, they are absorbing the cost of a legal and institutional system that was never built to recognise the two as connected at all. Work itself, the research finds, does not sit neutrally alongside family life. 

These findings unfold across four connected themes. First, the work-family binary itself does not hold as a stable, shared frame. Participants hold plural, sometimes contradictory theories of whether work and family are even separable. Second, where the ideal of balance persists, parents and spouses often internalise their failure to reach it as personal. Structural conditions, constant digital connectivity, unsupported remote and hybrid arrangements, transfer, hiring, pay and posting policies indifferent to caregiving, understaffing, and thinning social support, are converted into private narratives of inadequacy. Third, the research traces this displacement to its legal root: employment law’s thin, transactional conception of work which fails to recognise the relationship between the work and family it purports to regulate, leaving individuals to bear structurally-produced strain alone. Fourth, and most fundamentally, work itself is found to be capable of humanising or dehumanising the person who performs it. It can sustain capability through purpose and connection, or erode it under structural failure, with consequences that extend into marriage, parenting, and mental health.

Taken together, these findings suggest that a work-family balance standard, applied uniformly, is not only descriptively inadequate for many of these parents. It risks being normatively harmful, positioning them as personally responsible for a condition the research locates squarely in law, policy, and institutional design.

Key contributions:

This is a comprehensive qualitative account of how dual-earner parents in Kenya are navigating the structural conditions reshaping work and family life, drawing on in-depth interviews with 41 working parents. The research reframes the conversation from a personalised balance problem to a structural one, rooted in employment law’s own foundational assumptions about what work is. It surfaces what is at stake for marriages, parenting, and mental health where this goes unaddressed, and points toward concrete interventions for employers, HR practice, and government labour policy.

The research findings will be compiled and published as a journal paper, extending the evidence base on family and labour policy in Kenya. Conference proceedings will be documented and made available to participants and partner institutions. The conference will culminate in a policy brief synthesising key findings and recommendations, aimed at informing employer practice and government labour policy.

Target Audience:

This conference is designed for those best placed to act on its findings. This includes working parents and spouses navigating dual-earner households, HR practitioners and employers shaping workplace policy on flexibility, leave, and staffing, and government officials and policymakers who set labour, employment, and family law frameworks. It will also be of interest to researchers, family law practitioners, and civil society organisations working at the intersection of labour, gender, and family policy in Kenya.