Large shares of working parents lack access to benefits they say would help them most

It’s no secret that working parents are stressed out.

A recent survey brings the challenges faced by this group of employees into focus—and highlights areas where employers fall short on supporting them.

More than half (54%) of full-time working parents in the US said they have a difficult time balancing work and family responsibilities, according to a Pew Research survey fielded March 2–15.

Large shares of respondents reported “experiencing this overlap or blurred boundaries between family and work,” Luona Lin, a research associate at Pew who worked on the analysis, told HR Brew. Some 70% said they handled parenting-related tasks at work, while 59% reported performing work-related tasks while with their children.

The survey pointed to benefits that working parents would find helpful in addressing these challenges, but also revealed that large shares of respondents don’t have access to such offerings in their jobs. When asked about benefits like paid leave, flexibility, or onsite childcare, “we see large gaps in the share of working parents saying this would be highly helpful against those who say they actually have access to this sort of arrangement,” Lin said.

A large majority (84%) of respondents said paid parental, family, or medical leave would be helpful to them, while just one-half of respondents said this benefit was available to them. Some 71% of working parents cited flexibility to set their own required work hours, as well as work from home when needed, as helpful. But just 25% and 23% of respondents said this level of flexibility was available to them, respectively.

And 43% of respondents said onsite childcare would be helpful, but only 6% said their workplace offered it.

Keeping up with caregivers. Research suggests that supporting working parents is vital to retaining them. Among the women who voluntarily left the workforce in 2025, some 42% cited caregiving responsibilities, including the cost of childcare, as a driving factor, according to a survey from the non-profit Catalyst, HR Brew previously reported.

Some employers are making investments to address these challenges with benefits such as childcare subsidies, but few go as far as offering onsite care, as the Pew survey points out.

Paid family and medical leave is becoming more common thanks to laws that have taken effect in more than a dozen states throughout the US, but large shares of workers still lack this benefit.

Lin noted that the disparity between desire for benefits and access to benefits is particularly sharp among low-income working parents. Higher-income parents, for example, are more likely to have a predictable work schedule than their lower-income peers.

Some companies in industries that tend to employ high shares of hourly workers have tried to address this disparity in recent years. Volkswagen, for example, started announcing shift schedules nine days ahead of time, up from the standard two, to better support working parents at its plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., HR Brew reported in 2024.