Home-work spillover flows two ways

Does the hand that rocks the cradle get the cellphone call from the school nurse? You bet.

The technology that can connect us 24/7 to the office also gives us a ``hot line" to family, and that's a mixed blessing, especially for working moms. Having easy access via cellphones, e-mail, and instant-messaging to kids, partners, and household responsibilities is both a comfort and a stress to working mothers. Certainly, it adds to the wear and tear of an already frazzled generation of women.

Denise Banks , an East Boston office manager, loves getting a quick phone call or instant-message from her 14-year-old, Kathryn , after school lets out. As she is packing up at the end of her work day and driving the short trip home, she hears repeatedly from her 9-year-old twins, Amanda and Jessica , who share a cellphone. But the security she gains from being in touch comes with a downside: the stress of being constantly available.

``It makes life more of a rat race," says Banks, who works at a fleet vehicles company. ``Except for shutting it off, you have no privacy. But I have to have it on because of an emergency. God forbid the one time it's urgent, and they can't reach me."

This is the flip side of the work-to-home spillover that I wrote about in my last column. The intrusion of work into our private lives is a much bigger animal, contrary to employers' initial fears that the Internet and tele-work would turn us into a nation of goof-offs. Instead, the technology has meant we can work anywhere, anytime -- and we do. It also means that moms who are trying to live up to the ideal of the always-on worker now have more ways of living up to the ideal of the super-available mom.

``They're the go-to people," says Ellen Galinsky , president of the Families and Work Institute. ``Studies show that women are more likely to take psychic responsibility for the household."

It's a quid pro quo. If you're tethered to work all the time, you need to tuck in your private life wherever you can -- often at the office. Workers who answer job-related e-mail at home and have other contact with work after hours have significantly more negative spillover of home to work, according to national survey data tabulated for this column by the institute. That is, they feel that private worries and concerns distract them at work.

No gender differences were found, except women were more likely to use a computer at home for work, which strongly correlates with more home worries leaking into work, the Families and Work Institute data showed.

Cellphones seem to have a special propensity to fuel what sociologist Arlie Hochschild has dubbed the ``second shift," the domestic duties that working women shoulder.

Mobile phones are linked to more home-to-work spillover and distress for women than men, according to a two-year study of working couples, most with children, by Noelle Chesley , an assistant sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her study showed that cellphones are linked to more distressing work-to-home spillover for both men and women, as I discussed in my first column on these trends.

``Unfortunately, the mothers bear the brunt," says Jeanne Achille , owner of the Devon Group , a marketing communications firm in Shrewsbury, N.J., and mother of two daughters, ages 21 and 17.

A decade ago when Achille began running her business out of her home, her girls would slip messages in crayon under her door, pleading to get a ride to the pool or a friend's house. Beginning in their techno-fluent adolescent years, they learned to beep and ping her constantly, sometimes with not-so-urgent concerns.

``I'll be on the conference call and one of the kids will call me on the cellphone, and they absolutely need me right away," says Achille. ``Sometimes you start to listen, and it's something that in the total scheme of things could wait."

With patient training, she has taught her daughters what can wait and what necessitates a call. Permission to go someplace with a friend? Feel free to call. Frustrated with your history teacher or just had a spat with a pal? Bring it up at the dinner table.

If only more of us would try to infuse our high-tech communications with a similar sense of perspective both at work and at home, we'd all be better off. Always-on connectivity is sometimes just a form of instant gratification. Try weaning your kids and yourself from trigger-happy dialing and you might get more done at the office, plus reap the time to take an uninterrupted break. You might even be able to spend a minute or two smelling the roses blooming on a July day.

Balancing Acts appears every other week. Maggie Jackson can be reached at maggie.jackson@ att.net.