Peer-reviewed article
Work-to-family conflict and family role performance among employed adult child caregivers: A moderated mediation model.
Yang Jia, Yanyan Zhang ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-sonnet-5-5This paper studies employed adults who care for their aging parents. It looks at how conflict between work and family life relates to how well they perform their family roles. Two studies found that work-to-family conflict is linked to poorer family role performance, partly through caregiver burnout. Cultural beliefs about filial piety changed the strength of this link. The 'children' in the study are adult sons and daughters, so the paper is not about the well-being of children.
Key points
- Work-to-family conflict is negatively associated with family role performance.
- Informal caregiver burnout mediates this relationship.
- Reciprocal filial piety buffers the indirect effect of work-to-family conflict through burnout.
- Authoritarian filial piety amplifies the indirect effect.
- Study 1 was a time-lagged survey of 292 full-time employees; Study 2 was a 5-week weekly experience sampling study with 256 participants and 1,265 observations.
Limitations
The abstract does not say which country or countries the samples came from. It also gives no information about the well-being of minors, so it cannot inform child well-being questions.
Abstract
Work-to-family conflict has significant implications for adult child caregivers and the older parents they care for, and cultural values such as filial piety play a critical role in shaping these dynamics. By integrating the work-home resources model with the dual filial piety framework, this study offers a novel perspective on how filial piety shapes the resource-depletion processes linking work-to-family conflict with family role performance. We conducted two empirical studies to test our hypotheses. Study 1 employed a time-lagged survey design and included 292 full-time employees who regularly provided care to their aging parents. Study 2 adopted a weekly experience sampling design, involving 256 participants and yielding 1,265 observations over a 5-week period. The results reveal that work-to-family conflict is negatively associated with family role performance. Informal caregiver burnout mediates this relationship. Moreover, reciprocal filial piety buffers the indirect effect of work-to-family conflict on family role performance through caregiver burnout, whereas authoritarian filial piety amplifies it. These findings highlight the role of culturally embedded filial norms in shaping resource dynamics and provide actionable insights for promoting caregiver well-being and eldercare quality in rapidly aging societies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).