Working parent
Open-knowledge reference entry
A working parent is a father or a mother who engages in a work life, in contrast to a housewife or househusband. The variations of family structures include, but are not limited to, heterosexual couples where the father is the breadwinner and the mother keeps her duties focused within the home, homosexual parents who take on a range of work and home styles, single working mothers, and single working fathers. There are also married parents who are dual-earners, in which both parents provide income to support their family. Throughout the 20th century, family work structures experienced significant changes. This was shown by the range of work opportunities each parent was able to take and was expected to do, to fluctuations in wages, benefits, and time available to spend with children. These family structures sometimes raise much concern about gender inequalities. Within the institution of gender, there are defined gender roles that society expects of mothers and fathers that are reflected by events and expectations in the home and at work.
Historic viewpoints
The concept of working parents has existed for centuries, especially during slavery in the United States. Female and male slaves were expected to bear children for white slave masters, yet were not always allowed to parent these children. In some ways, these mothers and fathers were providing income for the offspring they produced, but in the way society thinks of traditional family structures, slaves were only sometimes allowed to be true working parents, earning a modified sort of income to support their family.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8034981. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Working parent” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.