The pandemic of the COVID-19 virus from 2020 to 2022 hit the world not only as a crisis of public health, but also fundamental challenges to work norms, care institutions, and family life routines. The work-from-home arrangement was offered to employees to combat the spread of the virus, but at the same time, schools cancelled in-person teaching and transitioned to remote learning, and daycare centres, residential homes, as well as nursing homes, were closed for virus control. Home, therefore, became a regular workplace, a school for children, a care centre for the needy, and a clinic and a hospital when family members became infected. For employees with family care duties, the number of uninterrupted hours that could be spent on paying jobs plummeted, and new patterns and strategies for work and family life had to be developed.

In the pre-COVID world, expectations of “ideal workers” in the workplace and growing care demands at home had been causing prevalent struggles and conflicts for employees with family care responsibilities (Figueroa & Reveco, 2020). The line of literature on motherhood penalty argued that the wage difference between mothers and women without children overshadowed the gender pay gap in the general population, and the penalty of motherhood was a major contributor to social inequalities in the labour market (Cuddy et al., 2004). More recently, scholars noticed that it would be more appropriate to examine a family caregiver penalty in the workplace than to focus on motherhood penalty alone (Bear & Glick, 2017), because commitment to care responsibilities at home appeared to bring all family caregivers negative employment outcomes, such as low wage and early retirement (Henle et al., 2020). To promote work-family balance and a family-friendly workplace had become an urgent agenda in many policy and academic discussions before the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. How workers were compelled to further juggle with work and family care duties during the pandemic, how family caregiver penalty and workplace disparities were reconfigured, and how individuals may learn from the global health crisis to improve relevant work and family policies are important yet still insufficiently explored questions in the post-COVID era (Shockley et al., 2020).

This study aims to investigate these empirical questions and extend the scholarly understanding of work-family balance in the social contexts of China, where the unique zero-COVID policy approach was adopted during the pandemic. For nearly three years, from February 2020 to December 2022, China employed extremely strict control measures to combat the spread of the virus, including border closing, national lockdowns, school closures, mandatory mask wearing, and social distancing. When the virus strains developed and changed, many parts of the world gradually opened up while China stuck to the rigid zero-COVID policies, through which the government insisted on wiping out infections by regional lockdowns, quarantines, case tracing and mass testing. The zero-COVID approach had some success in achieving low rates of infection and mortality, and maintaining normal economic activities in unaffected areas (Hassler, 2020), but disruptive impacts on social and family life were severe in regions with infection cases, the number of which drastically increased in the second half of 2022. China eventually gave up the zero-COVID approach at the end of 2022, when the spread of the virus appeared to be uncontainable. Massive and chaotic waves of infections took place in all parts of the country, and most of the infected population had to receive care and recover in their families as the medical institutions could barely function. In early 2023, however, everything went back to normal and the pandemic was declared to have ended in the nation. During the pandemic years in China, lockdowns, quarantines, and outbreaks relocated paid work, school education, and family care all to the home setting, and how such arrangements impacted on the sense of work-family balance of individuals with family care duties is at the core of enquiries of this study.

Early discussion on the balance of work and family duties often viewed workplace and family life as two mutually incompatible spheres that create role pressures and conflicts for employees with family care responsibilities (e.g. Greenhaus & Beutell, 1985). In line with the conflict perspective, researchers documented how care duties at home negatively affect the employment outcomes of workers in the labour market and result in motherhood penalty and family caregiver penalty in wage, fringe benefits, job assignment, promotion opportunities, and career development (Bear & Glick, 2017). It was also noted that fierce competition in the workplace challenges parents, as well as employees with other types of family care duties, in their arrangement, organising, and delivery of care at home, which leads to their personal dilemmas, undermined mental health, and family tensions (e.g. Hays, 1996; Doepke & Zilibotti, 2020). Scholars hence proposed that policy programmes and social services ought to be provided to reduce the stress from the workplace for parents and family caregivers (e.g. paid maternity, paternity, and family leave), and to ameliorate the social support system to family caregivers so that they can be relieved from care burdens at home and stay focused on their jobs (e.g. day care centres and childcare facilities).

As the conflict perspective understands achievement in the workplace and involvement in family care duties as contradictory to one another, work-family balance is defined as a middle ground in the trade-off relationship of the two spheres (Frone, 2003). To reach such a balance in the contemporary labour market, it usually requires negotiations and compromise in both workplace and family life, which may result in a delicate level of satisfaction among employees with family care responsibilities (Warner & Hausdorf, 2009). Some researchers reflected that this understanding of balance only captures the struggles and sacrifices of family caregivers in the workplace, and advocacy for it would reinforce family caregiver penalty and social disparity (Omran, 2016).

Meanwhile, another group of researchers adopted the role enhancement theory to argue that participation in the paid labour market and involvement in family care can be facilitative to one another– in other words, these two spheres are not necessarily in contradiction. According to the role enhancement theory (Sieber, 1974), individuals who participate in multiple roles could gain access to different resources through role accumulation and develop advanced individual skills, which would posit to encourage positive outcomes. The facilitation view of work and family thus believes that participation in one sphere can be made easier by the virtues of the experiences, skills and opportunities gained or developed in the other (Grzywacz & Carlson, 2007). Empirical studies along this line found that participation in paid work can benefit family life through financial resources, parenting skills in communication, and intimate family relationships, and increase the life satisfaction of family caregivers (Hughes & Galinsky, 1994). At the same time, involvement in family care and harmony in family life may in turn cultivate motivations in career development and improve efficiency in the workplace (Kirby & Buzzanell, 2014).

From the perspective of work-family facilitation, engagement in family care and family life and positive outcomes in the employment market are not only compatible, but should be the goal of social service programmes and policy interventions. Work-family balance can be defined as success in both work and family spheres, which would promote individual wellbeing of employees and healthy social developments (Khateeb, 2021). Some scholars found that positive emotions in the work settings can spillover to family life, and vice-versa, and regarded the positive spillover as an ideal state of work-family balance (Song et al., 2008; Savard, 2023). Others adopted the term “mutual enrichment” to describe how psychological well-being and quality of life of an individual can be promoted in the transference of resources between the work environment and the family domain (Lu, 2011).

The conflict and the facilitation view of work and family depict different relationships of the two important spheres in social life, and articulate distinct mechanisms to understand work-family balance. It remains as an unsolved puzzle in the literature, however, to explain how the two different theoretical approaches can be employed, in differentiation or integration, to understand work-family balance and its impacts on individuals in different social and cultural contexts (Grzywacz & Carlson, 2007). Furthermore, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when paid work and family care were both pushed into the home setting and the boundary between the two spheres was blurred, how employees reconfigured their workplace and family roles and re-explored their work-family balance has presented new and challenging questions to the two frameworks that await investigations.

As a result of lockdowns, quarantines, work-from-home, and closure of educational and care institutions, families under the pandemic had to re-coordinate work routines and care needs. In accordance with the conflict view of work and family care, emerging empirical studies documented growing stress on employees and worsening work-family balance. In Western countries (Aplin-Houtz et al., 2021), Nigeria (Kolo et al., 2021), and China (Hu et al., 2023), researchers all found increased work-family conflicts for employees because of intensification of care needs at home and scarce resources from educational facilities and household services. They believed that high demands of family care and diminishing care support during the pandemic disrupted employees’ engagement in the paid labour market, and therefore created a crisis in their work-family balance. Studies (e.g. Shockley et al., 2020) also revealed that work-family balance was particularly undermined in the pandemic for female workers, who usually served as primary family caregivers at home. In order to cope with the drastically increased needs of family care, they had to cut paid work hours, accept low evaluations of work performance, and forego career opportunities (Collins et al., 2020). Due to such work-family conflicts, women employees suffered more from the pandemic than their male counterparts in employment outcomes, financial security, and individual wellbeing, and many scholars believed that the pandemic has brought a “Shecession” (e.g. Alon et al., 2020) to the world.

On the other hand, some other researchers argued for a more positive understanding of work-family balance during the pandemic. Allen and colleagues (2021), for example, suggested that for employees who worked in office prior to the pandemic, work-family balance was in fact improved when their companies switched to the remote mode and the daily commuting time was freed up. In line with the facilitative view of work and family, Bernhardt et al. (2022) further explained that the work-from-home policy not only increased parents’ control of their own time schedules, but also enabled them to better coordinate resources in work and family life to fulfil their duties in both spheres. They argued that parents, particularly mothers, were able to apply skills in paid work to take care of children at home, and family intimacy provided emotional resources to complete job tasks. The mutual facilitation of work and family spheres could effectively minimise the rising levels of work-family conflicts during the pandemic period.

Goldin, in the epilogue of her book Career & Family (2021), agreed that mothers may have experienced improved work-family balance during the pandemic, but her explanation mainly lied in “couple equity.” Her survey evidence for April 2020 showed that mothers increased their family care hours by 1.54 times while fathers increased by 1.9 h. For couples with an infant, their total hours on childcare increased from 42 per week to 70 per week during lockdowns, but the share of mothers decreased from 66 per cent to 61%. Although the changed routines of work and family life increased care burdens at home, they facilitated care assistance and care support to primary caregivers from partners and other family members at the same time. Goldin’s analysis focused on the sense of work-family balance of women, the usual primary family caregivers, without examining the impacts of the pandemic on the work-family balance of their partners and other family members, who became more involved in family care.

The conflict view of work and family, the “Shecession” framework, the role facilitation approach, and the argument of couple equity proposed different mechanisms to understand work-family balance during the pandemic and came to inconsistent conclusions. This study aims to investigate the different frameworks in the contexts of the zero-COVID policies in China and gain a more systematic understanding of the changes in the sense of work-family balance of employees under the pandemic.

In March and April in 2023, shortly after China gave up the zero-COVID policy approach, precipitating large waves of infections, this research conducted an online survey via SurveyPlus, a Chinese survey platform, and asked respondents about their personal and family experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although online surveys certainly have many limitations in representation, validity, and reliability, given the political and social sensitivity of the questionnaire, the responses still constituted a valuable and rare national data set to understand the impacts of the pandemic on Chinese people.

The Sample

We used the sample database of SurveyPlus for the survey, which covers over one million people in different social and demographic groups in China. The questionnaire was sent to 5,500 individuals in different groups to meet the pre-set sample target of 3,500. In total, the database included 3,763 valid responses, resulting in a response rate of 68.4%.

We aimed to navigate how quarantines during the pandemic impacted on people’s sense of work-family balance through data analyses. As people in different cities and districts in China underwent quarantines at different times under the zero-COVID policies, respondents were asked to recall their struggles with work and family life during the most memorable quarantine in the last two year (2021–2023). In order to be more specific and accurate in the measurement, the investigation of work-family balance was limited to one most struggling period during the pandemic. Therefore, only those who had the experience, participated in paid work, and lived together with family members during the quarantine were selected, and the final sample size was 1,190.

Key Measurements

For sense of work-family balance during quarantines, the respondents gave answers on how the quarantine affected their paid work, family relationships, and work-family balance. For work, 989 (83.1%) reported negative impacts, and 201 (16.9%) reported positive impacts; for family relationships, 672 (56.5%) claimed negative while the remaining 518 (43.5%) positive; for work-family balance, 907 (76.2%) reported negative and 283 (23.8%) positive. In general, more people felt that the quarantine had negative effects on their paid work, family relationships, and work-family balance, which fit with the view of increasing struggles and conflicts of work and family during the pandemic in academic and media reports (e.g. Aplin-Houtz et al., 2021).

To understand how quarantines affected work and family of people with different family roles and care duties, the survey asked whether they were primary family caregivers in their families in general, whether they participated in family caregiving during the quarantine, and the family members they lived with during the quarantine. This study then divided the respondents into six categories for comparison: (1) people who were neither primary family caregivers (as in general times) nor crisis family caregivers (i.e. did not provide care during the quarantine); (2) crisis family caregiver yet not primary family caregiver, and lived with children under the age of 16 and/or older people over the age of 65; (3) crisis family caregiver yet not primary family caregiver, and lived with other adult family members (neither children nor older people); (4) primary family caregiver in general times yet not crisis family caregiver; (5) primary family caregiver and crisis family caregiver, and lived with children and/or older people; (6) primary family caregiver and crisis family caregiver, and lived with other adult family members. The categories echoed to the debates on work-family conflicts, work-family facilitation, and couple equity in the existing literature of family caregivers during the pandemic. The distribution of the key variables, as well as the control variables, could be found in Table 1.

Compared with the Census data of China, respondents in the sample were younger and better educated. The younger and better educated people were more likely to possess digital literacy and access to the internet, which facilitated their participation in the online survey. This bias in sampling was expected when the online survey method was adopted, but it still imposed critical limitations on the representativeness of the sample and the generalizability of the findings of the study.

Data Analyses

For the analyses on work-family balance during a lockdown or a quarantine, as the dependent variables were binary (positive or negative impacts), Logit Models were adopted to explore the effects of family caregiver roles and care duties on paid work, family relationships, and work-family balance respectively during the quarantine. Stata (version 17) was used to estimate the regression models.

Based on the survey data, we examined how feelings of paid work, family relationships, and work-family balance varied among people with different family care roles and duties during the quarantine. Using neither primary family caregiver in general times nor crisis family caregiver during the quarantine as the reference group, we constructed three models for paid work, family relationships, and work-family balance respectively. All three models were statistically significant (Chi-square(25) = 107.86, P < 0.0001; Chi-square(25) = 122.01, P < 0.0001; Chi-square(25) = 154.45, P < 0.0001). The results were reported in Table 2.

Compared with those who were neither primary family caregivers nor crisis family caregivers, people who did not serve as primary family caregivers in general times but had to provide family care during the quarantine (i.e. family members who provided additional care support, as in the argument of “couple equity”) demonstrated different feelings of work and family. To live with children and/or older people during the quarantine (likely having heavier care duties) was associated with reporting that the quarantine had positive impacts on their work-family balance. Living only with other adult family members was associated with perceiving negative impacts on work, positive impacts on family relationships, but no significantly different impacts on work-family balance.

Primary family caregivers, who also needed to provide family care during the quarantine, as well showed different feelings of work and family, compared with the group of neither primary family caregiver nor crisis family caregiver. To live with children and/or older people during the quarantine was associated with reporting positive effects of the quarantine on their paid work, family relationships, and work-family balance. To live only with other adult family members was associated with perceiving positive effects on family relationships and work-family balance, but no significantly different effects on their work.

Among the control variables, women were more likely to feel negative impacts of the quarantine on paid work, compared with men, which echoed the view of “Shecession” that women suffered more from the pandemic in income and financial stability. Compared with blue-collar workers, office clerks, people with management and professional jobs, and self-employed people all were more likely to report positive effects of the quarantine on work-family balance. Types of employment played a significant role in people’s sense of work-family balance during quarantines.

Robustness Checks

To verify the robustness of our logistic regression estimates, we applied Propensity Score Matching (PSM) analyses to our survey data. Potential selection biases were corrected by establishing propensity scores. For respondents’ feelings of paid work, results from the logistic regression model indicated that differences were more pronounced between primary caregivers and not primary caregivers. Therefore, we used being primary caregivers as the treatment. Propensity scores of being primary caregivers were calculated based on gender, age, current address, hukou, education, marital status, health status, monthly income, occupation, chronic illness, and type of quarantine. Then individuals were matched by their propensity scores using the caliper matching method, with the caliper being 0.01. For respondents’ feelings of family relationships and work-family balance, the logistic regression model showed that differences were more pronounced between crisis caregivers and not crisis caregivers. Therefore, for these two outcome variables, we used being crisis caregivers as the treatment. Given that being primary caregivers may have an effect on the decision of being crisis caregivers during the quarantine, we added being primary caregivers, in addition to the variables used above, to calculate propensity scores. The matching methods were consistent with those for the outcome variable of feelings of paid work.

The average treatment effects of the treated (ATT) were presented in Table 3. Results in the first row (paid work) suggested that respondents who were primary caregivers reported more positive feelings of their paid work during the quarantine (ATT = -0.061, SE = 0.026). Results in the second and third rows (family relationships and work-family balance, respectively) indicated that respondents who were crisis caregivers reported more positive feelings of their family relationships (ATT = -0.081, SE = 0.034) and work-family balance (ATT = -0.116, SE = 0.028) during the quarantine. These findings from the PSM method were consistent with those from our logistic regression method in Table 2, while the logistic regression revealed more nuanced differences among caregivers with distinct living arrangements during the quarantine.

To further verify the robustness of the previous logistic regression estimates based on the original sample, we conducted logistic regression analyses based on the matched sample from the PSM method. Results were shown in Table 4, where model 1, model 2, and model 3 examined respondents’ feelings of paid work, family relationships, and work-family balance, respectively.

Compared with those who were not primary caregivers, primary caregivers were more likely to report positive feelings of their paid work during the quarantine, which supported the findings from previous logistic regression analyses. Compared with those who were not crisis caregivers, crisis caregivers were more likely to report positive feelings of their family relationships and work-family balance during the quarantine, which were also consistent with the results from the original logistic regression model.

The statistical results of the study also echoed the emerging empirical literature on the positive and protective effects of work-from-home arrangements during the COVID-19 pandemic on the sense of work-family balance of family caregivers, especially women and those who lived with their care recipients (Vaziri et al., 2020). This interesting effect has been documented not only in Asian societies, such as Japan (Magnier-Watanabe & Magnier-Watanabe, 2023), Singapore (Qin et al., 2024), and Hong Kong (Jung et al., 2025), but also in Ghana (Abrefa Busia et al., 2022) and Hungry (Somogyi et al., 2023). The new evidence challenged the prevalent view that lockdowns and quarantines during the pandemic imposed only stress on family caregivers, and provided a fresh perspective to understand work-family balance.

There is little doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic, especially the difficult times of quarantines, presented challenges to people’s work, family relationships, and work-family balance by changing norms and routines of employment and family care. For people actively participated in family care delivery during quarantines, however, they did not necessarily all sense negative impacts on their paid work, family relationships, and work-family balance, as shown in the results of the current data analyses. Some individuals did not serve as primary caregivers in their families in general times, but had to become crisis caregivers during quarantines. Goldin (2021) noticed this group in her book yet did not examine their feelings of work-family balance while contributing to the couple equity in their families. Our data suggested that crisis family caregivers, compared with individuals who were neither primary nor crisis family caregivers, were more likely to sense struggles with paid work yet better family relationships if they lived with other adult family members. If these crisis caregivers lived with children and/or older people, on the other hand, were more likely to report improved work-family balance– the directions of effects on work and family relationships for this group were the same as for the group living only with other adult family members, but the effects were insignificant. These patterns echoed the conflict view of work and family for crisis family caregivers during quarantines, as they felt the incompatibility of work and family life, and connections and intimacy with family members often came at the cost of disturbed work. For crisis family caregivers living with needy family members like young children and older people, the struggles and care burdens, however, resulted in their positive sense of work-family balance. It was possible that closer family ties for this group during quarantines outweighed the negative effects on paid work, which contributed to their better feelings of a more balanced life.

As for people who were both primary family caregivers in general times and crisis family caregivers during quarantines– or, primary family caregivers who probably received additional care support at home in a time of more couple equity, it appeared that they were more likely to report positive feelings in paid work, family relationships, and work-family balance, compared with the reference group. Family caregivers in this group, if lived with children and/or older people, felt that quarantines had positively impacted on their paid work, family relationships, and work-family balance. When they lived only with other adult family members, they were more likely to report improved family relationships and work-family balance, while the effect on paid work was not statistically significant yet positive in direction. The facilitation view of work and family life could be employed to interpret the findings regarding this group of family caregivers. They were able to coordinate the resources in work and family spheres, channel them to one another through spillovers, and make the two spheres compatible during quarantines. They might have learnt the skills of facilitation and coordination before the pandemic as they had been serving as primary family caregivers. The additional care support from family members in a time of more couple equity, as well as reduced commuting times and increased schedule flexibility during quarantines, could also have contributed to the all-win patterns of paid work, family relationships, and work-family balance for this group of primary family caregivers.

This study examined how virus-control policies such as quarantines affected work and family of family caregivers during the pandemic. Social theories have long held the belief that natural crises are magnifiers of existing patterns of social disparity (e.g. Klinenberg, 2015), but our findings suggested more positive effects of the pandemic on primary family caregivers, an often-marginalised group in the workplace and work-family conflicts.

The conflict view of work and family argues that caregiver struggles and penalties could be increased during the pandemic. This study revealed that this framework might be partially applied to crisis family caregivers, who were not primary family caregivers in general times but were involved in family care during quarantines. They sensed negative impacts of quarantines on paid work, but at the same time, reported positive impacts on family relationships and work-family balance. Primary family caregivers in general times who also participated in family care during quarantines, on the other hand, were more likely to sense positive effects on family relationships, work-family balance, and even paid work. The result displayed an example for the facilitation, spillover and enrichment view of work and family on how primary family caregivers were able to connect the resources in both work and family spheres to enhance their roles as employees and caregivers during the crisis. Flexible arrangements of work and family care, as well as additional care support from family members during quarantines, could have assisted primary family caregivers to fulfil the facilitation.

Quarantines and the pandemic in general disrupted the norms of work and family care, but at the same time, many conditions for which scholars have advocated also took place, including reduced commuting time, flexible schedules, care support from partners and family members, and increasing couple equity in care sharing. Results of this study indicated that these conditions could contribute to positive feelings of primary family caregivers regarding paid work, family relationships, and work-family balance, even under the pandemic. A good lesson for the post-pandemic era is then to support and facilitate these conditions in our “normal” workplace and family life through policy and service programmes, as efforts to empower primary family caregivers and to fulfil gender equity and social justice.

Meanwhile, for those who are not primary family caregivers, when engaged in family care delivery during quarantines, although they might feel that their work was disrupted, they benefitted from more intimate family relationships and better work-family balance. Advocacies and policy initiatives to encourage involvement in family care of non-caregivers, as the study implied, would not only support primary family caregivers, but also enhance family coherence and life balance of all family members. It should be an important direction for the future.

Limitations

This study certainly suffered from many limitations. Although the survey aimed at diversified groups in the online survey, the sample was not representative, and the results were not generalisable. The self-reported status of primary and crisis family caregivers might be biased. Due to the limited time of the online survey, the survey failed to include many questions, such as the exact age of children, health status of older people, specific care recipients, detailed duties in family caregiving and so on, which would make the measurements more valid and accurate. The feelings and perceptions of work-family balance were collected after the pandemic ended from the survey respondents, and they may have shifted significantly since the actual quarantine period. This limitation reduced the validity of the retrospective and self-reporting data.

With the cross-sectional data set, this study could not compare sense of work-family balance of family caregivers with their circumstances before the pandemic, but only with non-caregivers at the point of data collection, although comparison with the pre-COVID period could produce more valid findings of the impacts of the pandemic. The cross-sectional nature of the survey data and the regression models could only describe associations of variables, and could not provide evidence of causal mechanisms or explain why caregivers reported greater satisfaction during the quarantine period.

Despite the limitations, the study still shed light on how quarantines and the pandemic affected family caregivers in work and family in China, and may serve as a reference for future investigations of the different theoretical frameworks to understand family caregiving, work-family balance, and family wellbeing.