Eight effective ways to support working parents: A comprehensive guide

Parents are an integral part of the workforce: in 2022, there were 24.2 million working moms, and 90% of all families had at least one working parent. Working parents face unique challenges, but also bring unique perspectives — and supporting them with inclusive family benefits is a key business objective for many HR teams. Not only does it ensure that your employees can bring their whole selves to work, it means the next generation is well supported and cared for as well. 

Family friendly policies and benefits are crucial to attracting and retaining top talent, but they can take on many different forms. In this guide, we'll walk through how companies support working parents, and how you can build a comprehensive and inclusive program for your organization.

Understanding the challenges faced by working parents

Working parents, and especially working mothers, are often said to have two full-time jobs: their role at work, and their role at home. And as many of us know, being a parent is one of the hardest jobs anyone can do. Getting ready for school, preparing healthy meals, and even just being present in a child’s life all come at odds with a nine-to-five work schedule, and all the stress it brings. 

Likewise, with childcare and babysitting costs growing considerably, working parents face immense monetary pressure just to go to work, let alone to take care of their children. Balancing childcare responsibilities, caregiving responsibilities, and career development can cause significant strain in working parents' lives.

It’s no wonder then that a 2022 study found that 66% of working parents faced burnout — and considering that nearly half of all two-parent families see both parents working full time, stress and burnout can quickly compound. Burnout is proven to reduce workplace productivity, which can lead to higher rates of absenteeism and job dissatisfaction. One study found the lost productivity cost of burnout to be valued at over $44 billion.

Employers are keenly interested in supporting working parents with family health benefits. In fact, according to Maven’s 2024 State of Women’s and Family Health Benefits report, 75% of employers say family friendly benefits are vital to retaining employees. But what do these benefits entail? And how do they play out in the workplace? Here's how employers can support working parents.

Building family-friendly workplaces starts with culture

Supporting working parents is as much a matter of workplace culture as it is family benefits. The companies who support working parents often boast robust, family-friendly cultures that celebrate and support parents, as well as their family responsibilities and their personal life.

1. Flexible work arrangements

Flexible work is often used by HR teams to give working parents some breathing room in their busy lives. For working moms especially, flexible work helps them stay in the workforce while supporting their families. Flexible work can take on a few different forms:

Remote and hybrid working 

Remote work, although subject to a lot of return-to-office discourse, is a great way for parents to accommodate the responsibilities of parenthood. Cutting out the commute saves them morning and evening time for school drop off and pickup, feeding, or even sports practice. During the holidays or summer vacation, it can help them save on babysitting or camp costs as well.

Flexible working hours

Flexible hours are more common in shift work, but nonetheless give parents some measure of freedom in their schedules to plan around pickups and dropoffs, babysitters, and other caregiving needs. Paired with remote work, this can look like a working parent logging on early, taking a long midday break, and finishing up at night.

Job sharing

Job sharing is a relatively new idea that allows individuals to ‘split’ a role with a coworker, working part-time collaboratively on a full-time role. For roles where this is possible, job sharing enables working parents to stay in their career while making time for their responsibilities at home.

Flexible work policies require, above all else, trust between HR and employees — trust that they’ll get their work done on time in exchange for the freedom to adapt their schedules to their duties at home.

2. Building a supportive workplace culture

Creating a family-friendly workplace culture can engender a feeling of psychological safety among working parents. Positive perceptions of workplace culture are shown to drastically improve job satisfaction. But while it’s easy to talk about these things in your company values or during your all hands meetings, making it a reality is a different story. Family-friendly cultures are built through policies. In addition to things like flexible work, family-friendly policies can include paid parental leave, breastfeeding rooms, childcare and senior care subsidies, and more. 

Besides policies, it’s critical for leadership and management to live these values as well. Adopting family-friendly language, supporting employee resource groups, and ensuring management promotes positive workplace culture are all key components as well. In addition, employee resource groups can give working parents some much-needed representation in culture and community.

3. Encouraging work-life balance

In a similar vein to culture, encouraging work-life balance is another way to support working parents. For example, being reasonable with hourly expectations and project assignments and tracking work according to company-wide and team-wide OKRs can help provide much-needed clarity and support. Training managers to understand, set, and respect boundaries, and recognize the signs of burnout, can go a long way. 

Likewise, encouraging leadership to model positive balance goes a long way in setting the tone as well — no one wants to take a vacation when they feel like they’re the only ones doing it. For working parents especially, they may feel pressured to match the pace and work ethic of their counterparts, which means they may not even use the benefits you invest in for them in the first place.

4. Providing resources and trainings for managers

To deliver on the aforementioned suggestions, it’s crucial for your team to provide training and resources for managers, so they can best support working parents on their teams. For starters, training around communication skills (especially in a hybrid or remote world) and project management can ensure teams are operating efficiently. Training on empathetic communication can also help working parents feel safe in asking for help or utilizing their benefits. And finally, inclusivity training is a must, so that parents with non-traditional family structures and members of the LGBTQIA+ communities can feel safe and protected.

Creating family-friendly benefits programs

Culture is one piece of the family-friendly puzzle. The other piece is a bit more practical: the tangible benefits you provide.

5. Providing comprehensive family health benefits

Parenthood isn’t just a series of milestones — it’s a journey of ups, downs, and turnarounds. Accordingly, comprehensive support includes benefits that offer continuous support through the entire journey of parenthood. And as much as your benefits need to support children, they need to support the parents themselves as well. Here are some of the essential bases to cover:

• Family building and fertility
• Paid parental leave, including maternity and paternity leave
• Return to work support
• Childcare support
• Inclusive healthcare coverage
• Mental health support and coaching resources

Family health benefit providers like Maven can help you build and tailor a benefits program to the families in your organization so you can provide continuous, 24/7 support to working parents and their families.

6. Offering financial assistance programs

Let’s face it, inflation is hurting everyone. Working families in particular are spending nearly a quarter of their monthly income on childcare alone, and that’s not including food, rent, and healthcare. If your business is in a position to, offering financial assistance and financial wellness programs can help alleviate some of this burden. Some examples include:

• Employee Assistance Programs
• Childcare subsidies
• Educational assistance
• Emergency fund planning

You can also look to EAPs and third-party vendors to help provide educational and financial wellness resources.

7. Enhancing mental health support for working parents

We’ve already discussed the impact of burnout on working parents and your business. But much like parenthood, mental health isn’t binary — it’s a spectrum of good days, bad days, and can change slowly over time or acutely all at once. Providing and enhancing mental health support for working parents, that goes beyond your healthcare plan, can pay huge dividends in mitigating the impacts of burnout, stress, and mental health disorders. 

Preserving mental health starts with maintaining the positive work culture and work-life balance like we discussed before. It also can include things like stress management workshops, allowing employees to take sick days for mental health days, or even providing resources and benefits like mediation, counseling, or even access to therapy. Maven, for example, offers your employees access to over 30 different types of providers, including mental health specialists, who can identify with and understand their unique needs. 

8. Leveraging technology and virtual benefits

Work as we know it is changing: remote, hybrid, and flexible work have fundamentally changed our relationships with our families, friends, and coworkers. To best provide assistance to working parents in your organization, look to technology-enabled benefits and virtual resources to provide accessible, round-the-clock support. This can include virtual healthcare platforms and tech-enabled EAPs, or even something as simple as instituting video calls for all meetings to accommodate employee schedules. Solutions like Maven, the leading virtual clinic for women’s and family health, can help you digitally transform your family health benefits to adapt to the changing world of work.

Meet Maven, your tech-enabled family health benefits provider

Building family friendly benefits may seem like a tall order. Implementing hybrid and remote work, flexible schedules, and a number of new benefits may seem like years worth of work. And if working parents in your organization need help now, you may be keen to look for quick wins.

Luckily, solutions like Maven can help you build and maintain an ecosystem of comprehensive family-friendly support for your employees. We offer an integrated platform that provides clinical, emotional, and financial support all in one place. From fertility and family building support to maternity, parenting and menopause, we provide a suite of employee benefits that support your employees to navigate multiple stages of life whilst thriving in their career. To learn more about how Maven can help working parents in your organization, check out our solutions or request a demo today.