Working parents of children with special needs (i.e., emotional, behavioral, and/or learning difficulties) face recurrent stressors that can make balancing work and family demands difficult. This strain has been magnified during the COVID-19 pandemic, as these parents often need to take on greater responsibility in supporting their children's remote learning, while still meeting their own job-related responsibilities. Accordingly, working parents of special needs children may be particularly vulnerable to adverse outcomes stemming from pandemic-induced changes to work (e.g., teleworking) and education (e.g., remote instruction). We sought to understand how daily family and work challenges influence satisfaction with work-life balance (WLB) in this priority population, with an emphasis on contextualizing this process through chronic job stress perceptions. Conducting a 10-day daily diary study in a sample of 47 working parents of special needs children during fall 2020, we observed family challenges to deplete positive affect from day-to-day, which undermined satisfaction with work-life balance. Furthermore, detrimental influences of daily family and work challenges on positive affect were magnified under chronic job stress, yielding diminished WLB satisfaction for more chronically stressed employees. We discuss how these findings can be harnessed to support particularly vulnerable employees during the COVID-19 pandemic and other chronic stress circumstances, while also drawing attention to how the pandemic may be exacerbating work-life inequities that some employees face. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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当 COVID-19 期间的日常挑战变得太多时：家庭和工作需求对有特殊需要的儿童的父母的工作与生活平衡的影响。


有特殊需要（即情感、行为和/或学习困难）的孩子的在职父母面临着经常性的压力，这可能导致平衡工作和家庭需求变得困难。这种压力在 COVID-19 大流行期间被放大，因为这些家长往往需要承担更大的责任来支持孩子的远程学习，同时仍然履行自己的工作相关责任。因此，有特殊需要的儿童的工作父母可能特别容易受到大流行引发的工作（例如远程工作）和教育（例如远程教学）变化带来的不利后果的影响。我们试图了解日常家庭和工作挑战如何影响这一优先人群对工作与生活平衡（WLB）的满意度，重点是通过长期工作压力感知来了解这一过程。我们在 2020 年秋季对 47 名有特殊需要儿童的在职父母进行了为期 10 天的每日日记研究，观察到家庭面临着日常积极情绪消耗的挑战，这削弱了对工作与生活平衡的满意度。此外，日常家庭和工作挑战对积极情绪的不利影响在长期工作压力下被放大，导致长期压力较大的员工的 WLB 满意度下降。我们讨论了如何利用这些发现来支持在 COVID-19 大流行和其他慢性压力环境下特别脆弱的员工，同时也提请人们注意这一流行病可能会加剧一些员工面临的工作与生活不平等。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2022 APA，保留所有权利）。