This description of the daily life of parents could have been written by any of the teams in the different countries and could refer to either public or private sector employees. In fact it was written by the team in Bulgaria, the poorest country in our study and one that is still suffering from the reversals and changes that took place from the early 1990s – the fall of the communist bloc and the arrival of private markets. A clue to its authorship lies in the words that end the quotation – ‘[parents’] feeling of helplessness and alienation’. However, as we shall see, this is not the case for all working parents interviewed in Bulgaria. As we shall show, parents’ feelings of time pressure and wellbeing vary according to their particular circumstances and resources.

In this chapter we examine the particular resources available to comparable cases of mothers and fathers. We also employ a temporal lens – at the point in parents’ lives when we interviewed them (2004) in which the present is informed by biography, but also by current contexts and orientations to the future. Here the focus is on the concurrent work–family ‘fit’ (Moen, 2011) rather than over the life course, as already discussed in Chapters Four and Five. A major underpinning perspective is time in the context of the increased simultaneity of events (Brose, 2004) in ‘the world at reach’ (Schutz and Luckmann, 1983), the ways in which parents’ everyday time worlds overlap and rhythms blur in relation to different social domains, creating a need to synchronise often irreconcilable timetables (Brose, 2004, p 7) and time meanings and often resulting in a feeling of a constant state of busyness and multitasking (Hochschild, 1997; Brannen, 2005b).