I just put together a very simple survey about working parents and stress. It takes only 3 minutes to complete.

If you’re a parent and you work to help support your family, here’s what I’d like you to do:

1. Take the survey.

2. Share the survey (or this post) with everyone you know.

3. Come back in a few weeks to read about the results here, or at Working Moms Break.

Why am I doing this?

There’s a ton of research about how time-starved working parents are, particularly in the U.S. where some experts say we work the longest hours of any developed country in the world.

There’s also a lot of research telling us how common work stress has become. Whether we have kids or not, our work stress levels have doubled since 1985.

So my question is, how is this time debt and work stress affecting the health of working parents? I can’t find any research that answers this question.

Will you take the survey?

The more responses we have, the more interesting and meaningful the responses become.

A note about terminology: I struggle with the term “working parent” because it makes it sounds like stay-at-home parents don’t work. This, of course, is not true. Stay-at-home parents work their butts off.

I could instead say “parents who work outside the home,” but that would exclude people like my husband, who performs much of his consulting work in a shed in our back yard.

I could just open the survey up to all parents, but I’m trying to focus on parents who help support their families through paid work, because they face a particular kind of time-bind that may or may not have adverse health affects.

P.S. I did a survey like this almost a year ago called “Who Clips the Nails?” asking parents how they divide up household chores. The answers were eye-opening. You can read about it here.

Cross-posted from Working Moms Break. You can also find me on Facebook or Twitter