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This article examines the determinants of perceived job security in German standard employment relationships (SER). Although SERs still dominate and shape the labour market, they have undergone several modifications in the recent past. Using survey data from 2006, the article examines how work organizations and particularly multiple workplace demands influence the perceived job security of employees in SERs. The article also asks whether -20 years after reunification -structural and cultural differences still exist between East and West Germany. The results show that employees in East German SERs are more willing to accept flexibility and performance requirements. The article suggests that a new psychological contract has emerged, which promises long-term employment only if employees eventually meet the new workplace demands. Yet the overall lower job security of East Germans, fuelled by lower trust in their employers' information policies, indicates the fragile nature of this arrangement.

Many employers introduced or expanded working from home (WFH) in response to increasing infection rates after the onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Whether WFH enhances or depletes parents’ resources for their children is still an open question. Drawing on contextual models of parenting and demands‐resources approaches, we examine how WFH during the early stages of the COVID‐19 pandemic was linked to changes in responsive and harsh parenting, particularly in light of pandemic‐related increases in work‐to‐family conflicts (WFC). We further investigate gender differences in these associations. Our analyses draw on a sample of working parents from a large‐scale German family survey conducted in 2019 and a COVID‐19 follow‐up from 2020. Results from first difference regression models in combination with Heckman's sample selection method revealed strongly gendered patterns of changes in parenting. Specifically, responsive parenting decreased and harsh parenting increased only among mothers who did not work from home. In addition, WFH buffered increased spillovers from WFC on declines in responsive parenting among mothers. In contrast, fathers’ parenting remained largely unaffected by pandemic‐related changes in their work situation. We conclude that WFH can be a resource gain because it seems to have relieved some pandemic‐related parenting strain for mothers. Yet as a consequence, it may have reinforced gendered patterns of childcare. We discuss implications for policymakers and support services for families. We also place a special emphasis on those who are not able to work from home because this seems to have increased the risk that high work demands impaired their parenting during the early stages of the pandemic.

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Identifying conditions under which parents thrive is a key concern of family research. Prior research often focused on mothers’ well-being in single life domains, yet it is more likely to be shaped by stressors that stem directly from the parenting role and related stressors emerging from spillover processes into other domains. We therefore examine how stressors concerning mothers’ subjective, relational, and financial well-being accumulate and combine within subgroups of mothers and whether the likelihood to belong to these multidimensional subgroups varies by family structure. Using representative German data ( N = 11,242), latent class analysis revealed four distinct subgroups of maternal well-being with varying exposure to financial, psychological, and relational stressors. Regression models showed that particularly single mothers were at risk to belong to the most vulnerable group with exposure to multiple stressors. Findings are discussed in light of persisting disparities among post-separation families despite demographic trends toward growing family diversity.