Online Research: Conflict due to Workplaces and/ or Profit 

IS FAMILY life being split apart by huge societal and work pressures, leading to a serious breakdown in morality among young people with no sustainable role model? According to research, yes. There's a direct link between workplace stress and severe domestic conflict:

• Work-to-Family Conflict: High levels of job demands, work-related stress and long working hours directly translate into work-to-family conflict. This conflict negatively affects the well-being and behaviour of the worker and can be partially mediated by lower family life satisfaction (the word 'mediated' is used because it can't be 'supported').

• Psychological Distress: Employees in high-stress roles, such as social workers, report high rates of stress, psychological distress and burnout - with many stating their mental health suffers because of their job due to increased workload and lack of work-life balance.

• Family Cycle of Stress: Parental stress and concern about a child's mental health (often driven by the parents' own stress/work demands) impacts the parents' performance at work, creating a "cycle of stress" in both their home life and working life. This shows the damage extends beyond the worker to the entire family unit.

• Business Short-Termism: While explicitly linking the term "corporate short-termism" to family split is difficult, the underlying behaviors associated with it - pressure, workload and the need for managers to put 'the interest of the organisation above the wellbeing of their colleagues' - are the biggest drivers of poor mental health caused by work. These pressures are what ultimately destroy the work-life balance necessary to maintain a healthy family life.

• A System Cracking Under the Strain: People are gradually realising that the promise of 'work hard and you'll be rewarded' is often a lie. The reward for constant sacrifice is often just more work, followed by burnout, illness or redundancy (especially when you are no longer operating at 100%). The lived experience of millions is the system - as it's currently configured by many large employers and incentivised by government policy - does not have sufficient mechanisms or motivation to protect its people.

Seriously, if you could count yourself at work behaving a bit like that 4th point, just stop for a break one lunchtime, step back - and take a look at yourself. Things need to change, don't they? Be that change many want to see in the world...