At first glance, a workday evening in Kurt and Annie Disch's home in Brentwood, Tenn., looks a lot like a movie about young American working families.

It's shortly after 5 p.m. and 10-month-old Marlie Disch is in her high chair ready for supper. Kurt is helping out in the kitchen. But only Annie is recuperating from a 30-minute traffic-snarled commute.

The Disches are a self-described "traditional" family that has flipped the work-life script. Annie got a good job offer and the couple decided it made sense to move to the Nashville, Tenn., area from the Boston area even though it meant Kurt's career had to take a back seat at least temporarily.

Annie, 27, works as admissions director at a 180-bed skilled nursing facility. Kurt was an experienced trade associations manager and marketer who is looking for work.

"Today, I would say both men and women expect to move for their jobs," said William Bielby, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist who has studied marriage and employment decisions. "A strong relationship remains between who is earning more and where a family lives. But the gap between the earnings of women and men has narrowed considerably."

The trend also means that more companies hiring new executives offer some job-finding services to the spouse who tags along. In a growing number of cases, the so-called "trailing spouse" in human resources parlance, is the man.

The Disches' saga of work and family begins in Tallahassee, Fla., where the couple met while attending Florida State University.

After graduation, both Kurt and Annie got jobs. She worked in marketing at a newspaper. Kurt was a trade group municipal and county government lobbyist. Annie later got a job handling admissions for an assisted-living facility. Then, the couple decided they wanted something new.

"I think we felt stuck," Annie Disch said. "Tallahassee is a college town."

Luckily, a suburban Boston-based trade association for Realtors offered Kurt a job. And within five days, Annie had a healthcare industry job in the area, too.

A couple of years later, the Disch family added a third member — little Marlie — and their priorities started to shift.

"Everything changes when you have a baby," Kurt Disch said.

At the time, Annie had a flexible schedule and sometimes worked from home. She was Marlie's primary caregiver. But Kurt's daily commute started to weigh on him, he saw too little of his infant daughter, and the couple worried that the cost of living could become a drain on income and divert savings from Marlie's college fund.

When Annie's Nashville job offer came along, the couple jumped at it.

In 2002, the Families and Work Institute and the American Business Collaboration — a collective of large corporations — commissioned a study of generation and gender in the workplace.

The study found that baby boomers were more likely than others to be "work-centric," meaning they place a higher priority on work than family. On the other hand, Generation X and Generation Y workers were more likely to be "dual-centric" or "family-centric."

Dual-centric workers place their jobs and families at roughly the same priority levels, while family-centric workers put families above all else.

For the Disches, another factor in their recent move to Music City came down to this: Kurt was missing out on too much family time.

"I maybe had (the baby) for a bowl of oatmeal in the morning before I had to ... rush out the door," Kurt said of his schedule while living near Boston.

In Nashville, the 27-year-old husband and father intends to work again; in fact, he's in the midst of a job search. But his goal is to find a better work-life balance.