Spousal Expectations and Adjusting Parenting Roles among Women with Children during COVID-19

Overview: The presenters will share the results of a study exploring mothers’ lived experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic with a focus on stressors, parenting roles, and work expectations through a feminist perspective and an attachment theory lens. Additionally, the presenters will discuss the implications of the findings.Proposal text: The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the day-to-day lives of parents around the world. Stay-at-home orders, school and daycare closures, and changes in work routines brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic have disrupted parents’ work and family lives.1 Before the pandemic, women earned 20% less per hour than their male counterparts.2 Furthermore, during the pandemic, 68% of women compared to 40% of men spent more time on housework.3 These disparities in employment and domestic responsibilities may contribute to the increase in stress that mothers have reported during the COVID-19 pandemic. The closure of childcare facilities intensified the stress levels of mothers because they had to assume the added responsibility of caring for their children during work hours.4
Data from this study came from a mixed-methods study that explored parental stress and resilience during the first six months of the pandemic. The research team recruited participants through licensed childcare centers and Facebook. The participants were interviewed via Zoom. Qualitative analysis of open-ended interviews with a diverse group of 44 mothers in the United States generated two main themes: spousal expectations and adjusting parenting roles.
Findings indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic is producing increased stress for mothers due to increased demands to balance domestic work and employment. The narratives of mothers coping with COVID-19 reveal that mothers have both internalized strong intra-family expectations to shoulder the primary responsibility for domestic labor and childcare in addition to completing their work obligations and experience institutional gender bias in the expectations that employers have for employees. The interviews highlight lower expectations for fathers’ contributions (relative to mothers’ contributions) to parenting in two-parent households under pandemic conditions. These findings can be understood through the feminist perspective by conceptualizing the stress and challenges these mothers are experiencing during the pandemic as reflective patterns of dominance and oppression as they relate to gender.5 Additionally, through the attachment theory lens, the findings about pandemic parenting show how the main responsibility of raising healthy, well-attached children falls heavily on mothers, while fathers, other relatives, and family structures, or contextual factors that may impact mother-child well-being assume less responsibility.6
Educating fathers about supportive norms and socializing men to take a more active role in fulfilling domestic responsibilities may stimulate greater father involvement. The current findings reveal a need for more research, policy, and practice to advocate for and implement coparenting education to relieve stress among mothers and the need for policy reforms that favor working mothers, such as expanding paid leave for childcare and supporting flexible work arrangements for mothers during pandemic conditions and beyond.7,8

Learning Objectives:
1) analyze the findings that mothers are under heightened stress during the pandemic because of increased demands to balance domestic work and employment;
2) apply the current findings to public policy change and advocacy to challenge the traditional view of the role of mothers while establishing new models of women as equal co-parents;
3) demonstrate the methods and be able to replicate the study using a more diverse participant group to further understand this phenomenon.