Caregiving in a Crisis: Mothers’ Parenting Experiences and the Persistence of Class-Based Parenting During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Mounting research has revealed how the labor of caregiving and parenting in the United States fell disproportionately to mothers during the COVID-19 pandemic, with negative impacts on mothers’ personal and professional well-being. Here, we advance this growing body of work by examining how mothers’ pandemic-related parenting and caregiving experiences differed across socioeconomic status. We ask the degree to which mothers’ class-based parenting approaches persisted or dissipated in the wake of the pandemic. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted with 130 mothers caring for children under eighteen in 2020–2021, we find that these parenting patterns largely continued into the pandemic, with mothers’ socioeconomic and employment status shaping how they experienced and navigated this disruption and particularly how they managed competing paid and unpaid labor demands.

Keywords

• motherhood
• caregiving
• parenting
• socioeconomic status
• covid-19 pandemic