Mothering in the Time of Coronavirus

When stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 pandemic erased the division between home and school, many parents in the United States were suddenly expected to become their children’s teachers. Despite this new arrangement, older gender norms largely remained in place, and these extra child rearing responsibilities fell disproportionately on mothers. Mothering in the Time of Coronavirus explores how they juggled working, supervising at-home learning, and protecting their children’s emotional and physical health during the outbreak.

Focusing on both remote and essential workers in central New York, Amy Lutz, Sujung (Crystal) Lee, and Baurzhan Bokayev argue that the pandemic transformed an already intensive style of contemporary American child rearing, in which mothers are expected to be constantly available to meet their children’s needs even when they are working outside the home, into extremely intensive mothering. The authors investigate the consequences of this shift, and how it is influenced by issues such as class and race. They also bring attention to how and why current public policies are not conducive to the de-intensification of motherhood. Locating their study within larger intersections of gender, family, and education, they contend that to fully appreciate the broader social consequences of COVID-19, we must understand the experiences of mothers.