Caregiving in the Time of COVID-19

Qualitative Sociological Research

The Project

I conducted this research independently for a senior Sociology seminar at the University of Washington from January to March 2021. For our final project, my class was asked to study the effect of the pandemic on a food-related topic. I chose to study pandemic-related changes in the gender dynamics involved in feeding a family, with a focus on the experiences of working mothers.

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic upended the lives of working parents as many schools switched to virtual learning and usual childcare options, such as after-school programs and relatives, became unavailable. Parents were left scrambling to coordinate childcare, assist with online learning, and manage additional housework brought on increased time spent at home.

According to a recent United Nations report, women have taken on the majority of this unpaid labor, and the amount of housework done by women compared to men has increased globally since the start of the pandemic.

Many working mothers struggled to balance the increasing demands of their jobs and housework, especially as children resumed virtual learning and the boundaries between home, school, and the workplace vanished.

This phenomenon had been widely discussed online, but at the time of my research, no sociological studies on pandemic-related changes in the gender division of household labor in the U.S. had been published.

My research explores how the pandemic has affected working mothers' unpaid labor in the home, in particular feeding, a term which I use to encompass all aspects of feeding a family from planning meals and grocery shopping to cooking and doing dishes. I use feeding labor as a window into mothers’ evolving views on femininity, motherhood, and the division of labor in their homes during the pandemic.

Sociological Background and Theory

The gender revolution has been largely one-sided; even as women have made significant progress towards gender equality in the workplace, they remain responsible for most household labor. In The Second Shift, sociologist Arlie Hochschild studies the unpaid housework and childcare labor done by mothers after a day of working outside the home and explains how the majority of this labor typically falls on women because norms of domesticity remain tied to cultural scripts of femininity.

Although it’s been thirty years since The Second Shift was published, women still typically shoulder the burden of household labor and are judged more harshly than men if they neglect housework. Recent scholarship suggests that while many individuals aspire to egalitarian relationships, institutional constraints such as stingy parental leave policies and demanding workplace cultures that require long hours hinder parents’ ability to achieve goals in both their career and their personal life. Heterosexual couples with children often revert to traditional gender roles when it comes to the division of labor, with women taking on more work within the home while men prioritize building their careers.

Feeding is one type of labor that has historically had a reputation for being “women’s work”. Although norms have shifted over the past half-century and women may not face as much overt pressure to cook, the act of providing food for the family still carries powerful symbolic and cultural meaning as an expression of femininity and motherhood.

If women have indeed taken on more unpaid labor in the home (including feeding work) during the pandemic, it is important to understand whether that shift is motivated by practical constraints, personal preferences, or adherence to gender roles.

Research Process

Interviews

I interviewed seven mothers who were found using a combination of snowball and purposive sampling. All are employed full-time, have at least one child between the ages of 2 and 14, live in the United States, are in a heterosexual domestic partnership or marriage, and are considered middle-SES in the areas in which they reside. The participants are a geographically and racially diverse group and represent a wide variety of ages, careers, lifestyles, and values. 

Interviews were conducted over Zoom and lasted between 20 and 45 minutes. Questions centered around three major topics:

1. Pandemic-related lifestyle changes and challenges

2. Family structure and the household division of labor

3. Beliefs about gender roles and parenting styles

Analysis

I analyzed interview data using a qualitative content analysis. First, an initial open coding helped me identify patterns in ideas and behaviors surrounding eating habits, parenting, and unpaid labor (e.g., prioritizing convenience or spending more time cooking). I organized these codes into more abstract categories including the pandemic’s impact on mothers, social influence, identity, the household division of labor, expressions of gender, feeding practices and priorities, tension between ideals and reality, and social support. I then connected these categories to broader sociological theories of gender roles, the division of labor, and power.

Results

By inducing people to spend more time at home, the pandemic has increased the amount of cooking, cleaning, and other types of housework that must be done in many families. Most of the women I interviewed said that they have taken on the majority of this additional work. I sought to find out why most of this work has fallen on women, and learn about what effects it has had on their lives.

The persistence of a gendered division of household labor

Almost all participants describe the division of labor in their households as “equal”, but asking them about time spent on different tasks usually revealed that their partner’s contribution had been overstated. These mothers seem to view housework done by themselves as fundamentally different from housework done by their husbands, since they would typically frame their own labor as essential while their partners’ work was often described as “helping out”. Even as many parents strive to maintain an egalitarian division of labor at home, an implicit assumption remains that housework is women’s work.

All the women I interviewed described feeling like they haven’t been living up to their ideals for “good” parenting during the pandemic. However, none placed blame on their partners or expressed a desire for their partners to do more housework or childcare. In fact, some participants expressed a belief that certain types of work were better left to them anyway. One participant told me,

“I take her to swim class and gymnastics and all her doctors appointments because I feel like it is more important to me. I will pay attention more. If a doctor is asking questions or wants details of things, I don’t necessarily feel like Jim will 100% pay attention or remember something or be able to relay information back. He’s just not super detail-oriented when it comes to something like that”.

Many other participants attributed personality differences between themselves and their partners (e.g., being kinder, gentler, or more focused) to them being more capable than their partners at certain tasks. Other participants contrasted their parenting style to their partner’s. The interviewees generally portrayed their approach to parenting as forgiving, accommodating, kind, and understanding, while describing their partners as either strict and disciplinarian or hands-off and relaxed. These women often described such differences in parenting styles are complementary.

Only one participant described housework as the responsibility of the wife and mother. All others seemed to push back against entrenched gender roles by emphasizing the importance of equality in their relationships. However, their identification with traditionally “feminine” qualities, and association of those qualities with competence as a caregiver suggests that these women also use caregiving and housework as ways to perform gender. Perceived differences in personality or parenting styles between themselves and their partners may actually be the result of social conditioning. Since this is often a subconscious process and it happens continually throughout a person’s life, its impact might not be obvious to a person, but it can still be powerful. Internalized gender norms, whether formally acknowledged or subconsciously held, likely explain why these mothers place greater responsibility on themselves than on their partners for caring for their families.

Although they may feel pressure to live up to a certain ideal of motherhood, it has been hard for many of them to juggle all their responsibilities. Most of my interviewees described how the pandemic has left them feeling stressed and overwhelmed, with more work than before but with less time and energy to complete it. For many, this has changed their relationship with food and feeding, giving convenience, taste, and emotional appeal greater importance when they decide what to feed their families.

Convenience

Many interviewees said that they are providing more meals for their family each week than they did before the pandemic, but all said that they have been putting less effort into cooking, grocery shopping, and meal planning. Convenience has become a bigger priority for them as they are under greater stress and have less free time. Participants described delegating cooking to a partner at home or shifting from homemade meals to frozen foods and takeout. Even participants who don’t do the majority of the cooking in their homes but typically help out with grocery shopping and meal planning said that they are doing less.

One interviewee told me about how even though husband does most of the cooking, she still plays an important role in feeding the family. She does all the grocery shopping, helps out with meal prep, and typically decides what they eat. Making sure that her daughter eats a healthy and varied diet is important to her. She told me,

“I was pretty good about that pre-COVID, but then, I don’t know, the energy of having to deal with everything and going back to work, having a longer commute, and then just having what seems like less time… it just kind of falls off with the combination of everything.”

These days her husband chooses most of their meals, often using food he finds in the freezer, and she feels that they are much less healthy now than they used to be.

Another participant’s children used to get breakfast and lunch at school, but now she must provide those meals for them at home. She told me that it can be difficult to find the time to cook on busy days, and her family has become more reliant on snack foods.

“We have had more snacking food around. That’s something that I have because the kids are hungry all the time and when I’m on a Zoom call I can’t be interrupted—’Here, go grab the pretzels out of the thing. Go grab what you want and self-regulate’”

Compensatory feeding

Existing sociological research has documented how parents use indulgent foods to compensate for being unable to meet some of their children’s material desires. Since food is relatively cheap and accessible, it can be easy for parents to meet their children’s requests for snacks or sweets when more expensive gifts, like clothing or toys, might be unaffordable.

The pandemic has imposed new types of scarcity on families. When I asked participants about their priorities as parents, I received answers like, “safety and stability”, “connection”, and “culture”. Many described how the pandemic has made it harder for them to provide these things for their children, who have been deprived of playdates, left alone at home, or are struggling to stay engaged in online classes. Most of the mothers I interviewed told me that the pandemic has been very hard on their kids, and they feel guilty as parents for not being able to do more for their them.

One way that some participants compensate for these challenges is by being more willing to accommodate their children’s requests for unhealthy food. One interviewee talked to me about how her son is having a hard time in his online classes. He wasn’t getting the support he needs, and she is in meetings all day and unable to supervise him. She uses food as both a way to incentivize him in class and to show her care for him during a stressful time. She told me,

“I’ll let him help me pick out dinner if he can pay attention through the day. This gives him something to look forward to and he’s really motivated by food. I will buy him a snack. ‘You guys wanna go to the gas station and pick out a snack? I’ll buy you a snack if you guys are good today.’ And that’s something new that I never did before this year”.

Another participant told me that she started buying more of her children’s favorite treats to make up for leaving them on their own.

“My kids have been on their own a lot, which I think is true of a lot of working parents. They’ve had to grow up pretty quick. I can’t say they have the best diet. I come home and it’s like, they’re eating ice cream… and part of it’s on me. I could probably do a better job of not buying junk. But I struggle with the guilt of, I’m off teaching these other kids and my own kids are on their own at home, left to their own devices.”

Not all mothers felt these pressures as a result of the pandemic. My interviewees who receive significant support from their partner and have professional help with childcare most days of the week said that the pandemic has had little, if any, impact on their lifestyle and eating habits.

The importance of social support

Social support is crucial for working mothers to maintain a sense of balance between their personal and professional lives. Mothers of young children in particular draw on their social capital for help with childcare and housework. All the mothers of young children I interviewed either rely on family members or professional childcare (e.g. daycare centers, nannies).

The high costs of childcare coupled with a lack of government support for working parents appear to reinforce existing patterns of socioeconomic inequality as parents who can afford to hire housekeepers, nannies, and tutors for their children are able to continue working more easily than mothers who must balance both work and childcare full time. This division seems especially strong between mothers who are able to work remotely and mothers who must work outside of the home. One interviewee told me,

“The entire previous staff at my current office didn’t return because all of them were working mothers and they were now homeschooling their kids and they couldn’t juggle doing both full time. So that completely wiped out the whole staff.”

Before the pandemic, this interviewee ran a successful wedding planning business, a job which allowed her to work from home so she could be with her two year old child. But as COVID-19 spread, her weddings were either canceled or indefinitely postponed. Since her husband is out of work and her business was no longer financially sustainable, she had to return to an office job to support her family. In a reversal of gender roles, she described herself as lucky for being able to support her family while her husband stays at home with their daughter.

Remote work complicated the mothers’ ability to balance work with responsibilities at home. While some of my participants described feeling fortunate to be able to work from home since they don’t have other options for childcare, all of the participants who work from home said that it’s harder for them to work with their children around and their productivity has fallen. Like mothers of young children, participants who aren’t able to work remotely either rely on professional childcare or close social ties, typically a partner who scaled back their career to take care of their children during the pandemic.

Takeaways

1. Research questions are not interview questions. I learned that you usually can’t just ask people what you want to know, especially when it comes to sensitive topics. For this project, I wanted to learn about how couples divide up household labor. In my first interviews, I asked participants about this directly. Almost all participants answered by saying it is “equal” or “fair”, but this told me little about who was actually doing what. I discovered that answers were much more fruitful when I inquired about specific tasks and asked participants to compare their parenting style to their partner’s.

2. When conducting remote interviews, always have a plan B. One of the challenges of remote research is not having control over the participant’s environment. This opens up possibilities for things to go wrong—distractions, computer problems, and even unsafe situations (e.g., a participant doing an interview while driving). Several issues like these came up when I was conducting interviews and I learned that 1) it is important to clearly communicate expectations prior to the interview and 2) you should always have a solid backup plan.

3. Clearly define the scope of your project—and stick to it. I gathered a lot of rich data from my interviews. In my analysis, I uncovered some very interesting information that was unfortunately beyond the scope of my research. I’ll be honest: it was painful to cut these sections from my work. But, sticking to my original research question ultimately strengthened my final report.

   Given the wide variety of pandemic experiences among working mothers, I believe that my research question would have been better addressed with either a larger sample size and the addition of a survey or a narrower focus (e.g., mothers who are working remotely and live with a partner who is also working remotely).