Being a mother in the pandemic was intense”: lived experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in Britain and Japan. Trying to Function in the Unfunctional': Mothers and COVID-19.” Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, vol.
Being a Mother in the Pandemic Was Intense”
Lived Experiences of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Britain and Japan
This article presents a snapshot of the early COVID-19 pandemic, captured through the lived experiences of English-speaking mothers in Britain and Japan. Mothers' experiences during the pandemic can be understood in the context of the social structure of gender (Acker; Risman), the institution of motherhood (A. Rich), and cooperative conflict between opposite-sex couples (Sen; Agarwal).
Parenting during a Pandemic: Mothers and Disabled Children in Aotearoa/New Zealand—
A Hidden Minority
Experiences of mothers caring for a child with an intellectual disability during the Covid-19 pandemic in the Netherlands.”. The experiences of mothers of children and young people with intellectual disabilities during the first COVID-19 Lockdown period”.
Falling Off a Cliff”: Mothering Disabled Children through the Pandemic and Beyond
During the COVID-19 pandemic, maternal caregiving responsibilities for caring for disabled children increased exponentially, and mothers continue to experience this in the aftermath of the pandemic (Cacioppo et al.; . Houtrow et al.; Rogers et al.). This caring work often does not decrease as disabled children grow older; rather, it intensifies (McCann et al.). Much has been written about the negative impact of school closures on children (Chaabane et al.; Vaillancourt et al.; Whitley et al.).
For example, disabled children can provide input on important research questions, interventions in development, and how to learn about other children's experiences (Ibrahim et al.; Vasalou et al.). Virtual school curricula required resources and support for learning, alienating many disabled children (Bakaniene et al.). For example, therapeutic support, such as physiotherapy and speech and occupational therapy, needs to be improved to support children whose development has deteriorated during the pandemic (Shakespeare et al.).
We need to “build fairer” (Marmot et al.) and develop equitable inclusive policies for children with disabilities, identifying key areas for support and reshaping policies that were never inclusive to begin with.
Quarantine Mothering and Working at Home
How Institutions of Higher Education Supported (or Failed to Support) Academic Mothers
Newspapers across the United States (US) documented the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic created a crisis for mothers. The body of research focusing on the impact of the pandemic on faculty at institutions of higher education (IHE) continues to grow (Kirk-Jenkins and Hughey). Together, these results suggested that the lived experiences of academic mothers during the COVID-19 pandemic were significantly more negative than those of academic fathers.
Once again, this paper focuses on questions about the impact of their institution's policies and practices related to working from home and with children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gender differences in first and corresponding authorship in public health research submissions during the Covid-19 pandemic. American Journal of Public Health, Vol. Gender inequality in research productivity during the Covid-19 pandemic. Harvard Business School, Working Paper 2020, pp.
Abrupt adaptation: A review of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on faculty in higher education.
The Stories We Tell: Narratives of Mothering and Work During the Dual Pandemics of 2020
And while we agree with these authors' sentiment that "the only new thing is the cameras." The book promises to help women dismantle “the barriers that exist within ourselves” (Sandberg and Scovell 8). As with the 'lean in' story, the pitfalls of the intensive motherhood story were emphatically present within the new pandemic lifestyle.
Duffy gives their definitions as “the production of goods in the economy and the reproduction of the labor power necessary to maintain that productive economy” (315). Effects of the COVID-19 Recession on the US Labor Market: Occupation, Family, and Gender.” Journal for Economic Perspectives, vol. McKinney: Social Media and the Interactive Construction of Police Violence.” The Journal of Social Media in Society, vol.
Mother's Sociology." Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Education, edited by Michael W.
Maternal Reflections on Working from Home with Children during the Pandemic
These changes due to the pandemic had negative consequences for both mothers and their children. However, the current study sought to explore the potential positive effects of the increased time spent together by mothers and their children in the United States (US) during the pandemic. Adults often reported that a positive repercussion of the pandemic was greater flexibility at work (Cornell et al.).
We were mainly interested in how mothers viewed the impact of their work during the pandemic on their children's career paths and leadership aspirations. Despite experiencing distress related to COVID-19, mothers reported that their children had learned more about their work responsibilities since the start of the pandemic compared to before it (t p < 0.001). The initial period of the pandemic lockdown (March to May 2020) put many mothers and their children in close proximity as work and school moved to online platforms.
Mothers played an especially important role in their children's career development during the uncertain times before the pandemic (DiPalma and Reid), and the mothers in our study acknowledged that they served as important career models for their children by exposing their children to their work environment and encouraged career discussions (Bloemen-Bekx).
Childbirth Narratives in the Canton of Ticino (Switzerland): Perceptions and Experiences of
One had moved from a German-speaking canton of Switzerland, and one had been adopted as a child and raised in the canton of Ticino. They all gave birth to their first or next child during the COVID-19 pandemic and lived in the canton of Ticino at the time of the interview. Since there was no time to perform a COVID-19 test, her husband was not allowed into the OR.
Contrary to what happens at home or in the maternity ward, in the private and public hospitals of the canton of Ticino, women are not assisted by midwives of their choice, but by staff on duty. In the canton of Ticino in 2020, only 2.26 percent of births took place outside the hospital (Grylka and Borner). In the canton of Ticino, women had the following options for giving birth during the pandemic: two public hospitals, two private clinics, a birthing center and at home.
It should be noted that despite the closure of schools and kindergartens in the canton of Ticino, they were closed for a shorter period of time than in other countries such as Italy and the USA.
The Pandemic and Maternal Mental Health in the Western World: A Cross-Cultural
Psychiatrist Pooja Lakshmin calls the experience of her patients feeling "betrayed". She discusses that "the crushing toll on working mothers". Lakshmin explains that this experience for mothers went far beyond burnout: "While burnout places blame (and therefore responsibility) on the individual and tells working mothers that they are not resilient enough, betrayal points directly to the broken structures around them." The pandemic experience went beyond guilt over children's experiences and parental availability or presence—it also included hopelessness. In such cases, they are more likely to be around other refugees and out in the world.
One mother told me that she had never done as much "parenting" as she has done in the United States: "[In Afghanistan] the women did the daily chores together and the children all played together. Another mother of eight said that she shortly after arriving in the US had given birth to another child and was shocked: "The medical treatment was fine at the hospital and I was in less pain than I was at home. The amount of work that mothers do in the West seemed to shock these Afghan mothers.
The consequences of this are evident in the many ways that mothers in particular have struggled during the pandemic.
Art Looking within MotherScholarhood
Art Elicitation for Self-Reflections and Sense Making
Scholar-participants viewed the art through a series of art-seeking tasks that Lauren designed to elicit conscious and focused self-reflection on the meaning and experiences of MotherScholarhood during COVID-19. In the initial data set, we each selected an individually selected print from a shared series by Hokusai and then wrote an accompanying narrative to explain how the print holds relevant symbolism to our personal perception of our MotherScholar experiences through the first two years of Covid-19 pandemic. Reflecting on her first year with COVID, Lauren chose The Fuji Reflects in Lake Kawaguchi, Seen from Misaka Pass in Kai Province by Hokusai (see Figure 1) to summarize her experiences and expand the timeline to include memories of pre-COVID-19 experiences and then focusing on the first months of 2020.
When reflecting on her first year of COVID-19 (focusing on fall 2020 to spring 2021), Chrissy chose The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai (see Figure 3) to best represent her experiences. But they feel more separated from me (if I = MotherScholar = Mount Fuji) than they did during the first two years of COVID-19. After reflecting on the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chrissy chose Daniel Popper's Umi as an accurate embodiment of her current MotherScholar identity name, as she chose to keep our original.
The personal transitions we experienced during COVID-19 led to an individualized redesign, recommitment, and rebalancing of each of our MotherScholar identities.
Drawing (Out) the Evil (M)other of the Family Court
The video performance drawing Respondent Mother, made in my family home in May 2022, is a consolidation of the autoethnographic methods of drawing that emerged during my doctoral research, when I explored the relationship between drawing and maternal subjectivity. According to the legal definition of the term "respondent mother", the application against me was filed by the father of my children, and in this way I, as the mother, responded to his application. But separately, without this context, the term "responsible mother" has a double meaning, as it emphasizes the role of the mother to constantly respond to the needs of her child: "Before the 'I' is simply a response to the call and demand of the Other".
In retrospect, it was clear that this experience, as expressed in discussions with the Children and Family Court Advisory Support Service (CAFCASS), only fueled the image of the anxious and unstable mother that the father's lawyer wanted to present to the court . My autoethnographic process took a “specific-to-general approach” (Chang 62) as it took into account the specific language of the court papers. Throughout the case, I was careful to protect our children from the details of court paperwork, often working late into the night with my submissions.
Produced in May 2022, just a month before the final hearing in a trial that spanned fourteen months, Respondent Mother began confessional-emotional autoethnographic writing (Chang 145) as the first step to understand the impact of the court case. traced on my body - as a "body of evidence" (Spry 19).
