Mothering in a Pandemic: Navigating Care Work, Intensive Motherhood, and COVID-19

Even before COVID-19, women around the world performed more unpaid domestic labor, specifically unpaid care labor, than men. COVID-19 has only exacerbated the gender gap in this domestic labor. For Western women, especially mothers in the United States of America, the normative discourse of intensive motherhood and the gendered pressure inherent in the unrealistic standards set by the discourse have only increased the amount of unpaid domestic and care labor required of mothers. Using qualitative, in-depth interviews with 18 mothers during May–June 2020, this study examines privileged mothers’ perceptions of what they did well in parenting both before and during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. The mothers’ pragmatic adaptations during the pandemic posed challenges to the norms of intensive motherhood, as did emergent ideas about integrative mothering articulated before the pandemic’s onset. We find that while COVID-19 has increased expectations on mothers, it has also provided a turning point wherein expectations can be changed, as the participants suggested. Implications for intensive motherhood scholars, mothers, and communication researchers are discussed, along with future research.