Families in Quarantine: COVID-19 Pandemic Effects on Parents’ and Children’s Labor, Leisure, and Education

• In Event: Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Topic - Family Context & Processes

Abstract

Women continue to be responsible for the majority of household labor and childcare (Pew Research Center, 2015). Female children are more likely to be responsible for family chores than their male counterparts (Liben & Bigler, 2002). Throughout development, girls expect to take on greater household and childcare roles as compared to boys, especially when their own parents modeled a traditional breadwinner-caregiver division of labor (Fulcher & Coyle, 2011; Fulcher et al., 2015). Consequently, girls and women anticipate and experience greater levels of work-family conflict and change work plans to accommodate work-family conflict and family role expectations (Coyle et al., 2015).

Less is known about how family functioning changes in times of crisis, such as during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Restrictions imposed by local and state authorities forced many Americans to live under mandatory quarantine conditions for the first time since the 1918 Spanish Flu. Over 200,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 in the 7 months since the first U.S. fatality was reported in February (CDC, 2020). Unemployment jumped from 3.5% (pre-pandemic) to 14.7 % during the peak of the quarantine (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020). Many of those who remained employed began working from home while watching children or assisting with remote schooling. Research shows mothers rely on daughters to assist even more around the house when mothers’ work demands are greater (Crouter et al., 2001), something we interpret to mean similar processes could operate when working and schooling at home. We expect that in heterosexual households, women in particular may be taking on additional housework, childcare, and educational responsibilities. As a result, we expect women may be experiencing greater work-family conflict, greater stress, and lower psychological wellbeing than they were before the pandemic. We hypothesize that children will spend their time engaged in a variety of formal and informal learning practices but that leisure time activities and chores will be largely gender-typed in nature.

Parents (N=280) with at least partial residential custody of at least one child under age 18 were recruited via online groups, email, and snowball sampling in April 2020. They completed measures of past (pre-pandemic) and current work-family conflict (Carlson et al., 2000), division of household labor (Who Does What; Cowan & Cowan, 1990) and schooling responsibilities, and coping (Satisfaction with Life; Diener et al., 1985; and Perceived Stress; Cohen et al., 1983). They completed a time diary of children’s leisure, health, education, and chore activities.

Data collection is complete, and coding and analysis are on-going. Preliminary findings suggest that indeed, for working parents, work-family conflict increased under quarantine, t(266)=5.65, p<.001. Mothers reported greater responsibility for children’s schooling than did fathers, t(209)=2.97, p=.003. Daughters were more likely to have increased responsibility for caring for younger siblings during quarantine, t(214.28)=2.02, p=.046, and spent more hours assisting siblings with school than did sons, t(17)=2.25, p=.038. As the pandemic continues, our results have implications for necessary family supports that might be implemented by employers, schools, or mental health providers.

Authors

• Emily F Coyle, Saint Martin's University
  Presenting Author

• Megan Fulcher, washing
  Non-Presenting Author

• Konner Baker, Saint Martin's University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Craig N Fredrickson, Saint Martin's University
  Non-Presenting Author