“The time-plan has been ousted and is now in the garage”: Family life and homework in stories about COVID-19

Abstract

In Western societies the role of the parent has increasingly been framed by neoliberal discourses. The focus is on the parent, especially the professional middle-class mother, as an entrepreneur who makes choices and trains the child with an eye to how it can maximize its potential and become a good citizen. This places a strain on parents, especially working mothers, who juggle their parenting responsibilities with their work outside the home. The COVID-19 epidemic upset these juggling acts and the fine-tuned daily rhythms of many families. In April, 2020, when the study took place, Iceland was in semi-lockdown, with schools running at limited capacity and a ban of gatherings of more than 20 people. Furthermore, many parents did not have access to their usual support in terms of childcare. These times without “precedent” thus provided an interesting moment to explore constructions of parenting, especially in relation to parents’ role in their children’s education and how at times contradictory demands from the home and work were met.

This article adopts a feminist poststructuralist perspective to analyse ideas about parenting roles in relation to children’s homework during the COVID-19 epidemic in Iceland. Data was collected using the story-completion method during the period April 7–24, 2020, when a national emergency had been declared in Iceland because of the Corona virus. The story completion method is useful as it provides insight into the sociocultural ideas and discourses people draw on when making sense of a topic. The participants were approached on social media where they were provided with a link directing them to the task on Qualtrics. There the participants were randomly presented with either of two different story stems and asked to complete a story. In the first story stem the main fictional character is a mother who is informed that her children will only be able to stay 2 hours per day at school and she is sent ideas for homework to work on with her children. The other story stem is identical except the main character is a father. In total, 97 stories were collected. The majority of the participants who submitted stories were middle-class, university-educated women and the stories have to be interpreted with that in mind. However, they are an interesting group as they are usually considered to set the norm for good mothering. A recurrent idea running through all the stories we collected was how parents tackled the many demands placed on them and how parental excellence was defined either in alignment with or in resistance to the dominant neoliberal discourse. The analysis resulted in 3 themes: (1) Finding the time: In this theme time is defined as a gendered resource where mothers experience more demands on their time. Lack of time calls for management skills as revealed, for example, in the making of detailed schedules and time-plans for all family members where each task is listed and organized. (2) The struggle with homework: Re-evaluation, success and failures. The parents’ social status, for example level of education and marital status, plays a part in how realistic it is for them to supervise their child’s homework. The parent who fails experiences feelings of guilt and shame. The parent who succeeds often does so at the expense of vital time for paid work. (3) Overburdened parents resist unrealistic demands. This theme describes how parents in the stories are made to question the neoliberal ideas that good parenting entails a constant awareness of risks to the child and its development. The stories describe the pleasure taken in untidy homes and education that does not follow the school curriculum but rather the rhythm of the home. Overall, the themes shed important light on the pressures parents face in modern society and their anxious investment in discourses of parenting where they feel their children’s and their own well-being is on the line. They also pinpoint how important it is to place unrealistic demands on parents in a social and discursive perspective rather than framing them as the responsibility of already overburdened parents. Only by doing so can we work towards social justice and equality in our society.