‘I Don't Have a Lot of Choice … My Boss He Still Likes to Go to the Office Everyday Pretty Much’ – Exploring the Impact of COVID-19 on Parents’ Decision-Making When Planning Care During Their Child's First Year

Abstract

The closure of schools and nurseries during the COVID-19 lockdowns triggered the re-insourcing of childcare to the home, sparking extensive public debate and academic research on the pandemic's potential impact on gender equality (see, for example, Burgess and Goldman, 2021; Vandecasteele et al. 2022). My PhD research, which explores parents' decision-making influences when planning care during their child's first year in the UK context, coincided with COVID-19. The coinciding of my data collection with COVID-19 (seven online discussions with a total of 36 participants and 12 follow up interviews, 10 which include partners) created microcosms in which wider public debates were echoed. My research draws on the Capability Approach (CA) (Sen, 2009) to conceptualise parents' capabilities to share leave as they aspire to and employs dialogical narrative analysis (DNA) (Riessman, 2008) to explore how gendered parenting norms are constitutive of parents’ care capabilities. In this chapter, I draw on feminist ethics of care to explore the disruption of gendered parenting norms, in the COVID-19 context, within parents' decision-making and a possible ‘reimagining’ of the value attributed to care (Ozkazanc-Pan and Pullen, 2021; Tronto, 2017). My findings support anticipation of what the promise of greater flexibility could bring as a result of increased visibility of caregiving during COVID-19. However, I also find evidence which supports the caution previously recommended of the need to reflect on work cultures and the predominance of masculine ideal worker norms in the UK (Chung et al. 2021).

Citation

Matysova, C. (2024), "‘I Don't Have a Lot of Choice … My Boss He Still Likes to Go to the Office Everyday Pretty Much’ – Exploring the Impact of COVID-19 on Parents’ Decision-Making When Planning Care During Their Child's First Year", Disney, T. and Grimshaw, L. (Ed.) Care and Coronavirus (Emerald Studies in Child Centred Practice), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 121-135. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83797-310-120241009