The Struggle of Motherhood in the Pandemic

The system of care work in the US is truly broken and is in no process of changing. The flaws of the system are affecting people of every race, class, and identity.

My main focus will be the treatment of women within American society in relation to motherhood. The article ‘Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women’ wrote about the study of women and how they balance motherhood with everyday life. They followed a couple of mothers for a couple of years and interviewed them every 6 months, starting in the pandemic, to see how different factors are affecting them. Most of the studies have shown that mothers have become increasingly stressed, anxious, and feel like failures because they have no support in the way that they are managing motherhood.

All of these cases have many things in common, but the one underlying factor is that they don’t have a system that is rooting for them or helping them make the right decisions. This lack of foundational support is the main cause of the serious effects that the pandemic left on mothers. They had to take care of their children, work from home, attempt to keep their children busy, and all while trying to uphold the societal standards of parenting.

One main problem that mothers in each case were facing was trying to find the balance of screen time for their children. This was a major problem because although technology is a good way to keep kids distracted, it is viewed as a negative thing to do because of how it affects development. This goes to show that mothers didn’t have many options on what to do with their children during the pandemic because there was no one to help them figure it out.