Childcare and mothers’ mobility in the United States during COVID-19

Angela Remus

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Remus, Angela. 2021. Childcare and mothers’ mobility in the United States during COVID-19. MoLab Inventory of Mobilities and Socioeconomic Changes. Department ‘Anthropology of Economic Experimentation’. Halle/Saale: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.48509/molab.9025

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By March 16, 2020, approximately 30 million children’s schools had closed for in-person instruction across the country.[1]^,[2] Many schools remained closed through to the end of the school year in May or June. When the new school year started, many schools continued with remote learning,[3]^,[4] while others implemented hybrid models that required part-time distance learning and part-time in-person learning.[5]

Because schools are funded in part by local property taxes, schools in lower-income areas generally have fewer resources than schools in wealthy areas.[6]^,[7] With fewer resources, it can be more difficult for these schools to implement the public health recommendations that reduce the risks of returning to school in person.[8] Infrastructural improvements, such as replacing ventilation systems or decreasing classroom density with outdoor tents and extra class- and recreational rooms, may not be an option for overcrowded, under-resourced schools.[9] Children in families of lower socioeconomic status are therefore more likely to be learning remotely than their wealthy counterparts.[10]^,[11] Consequently, we hypothesize that mothers in low- and lower-middle-income families may be disproportionately immobilized in the home as a result of the pandemic.

Job loss among low-income women may also contribute to the immobilization of women in the home, potentially to a greater extent than men. Women make up a disproportionate share of workers in the retail, hospitality, and childcare industries, which have been particularly affected by the pandemic.[12] Further, women of colour have seen especially high levels of unemployment during the pandemic, and are also more likely than their white counterparts to head low-income households.[13]

Of course, low-income women who remain employed are more likely to hold jobs that require in-person labour than are their wealthy counterparts.[14] Some cities have adopted measures that, while primarily designed to enhance students’ learning experiences, are also likely to facilitate mothers’ continued mobility. San Francisco, for example, has implemented a Community Hub Initiative, designed to provide supervision of small groups of low-income and minority students at community organizations as they complete lessons taught remotely by their schools.[15],[16]

But predictions about mothers in low-income families are far from the only hypotheses one can make regarding mothers’ mobility. It is also conceivable that women in dual-parent households on the high end of the income spectrum may also be immobilized in the home. Although wealthier school districts are more likely to have in-person options, it is nevertheless the case that a large share of American students are learning remotely at least part of the time.[17] Furthermore, non-school childcare options are not widely available, even for families that can afford them.[18]^,[19] With children immobilized at least part-time at home, high-income mothers may opt to immobilize themselves in the home; stereotypical gender roles—coupled with the fact that men are, on average, higher earners than women[20]—may lead some families to accept a new mobility arrangement as a pandemic-induced status quo.

Despite the seemingly intuitive interaction of children’s and mothers’ mobility, existing statistical and academic attempts to characterize the impact of COVID-19 on the experience of women have not yielded a uniform characterization of the impact of the pandemic on mothers. One recent study by the Pew Research Center suggested that the gap between mothers’ and fathers’ employment levels in September 2020 is comparable to that of September 2019, suggesting that the gendered impact of the pandemic might be less significant than news media commentary suggests.[21] Other studies, by contrast, suggest that women are falling behind men in job recovery,[22] that mothers are cutting back on formal work time relative to fathers,[23] and that mothers are dropping out of the workforce and thus are not being counted among the unemployed.[24] If generalizable conclusions about the impact of the pandemic on mothers’ (im)mobility remain elusive, we suggest that a closer look at the interaction of children’s mobility and women’s employment may prove fruitful.

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.