Maternal Wellbeing at Home and Work: The Impacts of COVID-19 School and Childcare Closures

Mothers were disproportionally impacted by school and childcare closures during the COVID-19 pandemic because they undertook the lion's share of homeschooling and/or caring for children. For instance, a large survey from the Institute of Fiscal Studies in the UK showed that mothers were likely to combine paid work with other activities, almost always childcare, in 47% of their work hours, compared with 30% of fathers’ work hours (Andrew, Cattan, Costa Dias, et al., 2020). The demands of combining full time work and looking after children and the gendered division of home-labour is often related to poor maternal and child mental health and reduced maternal participation in paid work (Lachance-Grzela et al., 2019; Offer & Schneider, 2011; Daminger, 2019; Chandola et al., 2019; Czymara et al., 2020).

The goal of this Research Topic is to examine the impact of school and childcare closures on maternal wellbeing during the pandemic and consider the lessons learnt for maternal mental health, and maternal participation in the workforce in a post-pandemic world. More specifically, we want to shed more light on maternal experiences overall, as well as from groups of mothers that we know were particularly challenged. For instance, while we know that working mothers’ mental health was significantly impacted, we know less about how working status impacted their well-being (Racine et al., 2022). Additionally, we are aware of no research on student mothers.

Caregiver responses to the lockdown and associated stresses were experienced differently across cultures (e.g., Morgul, Kallitsoglou, Essau, 2021). Adopting a global perspective in this Research Topic, we want to better understand maternal wellbeing during COVID-19 school closures across cultures.

Finally, while access to free childcare was proved a key factor of improved maternal wellbeing and employment during the pandemic (Racine et al., 2022), school closures taught us additional lessons about what matters for mothers which are yet to be unraveled. To this end, another goal is to identify the subtle factors that promoted or hindered maternal wellbeing.

For this Research Topic, we invite contributions that help us better understand maternal wellbeing at home and at work during the COVID-19 school closures, with a focus on the following issues:

• homeschooling and/or caregiving while working or studying;
• the gendered distribution of unpaid/domestic work;
• work-related issues informal and formal social supports (e.g., paternal support);
• maternal coping strategies;
• cross-cultural perspectives on the above issues.

We are interested in exploring those themes across several maternal characteristics and their intersection including race, age, level of education, single motherhood, full-time vs part-time employment and child characteristics such as special educational needs.

We welcome contributions from across the maternal population, but we encourage submission on working/studying mothers or research with implications for these populations. While the focus is on the maternal population, we are keen to incorporate a range of voices, so we welcome studies that include fathers, and/or employers. If the studies do not include mothers, then the relevance and implications for maternal wellbeing should be made explicit.