The pandemonium of pandemic parenting

 

 

The pandemonium of pandemic parenting

by Christine Rosen, Managing Editor |

The Washington Examiner,  February 17, 2022

 

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Not long ago, the New York Times published a story about a new and odd ritual that had emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic: Mothers screaming into the void. The women profiled in the story were from Boston and “exhausted” because “for nearly two years, they have been trapped” by the nation’s pandemic restrictions. Twenty of them decided to assemble on a high school football field to scream together.

 

“Their voices, which carried years of pain and rage that they could finally release, merged into an anguished chorus,” the Times reported. The organizer of the event runs a “mom wellness” website and teaches yoga; she initiated each new round of mom-screaming “by raising two light-up unicorn wands.”

 

Elite, left-of-center publications have devoted a great deal of attention to the difficulties of pandemic parenting during the past two years. The articles almost universally adopt an apocalyptic tone (“The parental burnout crisis has reached a tipping point,” Vox declared in 2020; “Covid parenting is reaching a breaking point,” the Atlantic concurred a year later). The New York Times itself published a series of articles called “primal scream” that examined such experiences, although the newspaper limited its focus to the lives of “working mothers,” since, at the Times, discussions of parenting challenges faced by stay-at-home mothers are verboten. (To say nothing of fathers, whom they also largely ignore.)

 

Many of the pandemic-era stories about parents focused on women who enjoyed a certain amount of privilege, and attracted their fair amount of mockery. But there is a core truth embedded in these often-overwrought feature stories: Parents of children under 18 have endured a pandemic that is qualitatively different than the one experienced by everyone else, and even people not inclined to overshare with public primal screaming are beginning to acknowledge it. Their experiences as parents have changed the way they understand their obligations to their own families, but also their approach to the institutions that play a daily role in their lives. Many parents across the political spectrum feel like the social compact has been broken. And while wealth has protected some families from the worst of these impacts in the near term (allowing them to keep their children in private schools that were still open, or to hire private tutors, for example), the political and social effects will be felt by all for years to come.

 

 

In the late 1960s, sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb set out to study “the moral burdens and emotional hardships of class” in America. The result, The Hidden Injuries of Class, argued that a salient yet underappreciated aspect of class conflict was the way many workers felt about their own status when compared to others in the hierarchy of success. These internal conflicts had less to do with the particulars of their jobs or even with the amount they were paid and more to do with an overarching sense of powerlessness combined with a lack of respect from others for the work that they did. Although they knew their work to be vital, they were often made to feel invisible. Even when they reached objective levels of “success,” they expressed a great deal of self-doubt.

 

 

Although Cobb’s and Sennett’s work focused on the working class in the late 20th century, their insights still resonate. In many ways, the pandemic highlighted how much parents are a class akin to the one Cobb and Sennett examined, a class whose contributions to society are often taken for granted and whose failures or anxieties are deemed to be entirely of their own making. But it is a class that is beginning to understand and publicize the hidden injuries they experienced during the pandemic.

 

Consider how often parents were expected to shoulder the burden and the blame for any suffering experienced by their children as the direct result of institutional and leadership failures. School closures were the most egregious examples of such failures, but there were many smaller challenges that affected the daily lives of parents and their children: playgrounds shuttered, sports and extracurricular activities curtailed, grocery and drug stores understaffed and understocked, doctor’s offices restricting appointments, mass transit scaled back in some cities to the point where a 45-minute wait for a bus became the norm, not the exception.

 

In all of these cases, the failure of leaders and institutions was passed along to parents, who were expected to endure them in silence, which for the most part, they did. The public health institutions, school boards, school administrators, teachers unions, and elected leaders made clear to the families dependent on these institutions and infrastructure that they had little say (and the leaders had little accountability) when they failed.

 

The “safetyism” that dominated elite parenting before the pandemic and that Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff described in The Coddling of the American Mind, a culture “in which safety has become a sacred value” and in which “people are unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns,” became the ruling principle of the pandemic. The notion that parents know what’s best for their children was effectively muzzled by a public health bureaucracy that insisted that any refusal to follow its often-inconsistent pronouncements was a refusal to follow The Science.

 

People’s trust in institutions has declined significantly in recent years. The pandemic revealed just how little institutions trust parents. Time and time again, parents were expected to subsume their own autonomy and risk calculations to the wisdom of the experts.

 

And most did. But fissures soon developed. The pandemic exposed the fact that we don’t have a working class and a professional class but a ruling class — a Zoom class that can comfortably work from home, say — and everyone else. The Zoom class was able to outsource much of its daily risk to others who would do the grocery shopping and deliver Amazon packages and takeout food orders; everyone else still had to show up and work.

 

This did not always break down along traditional class lines, either. If you are an hourly service worker who had to report to your job restocking grocery store shelves or be fired, it was galling to hear teachers insist that it was “unsafe” for them to return to work, even after vaccinations were widely available — vaccinations for which teachers insisted they be at the front of the line to receive. Local leaders and school officials who refused to reopen schools left parents who had to work outside the home with few options for childcare; many parents (mostly women) ended up leaving the workforce because they had no other way to care for their children. Similarly, front-line medical workers in the most dangerous line of work were praised for their heroism, but if they were parents, they faced the same challenge regarding childcare. They had far more in common with a grocery store worker than with the knowledge worker Zooming into meetings in sweatpants.

 

Another hidden injury now emerging for many parents was the lack of respect with which the leaders of institutions treated them. Teachers “working” remotely were caught laughing at parents who were juggling work while overseeing their children’s online schooling; even Vice President Kamala Harris got in on the joke, cackling while telling a group of teachers that maybe parents will pay them more now that they see how hard it is to watch their own children.

 

This laughter came at the expense of parents who witnessed firsthand the struggles that educators only belatedly and abstractly acknowledged as “learning loss” from more than a year of school closures. Parents are also on the front lines of the daily mental health challenges their children experienced. Even children who were spared serious mental health issues are now suffering the effects of delayed socialization, with the ensuing problems such delays cause for normal childhood development at every stage. No wonder so many parents were infuriated when elected officials and teachers union leaders told them not to worry because “children are resilient.”

 

Parents who merely asked for metrics that would determine school reopenings or the removal of draconian quarantine rules were met with scolding and moralistic denunciations from public health officials. The overwhelming message that our leaders have sent to parents was one of contempt — for their concerns, for their demands, for the work they do every day as parents.

 

The contempt has been echoed in messaging from the very top: After promising to “shut down the virus,” President Joe Biden, beholden to the teachers unions that helped elect him, has instead stuck with mandates and restrictions that have proven constitutionally suspect, economically disastrous, and, from a public health perspective, largely ineffective, particularly during the recent omicron wave. Add to this the public’s concerns about inflation and rising crime in many parts of the country, as well as other quality of life matters, and it’s no wonder the national mood is one of extreme anxiety. The screaming mothers might be on to something.

 

There have been some unexpected positive side effects of the pandemic. Despite the often-relentless focus on the feelings of mothers, fathers, too, faced challenges during the pandemic, and one outcome of the forced togetherness of mandatory lockdowns was that many fathers spent more time caring for their children. A 2020 study from Harvard University found that fathers reported strengthening their relationships with their children during the pandemic. Both mothers and fathers who once had to spend hours commuting, or days away from home traveling for work, could relish being home without those disruptions — as long as they still had jobs, of course.

 

“We’re all in this together!” was the message the public was encouraged to embrace early in the pandemic, and parents for the most part did so with enthusiasm, slapping masks on toddlers, upending their lives to educate their children at home, and doing everything possible to keep them safe and healthy, even when the restrictions handed down from on high seemed irrational and onerous. Two years later, as hypocritical politicians party maskless at the Super Bowl, many parents don’t feel like we’re all in this together anymore. We feel like we are sitting in Sartre’s waiting room in No Exit.

 

Parenting is a public good that is largely practiced in private; that fact creates endless tension (and some very questionable social policy) in each generation. The pandemic severely constrained parents’ ability to do what is best for their families. It exposed serious flaws in how our government and social institutions understand parents’ role in society, and it subjected ruling-class norms to serious and well-deserved criticism. The result has been a great deal of conflict but also an opportunity. Whatever the “new normal” looks like in the post-pandemic future, it should include a vigorous role for parents who, although not a class in the traditional sense, are no longer willing to allow injuries to their children to remain hidden.

 

 

Christine Rosen is a senior writer at Commentary magazine and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.