A Simple Life? Parents’ Early Narratives Of Babies Raised During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Citation

Bellussi L & Lucas S (2024) A Simple Life? Parents’ Early Narratives Of Babies Raised During the COVID-19 Pandemic. In: Care and Coronavirus Perspectives on Childhood, Youth and Family. Emerald Publishing. https://bookstore.emerald.com/care-and-coronavirus-hb-9781837973118.html

Abstract
Restrictions connected to the COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted the nature of support available to new parents. In 2020 we conducted a study (Lucas & Bellussi, 2023) to explore parents’ experiences of shifting to “digitalised” caregiving specifically focusing on parents’ access to online parenting groups. Data from the same study have been re-examined in this chapter, to present parents’ narratives about how their attempts to make sense of and provide the best environment for their children during an unprecedented period, where most of their face-to-face support networks were unavailable. Our thematic analysis aims to determine parents’ construction of the “COVID baby”, a term introduced by Brown (2021), although never defined in detail. Three themes were identified: “Hopes and fears for the babies’ future”; “Peaceful and oblivious babies”; “Babies as a perceived mirror of parents’ abilities”. Despite the major challenges of the pandemic, parents in this study expressed a positive portrait in which babies thrived at home, however, many parents expressed worries about their baby’s future, as they lacked opportunities for development and socialisation usually offered by paid or unpaid group activities. To compensate for this deficit, some parents engaged in extra labour at home in the face of home-made activities, inspired by previously attended group sessions. Some parents also elaborated on their experiences of displaying what they conceptualised as “good mothering” in digital and in public. We argue that new parents, specifically mothers, are often pressured to display “intensive mothering” (Hays, 1996) to provide the best opportunities for development for their babies, in order to fulfil gendered and class expectations: such pressure leads to increased consumerism, but the limitations of this approach have been emphasised by the simpler life that the lockdown forced on them, with apparent benefits to the babies’ wellbeing. On the other hand, the need for new parents to be connected to nurturing networks of support remains essential.

Keywords
covid19; parenting; babies