Change is an inevitable part of a parent's role, whether due to their child's development, family life, or external events. To understand the information needs of parents navigating change, we studied the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic as a widely experienced disruption in the lives of parents and children. We interviewed 16 parents about their caregiving experience as the COVID-19 pandemic collapsed boundaries between home, school, and work. In particular, we asked about adjustments to behavioral care, or the social learning, supports, and interventions through which children develop social and emotional skills. We focused on parents of children already receiving accommodations and behavioral support from their school, to understand how disruptions in these services affected the role of the parent in meeting their child's individual needs. Applying role theory and the Kübler-Ross change curve, we describe the coping mechanisms that parents used to navigate the stages of change, as well as the information needs that remained unmet, despite their efforts. We discuss how practitioner-initiated and parent-centered supports can be designed around the lived experience of change, by accommodating a parent's capacity to accept and use help at different stages.
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Parenting in a Pandemic: Juggling Multiple Roles and Managing Technology Use in Family Life During COVID-19 in the United States
The COVID-19 pandemic upended the lives of families with young children as school closures and social distancing requirements left caregivers struggling to facilitate educational experiences, maintain social connections, and ensure financial stability. Considering families' increased reliance on technology to survive, this research documents parents' lived experiences adapting to technology's outsized role alongside other shifts in family life associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we describe a 10-week study with 30 enrolled families with children aged 3 to 13 in the United States using the asynchronous remote communities (ARC) methodology to 1) understand the benefits and challenges faced by families as they adapted technology at home to navigate the pandemic, and 2) to ideate improvements to those experiences through co-design. We found that amidst gaps in infrastructural support from schools, workplaces, and communities, parents experienced deep anxiety and took on new roles, including tech support, school administrator, and curator of meaningful activities for their children. As parents shared bold and creative technology-based solutions for improving family well-being, schooling experiences, social life, and beyond, they demonstrated their capacity to contribute to new models of learning and family life. Our findings are a call to action for CSCW researchers, designers, and family-focused practitioners to work with learning communities that incorporate parent, teacher, and technology experiences in their academic and community planning.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2027525
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10350182
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
- Volume:
- 5
- Issue:
- CSCW2
- ISSN:
- 2573-0142
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 39
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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We report on how one community builds capacity for disrupting injustice and supporting each other during the COVID-19 crisis. We engaged long-term community partners (parents, their youth, and local community center leaders) in on-going conversation on their experiences with the pandemic. We learned with and from community partners about how and what people in communities most vulnerable in this crisis learn about and respond to COVID-19 in highly contextualized ways, individually and through extended family groups and trusted social networks. We report on how they put understandings towards educated, organized, urgent community infrastructuring actions within informal coalition networks. We explore these actions as necessary localized responses to systemic neglect from dominant institutional infrastructures during a global pandemic.
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3479546
