New practices during the pandemic? A qualitative study of parents’ work, care and housework during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

In this article we explore how parents (re)negotiate care and housework during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Swedish parents of school-age children, the article contributes new knowledge about how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the everyday lives of families and their care and household practices. Previous research indicates that life changing events influence how couples divide and perhaps renegotiate the division of care and housework. Similarly, the pandemic and its accompanying restrictions and recommendations, such as working from home, might trigger the need to renegotiate care and housework. The results of the study suggest that while most of the interviewed parents have been affected in some way by the pandemic, especially with regard to a change of workplace and the restrictions on social interactions, only some argue that this has led them to explicit renegotiate and modify the division of housework and care.

KEYWORDS:

• Care
• housework
• COVID-19
• negotiations
• gender

Introduction

In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 virus started to spread to many parts of the world. Although different countries responded to the pandemic in different ways, it is fair to say that most people’s everyday lives changed significantly in a short space of time. In this study, we draw on qualitative interviews with Swedish parents of school-age children to analyse their everyday family life practices and (re)negotiations of care and housework during the pandemic.

In families with school-age children, both adults and children were dislocated from some or most of their everyday routines and practices (work, school, activities, social gatherings etc.) due to the COVID-19 recommendations and restrictions. For some, and especially healthcare workers, the workload was exceptionally high during the pandemic, which led to stressful situations (Benfante et al., 2020; Dagens Medicin, 2020). For others, mainly white-collar workers, the recommendations implied working from home instead of at the office. While the circumstances may have differed, most families were faced with new and potentially challenging situations concerning work and school, the reconciliation of work and family, and, not least, the division of care and housework during the pandemic. What did these new situations mean for the (gendered) division of care, housework and paid work in families? Although research on this is still limited, recent studies have indicated clear gendered consequences of the pandemic, often showing that care and housework have become more unequally divided (Collins et al., 2021; Hipp & Bünning, 2021; Petts et al., 2020). This is not always the case, though (Chung et al., 2021).

Swedish society during COVID-19

This article explores the various practices of care, housework and paid work in Swedish families during the COVID-19 pandemic and focuses on individuals or couples with children. Hence, it is important to note that Sweden stood out in international comparisons as one of very few countries to avoid strict ‘lockdown’ measures.¹ Society remained relatively open and the strategy relied more on voluntary compliance with the recommendations, rather than legislation and penalties. The areas of childcare and education were noteworthy exceptions to the international norm. In Sweden, although school is not mandatory until the age of six, the publicly funded preschool (förskola) is attended by 90–95 percent of 2–5-year-olds and 50 percent of one-year-olds (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2021b). 55 percent of 6–12-year-olds also attend after-school recreation centres (fritidshem) (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2021a). The heavy reliance on these services means that closing them down would have caused major disruptions. Against this background, during the pandemic the Public Health Agency recommended that preschools, schools and after-school recreation centres for younger children should remain open (Public Health Agency of Sweden, 2020).²

However, everyday life in Sweden was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the lack of penalties for non-compliance, when used by public authorities the term ‘recommendations’ appeared stronger than when used in common language. All citizens were expected to follow them, including staying at home if showing symptoms of COVID-19, distancing from other people in public, and limiting close contact to a small number of people.³ People were also recommended to work from home when possible (Public Health Agency of Sweden, 2021a). Many followed this recommendation and in spring 2021 around 42 percent worked at least partially from home (Statistics Sweden, 2021). Also, while schools remained open, parents were told to keep their children at home if they showed any signs of the virus. This change was reflected in a record number of applications for temporary parental leave to care for sick children in spring 2020 (Swedish Social Insurance Agency, 2020).

As yet very little is known about what the pandemic has meant for the everyday practices of families with children, and how it has affected care and work practices. Very few studies have investigated this in any depth. Although the value of readily available childcare and education should not be underestimated, focusing on the consequences of closing such services, which some previous research has done, risks overshadowing other aspects of the pandemic that may have affected family practices. This study explores the situations of middle-class parents in Sweden, many of whom worked from home during the pandemic but whose children continued to go to school. Studying these families can therefore contribute to the overall picture.

Previous research

Gender equality has been a strong norm in Sweden for many decades (Ahlberg et al., 2008) and the Swedish welfare state is one of the most clear-cut examples of an earner-carer model that encourages fathers and mothers to engage in paid work and share unpaid care work (Ferrarini & Duvander, 2010). The division of domestic tasks has become more equal over time, and about a fifth of couples with both partners in paid employment now divide housework equally (Boye & Evertsson, 2015). Men’s parental leave increased in the early 2000s and in 2019 men made use of 30 percent of the parental leave days reimbursed by the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (Statistics Sweden, 2020). Despite this, on average women spend more time than men on housework and childcare (Boye & Evertsson, 2015). Swedish men increased their housework time most during the 1970s and 1980s. As in other parts of the world (Baxter & Tai, 2016), recent movements towards equality in the division of housework are mainly driven by a continued reduction in women’s housework time (Boye & Evertsson, 2015). Women still make most use of their parental leave allowance, although only about a tenth of parental couples share parental leave in the 40–60 percentage range (Eriksson, 2019).

Previous research indicates that life changing events, such as becoming parents (Fox, 2009), moving in together (Boye, 2014), or longer periods of sick leave (Alsarve, 2019), can influence how couples divide unpaid work. When couples become parents for the first time, women tend to increase their share of the housework. Bonnie Fox has argued that becoming a parent is perhaps the event that constitutes gender ‘more thoroughly than any other experience in most people’s life’ (Fox, 2009, p. 6). It could be argued that events like having a baby, moving in together, changing jobs and so on could necessitate a renegotiation of the division of care and housework (cf. Björnberg & Kollind, 2003, p. 44).

Similarly, pandemic-related restrictions (such as recommendations to work from home) influence everyday life in ways that can trigger renegotiations of care and housework. In contrast to many family events, the occurrence of the pandemic is extrinsic to the family, in that it is unrelated to the family members’ actions and characteristics. Although moving in together, having a child, or going through a divorce are related to previous actions and choices (see for instance Roman, 2014), a pandemic hits everyone in one way or another. Hence, the COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to study how parents delt with such an ‘external shock’ to their family practices. Earlier studies of care and work in Germany (Hipp & Bünning, 2021) and the US (Collins et al., 2021) suggest that mothers are more likely than fathers to reduce their working hours to meet the increased care of children during the pandemic. Petts et al. (2020) also found that the closure of schools and childcare in the US had an adverse effect on the employment of mothers but not fathers, in that mothers were at greater risk of losing their jobs, voluntarily reducing their working hours, or stopping working altogether. In contrast, a survey of UK parents indicates a potential increase in gender equality. While the mothers in the survey shouldered the main responsibility for childcare and housework both before and during the pandemic, fathers who worked from home during the pandemic increased their share of these aspects (Chung et al., 2021). A recent report on inequalities in Europe during COVID-19 has shown that the gender care gap has increased (Axelsson et al., 2021). What happens, then, in a context (Sweden) in which gender equality has been the norm for decades and where society has remained relatively open during the pandemic?

Aim

The aim of this study is to explore how parents (re)negotiated care and housework during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Swedish mothers and fathers of school-age children, the study seeks to contribute new knowledge about what happens to everyday life practices when an unexpected, external event takes place – in this case the COVID-19 pandemic. The following questions are addressed: 1. How did the COVID-19 pandemic, and its restrictions, influence the interviewed parents’ everyday practices? 2. How did the pandemic necessitate (re)negotiations of care and housework among the interviewed parents and what were the outcomes?

The introduction is followed by a section on the theoretical framework. Thereafter, materials and methods are presented. We then present the study’s findings under four main themes. Finally, the findings are discussed.

Theoretical framework

The concept of negotiation is central to the study. This concept is frequently used in studies of families’ decision-making, although here understood from the perspective of symbolic interactionism, where negotiations are seen as inherent in almost all social interactions. It is thus seen as an ongoing process and is not only viewed as explicit decision-making, through open discussion, about an issue. More subtle, implicit negotiations about care and work are often intertwined in the everyday practices of families (Finch & Mason, 1993).

Of course, parents’ negotiations do not exist in a void, and our previous studies have shown that their negotiations around work, care and housework during the early childhood years are often embedded in other social relationships, such as the children’s grandparents and employers (cf. Alsarve, 2021). The pandemic had a considerable effect on these networks of social relations and probably also influenced parents’ negotiations. For example, a Swedish study of intergenerational care during the pandemic concludes that the pandemic has led to a reformulation of care practices that highlights both the importance and difficulties of intergenerational care (Eldén et al., 2021). Furthermore, parents’ negotiations around care and housework are embedded in cultural norms and ideas about gender, and specifically ideas about good mothering and fathering (cf. Ahlberg, 2009, p. 206, 265f; Fox, 2009, p. 187f, 217). When parents negotiate and carry out care and housework they also ‘do’ or produce gender (cf. West & Zimmerman, 1987, p. 143f). Thus, negotiations around care and housework are not only about the practical division of chores, but also involve perceptions of femininity and masculinity (Björnberg & Kollind, 2003, p. 18, 47). In this study, we are particularly interested in studying whether and how the pandemic, as an external event, necessitated (re)negotiations of care and housework among the studied families.

The theoretical discussion about work-family interaction is also important. Here we take our departure from Clark’s (2000) theory on work-family borders, which focuses on how people negotiate and manage work and family domains and the borders between family and work. People are seen as border-crossers who often move between work and family. According to Clark, different work-family borders need to be taken into consideration. There are temporal borders that delimit when work or family activities are carried out, physical borders that delimit where activities in a domain are performed, and psychological borders, which are an individual’s rules for when domain-specific thoughts, behaviour, and emotions are appropriate. The borders can be stronger or weaker depending on their flexibility and permeability. They are flexible if they can be easily moved, and permeable depending on the level to which the border between home and work allows parts of one domain to enter the other. Clark argues that border permeability can be illustrated by a person having an office with physical borders, such as doors and walls, into which family members can enter, talk to and interrupt the person who is working, and where ‘Frequently, physical and temporal permeations are perceived as interruptions’ (Clark, 2000, p. 765). Border-crossers can be more or less influential in a domain and may identify more or less with a domain. This is important for a person’s possibilities and motivation to fulfil domain roles and manage, negotiate, or change domains and domain borders. Finally, other domain members can influence the definition of domains and borders, in that they can be more or less aware of what the border-crossers do and experience in another domain (other-domain awareness). They may also be more or less committed to the border-crosser, i.e. care more or less about the border-crosser’s experiences in all domains. How best to negotiate and deal with the work and family domains and the borders between them were probably important for parents who started working from home during the pandemic.

Materials and methods

The article draws on 32 in-depth interviews with parents of school-age children: 14 fathers and 18 mothers. The study builds on a previous one in which 40 Swedish parents (20 cohabiting couples) were interviewed about their transition to parenthood. 32 of these parents agreed to be interviewed again in the present study, when their children had reached school age. 12 cohabiting couples, two former couples who had separated, three separated women (without the former partner being interviewed), and one widow were interviewed. While the sample was varied in terms of family formation, it was less heterogenous in other respects.

In general, the interviewed parents were highly educated (with a university degree), well-established in the labour market and lived in larger or middle-sized cities. All the interviewees but two were born in Sweden. One father was unemployed at the time of the interview, one mother and one father was on parental leave (but worked part-time), for two parents their working hours had been reduced during the pandemic as part of the short-time work allowance programme,⁴ and one mother was on sick leave for 75 percent of full-time. All the other interviewees were employed and worked full-time or almost full-time, i.e. about 40 h per week. Most of them were in their 40s at the time of the interview and had two or three children. All the parents had at least one child of 11 years and one or two younger children. One woman lived with her new partner and had stepchildren in addition to her two biological children. Based on their level of education and work positions, all the interviewees could be classified as middle-class or upper middle-class parents. Table 1 provides some key information about the work and family situations of all the interviewees. The names and other personal information have been changed in order to protect the interviewees.⁵

Table 1. The interviewees.

Name	Work position	Workplace at the interview	Cohabiting/lone parent/new partner	Number of children
Sara	Manager	Mainly at workplace	Cohabiting	2
Simon	Educator	Home	Cohabiting	2
Kajsa	Teacher	Home	Cohabiting	2
Andreas	Construction engineer	Workplace	Cohabiting	2
Ellinor	IT-manager	Home	Cohabiting	2
Stefan	Process leader	Mostly at home	Cohabiting	2
Elin	Nurse	Workplace	Lone parent	2
Maria	Community planner	Home	Cohabiting	2
Patrik	Controller	Home	Cohabiting	2
Kristina	Teacher	Workplace	Lone parent	2
Karin	Carpenter	Workplace	Separated/new partner	2 (plus stepchildren)
Lena	Journalist	Home	Cohabiting	2
Carlos	Manager	Home	Cohabiting	2
Niklas	Controller	Workplace	Cohabiting	2
Tina	Administrator	Home	Cohabiting	2
Ninna	Biological technician	Workplace	Cohabiting	2
David	Programmer	Home	Cohabiting
Emma	Musician	Home	Cohabiting	3
Magnus	Youth worker	Workplace	Cohabiting	3
Isabella	Economist	Home	Cohabiting	2
Markus	Project leader	Home	Cohabiting	2
Eva	Web editor	Home	Lone parent	2
Therese	HR director	Home	Cohabiting	2
Lukas	Logistics manager	Home	Cohabiting	2
Stina	Insurance claims clerk	Home	Lone parent	2
Per	Unemployed (bank clerk)		Lone parent	2
Linda	Project manager	Home	Lone parent	3
Emil	IT consultant	Home	Lone parent	3
Sofia	Communications manager	Home	Cohabiting	2
Johannes	Programmer	Home	Cohabiting	2
Ylva	Lawyer	Home	Cohabiting	3
Anders	Lawyer	Workplace	Cohabiting	3

The interviews were semi-structured and centred around themes such as care, paid work, housework, time, work-family strategies, challenges with older children, the pandemic and its consequences for everyday life.⁶ The questions were open-ended to encourage narration. We decided to interview the parents separately, partly because we had done so in the previous project, and in order to get comparable data. This means that we got their individual views, experiences, and narratives, rather than their couple narratives and ‘co-constructed meanings’ (Daly, 2002, p. 329). In our view, individual interviews made it easier for the interviewees to address difficulties and conflict areas related to the division of care and housework. The fact that eight of the interviewed parents no longer lived with the other parent also contributed to our decision to conduct separate interviews with all the parents in the study.

The interviews were conducted in the summer and autumn of 2020 and at the beginning of 2021. This meant that for those parents who were interviewed in the summer of 2020 the pandemic was still quite new, given that only a few months had passed since its start, whereas those interviewed in early 2021 had lived in the shadow of COVID-19 for almost a year. The interviews lasted for approximately 2–2.5 h and were recorded and transcribed verbatim.

The COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult to conduct the interviews in person. In the later interviews the options were more limited, but in summer/early autumn 2020 the interviewees could choose whether to be interviewed via a video link or face-to-face. 17 interviews were conducted face-to-face (keeping the recommended physical distance and mostly held outside) and 14 via an online video link. One interview was conducted by telephone due to connection problems. The video link interviews worked well, and the interview data was rich and full of detailed descriptions of the interviewees’ everyday lives. Video calls were time efficient and allowed the researcher to see the interviewee, which was an advantage. One possible reason behind the overall positive experience was that the parents had been interviewed in the previous project (by Alsarve and Boye), which may have made it easier for them to relate to and feel comfortable with the interviewer in the current study.

The 32 interviews were analysed by means of a thematic analysis. First, careful summaries were compiled after each interview with the main themes and any relevant aspects connected to the work-family interface, the pandemic, and its consequences for everyday life. Second, the summaries were then compared with those of the other interviewees, not least couple wise (for those parents living together). Third, the interviews were coded according to the emerging themes connected to COVID-19 and its consequences for everyday life practices, such as changes in social relationships, work situations, subsequent (re)negotiations of the division of work and care, relationships with the children, and long-term consequences of the pandemic. In the article we consider five main themes that emerged from the data: (1) blurred borders between family and work, (2) the slowing down of the family tempo (3) unchanged divisions but new practices, (4) new divisions and gendered practices, and (5) explicit negotiations in the wake of the pandemic.

Findings

Blurred borders between family and work

How did the COVID-19 pandemic and its restrictions influence the interviewed parents’ everyday practices? As can be seen in Table 1, in all but three of the families one or both parents worked from home during the pandemic. Many of them had worked from home since the outbreak on a full-time or part-time basis. In some of the families both parents worked from home, which meant that more time was spent together in the home than before. According to one group of parents, this resulted in substantial changes to their everyday life practices, especially with regard to their work situation. Most of the parents working from home described this in mainly positive terms and appreciated ‘being there’ when the children came home from school. Others described conflicts and ambivalence, which we will discuss in more detail in the following sections. As Maria and her partner had been working from home for about seven months at the time of the interview, she pointed to the positive aspects:

Yes, we have been working from home 100% since March. So, it is a huge change and fits me personally very well, and for me in the family situation it is great […] I feel as though we are closer to [the children] now. […] It is easier to move the working hours around. […] For instance, if one of the children want us to meet them at school, […] I can take a break for 40 minutes in the afternoon and then continue to work after that. […] There is a flexibility that is greater than before. […] For me, digital working life works splendidly. (Maria)

As demonstrated in the interview excerpt, Maria considered this change as both substantial and positive.⁷ For Maria and her partner, working from home facilitated ‘being there’ for the children and their needs, eliminated the travel time to and from work, and the transport time between meetings. When the geographical distances between the family and work domains were removed, the domain borders, especially those that were temporal (Clark, 2000), became more flexible. In short, this is an example of a parent couple who were very happy with their changed situation due to the flexibility it offered and the reduced stress in reconciling work and family life. Similar descriptions were also found in other interviews.

Some of the interviewees emphasized the challenges of working from home, especially when the children came home from school and interrupted their work. A quote from Isabella, a mother of two, illustrates the downside of working from home:

[…] they approach me all the time, because they want to show me something or ask something, or just say ‘hello’. And I am more likely to be disturbed, although I really need to focus, and I think that this affects me more than my partner (Isabella).

Isabella and her partner Markus both worked from home, but for Isabella the working day was often interrupted when the children approached her (more than her partner) after school with their needs. This resulted in unwanted breaks from her work, which she considered stressful. This view was shared by her partner, who claimed that he could more easily draw boundaries in relation to the children, for instance when he was in a work meeting. In other words, new challenges and potential conflicts evolved when changing to working from home. For Isabella, the work borders were permeable (Clark, 2000), while her partner seemed to maintain the borders in relation to the other family members. For both Maria and Isabella, time and temporality seemed important. For Isabella, her temporal and physical border to work weakened and the time that was devoted to (paid) work was interrupted when the children came home from school, which affected her work negatively. In contrast, Maria talked about the flexibility of time devoted to work – and hence work borders – as something mainly positive. She was sometimes able to take a break to support the children or do housework, such as cooking. Although they experienced these things in different ways, their work time was not clearly defined and neither was their time as caring mothers (cf. Ambjörnsson, 2018, p. 26f; Clark, 2000). Maria also said that when the children came home from their after-school activities her workplace was not only a place for paid work: ‘from about three o’clock my workplace in the kitchen becomes a mishmash of day care so to speak, dealing with other ongoing activities in the kitchen’ (Maria). This captures some of the ambiguity of flexibility at work and/or of working from home and the permeable borders between work and family.

The experience of working from home could also change over time. One interviewee, Therese, explained that while she considered the changes (such as working from home) to be positive and less stressful at the beginning of the pandemic, at the time of the interview she had grown tired of staying at home all the time: ‘all the fun things in life have been paused, so to speak. So, it has been extremely challenging. […] Now I am very, very tired of it’ (Therese).

In other families, only one parent worked from home, while the other continued to work at the workplace. For these families, everyday life was characterized by some changes, but not always the substantial changes described above. In two of these couples, Ylva and Anders and Sara and Simon, the person working from home also worked part-time over the space of a few months. For Ylva and Anders, both of whom were lawyers and the parents of three children, it meant that while Ylva worked reduced hours from home, in the main Anders continued to work at his office on a full-time basis. Although Ylva said that she did not think that her everyday life had changed substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic, she did mention that she helped the children somewhat when they came home from school and that the borders between work and family time had become more blurred since starting to work from home. Regardless of whether one or two parents worked from home, those who did so tended to support the children after school. This and the experience that the borders between work and family became weaker were recurring themes in the interviews.

All this indicates that the consequences of following the government’s and employers’ recommendations to work from home were improved work-family reconciliations and new challenges and dilemmas for parents when the temporal and physical borders of work became less clear (cf. Clark, 2000). The latter is in line with previous research on work flexibility (Peters et al., 2009). Several of the parents in the study hoped to continue to work from home, at least partially, after the pandemic, as they found this flexibility helpful in their struggle to combine paid work and caring responsibilities. This is in line with findings from quantitative studies (Felsted & Reutschke, 2020a).

However, not all the interviewed parents were able to work from home. Three of the parents, all of them mothers who had separated from the children’s fathers, continued to work at their workplace during the pandemic. For example, the work positions of nurse, carpenter, and teacher could not be moved to the home. Elin, a mother of two children working in the healthcare sector witnessed a drastically changed work situation as she had been transferred to work on COVID-19 wards. Despite this, and the fact that she was unable to mix with friends and family as she could before the pandemic, she did not describe any profound changes in her own or the children’s everyday life practices. When asked if her children’s everyday lives had changed during the pandemic, Elin concluded: ‘No, they have gone to school and to the after-school recreation centre and, there has been no change there.’ In contrast to other parents, all three women described limited changes in their everyday lives during the pandemic. Kristina nonetheless said that she had been at home (on temporal parental leave) more with her children when they were ill due to the government’s recommendations, which had resulted in increased stress at work:

Being away from work for several days because the children are ill can be stressful. This autumn [2020] I was off work for a whole week. The fact that it was a week was mainly due to the restrictions, which implied that you had to be at home for at least two extra days. (Kristina)

The fact that some Swedish parents were at home on temporal parental leave to care for sick children to a greater extent during the pandemic (Swedish Social Insurance Agency, 2020) naturally influenced their everyday lives. It is also worth noting that the parents working from home did not always apply for temporal parental leave when minding sick children, thus indicating that the real impact on their working lives was even greater than the official figures suggest.

Slowing down

Did the pandemic influence the parents’ everyday practices in other ways? The interviewed parents highlighted significant changes to their everyday lives that were not directly related to work. One such change was that their children’s leisure activities were either reduced or cancelled. However, all the interviewees’ children continued to go to school and some, especially the younger ones, continued to attend after-school recreation centres during the pandemic. The older children, aged 11, often went home directly after school, partly due to the pandemic and partly because they were older, more self-sufficient, and did not want to take part in any after-school recreation centre activities.

Changes to social relationships and not being able to see friends and family as before were put forward as important negative changes since the outbreak. In particular, being unable to see the children’s (elderly) grandparents featured in almost all the interviews and was framed as a negative outcome. This was highlighted primarily in terms of not being able to visit them, which was described as ‘sad’, and secondly that they were unable to help with babysitting. The latter implied that before the pandemic grandparents could be relied on for some help with the children, for instance when they were ill. Ylva concluded that: ‘pre-COVID we could always call grandma for help (laughing)’. Support from (grand)parents has been shown to facilitate the reconciliation of work and family among Swedish parents despite the subsidized and readily available licenced childcare in Sweden (Alsarve, 2017; Roman & Peterson, 2011; Wissö, 2012), i.e. people tend to live what other researchers have called ‘linked lives’ (Eldén et al., 2021; May & Nordqvist, 2019).

Changes in everyday life, such as working from home, the cancellation or reduction of children’s activities, or fewer meetings with friends and family, ­resulted in a slowing down of the family life tempo. This meant that the interviewees’ weekends, afternoons, or evenings after work were not as tightly planned or structured as before the pandemic. This change in tempo was explicitly stressed by for instance Kajsa, who taught online from home during the pandemic while her partner continued to work at his regular workplace:

[F]or our family it has been good that social meetings with family and friends have been limited and that events have been cancelled. This has slowed down our tempo. (Kajsa)

Kajsa, like several other parents in the study, had previously been on sick leave due to stress/burnout. She regarded the slower tempo during the COVID-19 pandemic as positive, both for herself and her family. However, she also described an increase in ‘invisible’ housework during the pandemic; a change that led to a less equal division of care and housework between her and her partner. We will expand on that in the following sections.

Unchanged divisions, but changed practices

Central aspects of families’ everyday life practices are of course care and housework, both of which are addressed in the study’s second research question: How did the pandemic necessitate (re)negotiations of care and housework among the interviewed parents and what were the outcomes?

Among the 12 cohabiting couples in this study, we found those in which the divisions remained unchanged and those who experienced new divisions of housework and care during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Couples who did not experience significant changes in the division of labour generally worked from home, which meant that both parents spent similar amounts of time in the home and could therefore devote some of their working day to household chores. Sofia explained that even though the division of work had remained more or less the same, she and her partner had changed when they carried out some of the household tasks:

What has changed is perhaps that as both of us are working from home we do certain things during the week rather than at the weekend as before. We feel more flexible when working from home. Not things like cleaning, though, we still do that at the weekend. Vacuuming, dusting and things like that are done during the weekend. But things like going to the recycling station or cleaning out stuff at home are now done more during the weekdays than before. (Sofia)

This is in line with the temporal aspect mentioned earlier. Some parents stressed the possibility of being flexible with their time and devoting time during the working day to doing housework. This also tended to reduce the stress levels at the weekend. The couple Maria and Patrik explained:

The everyday routines are easier to manage when you don’t have to plan everything, because now you can just do the tasks that need to be done. (Patrik)

Being at home when the children come home. Doing some laundry during the working day, switching on the washing machine during a break from work and then hanging the laundry out on another break. That is so extremely valuable in a family. (Maria)

Maria and Patrik were clear about the importance of an equal relationship. Some years ago, they had explicitly negotiated and decided on an equal division of work in the home. They took turns doing various chores and had ‘food weeks’, where the weekly responsibility covered the planning of care and housework. They emphasized that it was easier to do housework during the day when working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic (in terms of more flexible and temporal borders). However, the actual division of housework and care was not flexible and had not been renegotiated during the pandemic.

In the case of Emma and Magnus, Emma worked from home on a part-time basis (both were on part-time parental leave), while Magnus continued to work at his regular workplace. Just like Maria and Patrik, they did not experience any changed division of care and housework due to the pandemic, mainly because Emma had also worked from home prior to the pandemic and, according to Emma, they had already talked about this several years ago:

No, I don’t think that … I worked from home for many years before the pandemic, and this was one thing I was very clear about. Just because I’m working from home it doesn’t mean that I’ll do the grocery shopping and the laundry and the vacuuming. My work is also … I need […] I don’t think that my working from home has made me do more housework. [Interviewer: No. Have you discussed this, have you brought it up?] Yes, I brought it up years ago. (Emma)

The excerpt shows that long before the pandemic this couple had explicitly negotiated paid work, housework, and care. Emma also stressed the importance of maintaining strong work borders and the family members’ other-domain awareness (cf. Clark, 2000) with regard to her work. Their earlier agreement was therefore seemingly important when the pandemic started and when Emma started to work from home again after having worked at an external workplace. Magnus, on the other hand, stressed that what had influenced their division of care and housework in the last few years was his partner’s former sick leave and the birth of their youngest child, rather than the pandemic (cf. Alsarve, 2019; Fox, 2009).

According to several interviewees, one thing that had changed was that the housework had expanded somewhat when they worked from home, in that more meals had to be prepared and cooked and their homes became ‘messier’ (Lukas). This meant that the parents had to increase the time that they devoted to housework. For Ellinor and Stefan, another couple whose division of housework and care had remained the same as before the pandemic, this change had led them to negotiate the need for food preparation on Ellinor’s initiative:

[…] that was one of the discussions we had some time ago. I think we should plan for lunch [during the working day], but Stefan thinks ‘let’s go and buy some lunch’. But after we had that discussion Stefan has started to check his schedule and says: ‘well I have a meeting until 11, then I can prepare lunch if you want’, and I do the same thing. (Ellinor)

This rather explicit negotiation (cf. Finch & Mason, 1993) seemed to have resulted in them both taking part in the planning and preparation of lunch during the working week, although Ellinor stated that the overall planning of (all) the meals in the family was still her responsibility: ‘I’m still planning the food, because he doesn’t think about food at all.’ This indicated that even amongst fairly gender equal couples gendered aspects of the division of unpaid work were visible, such as the woman’s overall responsibility for and planning of housework (and care) (cf. Daly, 2002).

New divisions and gendered practices

In other families it was evident that the division of care and housework had changed somewhat since the outbreak. The findings suggest that in two families the father carried out more care activities during the pandemic than before it. These were families in which the father worked from home and the mother continued to work at the workplace. The fathers prepared snacks after school, supported the children in their leisure-time activities and took greater responsibility for the children when they came home from school than before the pandemic. One of these fathers, Simon, described his changed everyday life as follows:

I’ve been working from home, which has meant that life is more flexible now. I don’t have to commute for 2 hours a day, which means that I can pick the children up from their after-school activities earlier, do more things with the children and be there when the children come home. Sara […] she doesn’t have to rush home to pick them up because I’m able to both take them to school and pick them up when I’m at home. So, I hope this has made her days easier. (Simon)

On the one hand, Simon argued that taking on more care duties had facilitated his partner’s work and reduced her stress in reconciling work and family life. On the other hand, it did not seem as though he had increased his share of the housework during this period. When asked if their division of housework had changed when Simon started to work from home, his partner, Sara, said:

No, I honestly don’t think so. When I work from home, which I almost never do, I take phone calls and at the same time do the laundry. Then when I get another call, I might unload the dishwasher […] At the same time. But he can’t. So, when he is at home working, he sits here [in the kitchen] and when it is five o’clock I come home and he is still sitting there and there are lots of dishes in the sink from his lunch, he has just left them there because he has not had the time to clean up. So no, I wouldn’t say that he does more during the day, on the contrary it gets messier now (laughing). (Sara)

In the above excerpt Sara points to a difference between herself and Simon. Whereas she did household tasks while working from home, she claimed that Simon ‘can’t do this’. According to Sara, this meant that he cared more for the children but did not do any housework, which resulted in more mess at home than before the pandemic. One interpretation is that Sara and Simon had different psychological work borders and allowed different forms of family activities into the work domain during the working day (cf. Clark, 2000). It is noteworthy that with this couple there were no indications of more explicit (re)negotiations about work and care. Instead, Simon argued that it felt ‘natural’ to take more responsibility for the children since he was at home, and they seemed to have had implicit negotiations about for instance the car and travel to and from work, given that Simon would eventually go back to working at his regular workplace.

We describe above how one group of couples did not experience significant changes in the division of labour, whereas in another group the father had taken on some additional care when working from home. In a third group, the division changed because the mother had increased her share of the care and housework during the pandemic. In all these families but one the mother worked from home and the father at his workplace during the pandemic. An important difference with the fathers mentioned above who worked from home and cared more for their children was that these mothers also did more housework whilst working from home. Again, the mothers appeared to allow more types of family activities into the work domain than the fathers (cf. Clark, 2000). Kajsa, for instance, said that she did more ‘hidden’ housework during her working day, which resulted in more time for other things, such as gardening, for both her and her partner at weekends. Interestingly, her partner Andreas did not talk about her increased share of the housework but agreed that they got more done at weekends. This supports the idea of housework as hidden and/or taken for granted. Kajsa sometimes felt that she needed to remind her partner that, like him, she also worked full-time. In other words, she felt that she needed to raise her partner’s other-domain awareness (Clark, 2000). This could be seen as a more implicit negotiation (Finch & Mason, 1993), in that she did not want to end up with too much unpaid work simply because she worked from home. In her interview it was clear that Kajsa also did more housework than her partner before the pandemic: ‘the housework is mainly on me, and Andreas helps out’ (Kajsa), and that this division was intensified during her previous sick leave when she spent more time in the home as well as during the pandemic, when she (but not he) worked from home.

Explicit negotiations in the wake of the pandemic

For most couples the pandemic had not necessitated explicit renegotiations. But in three of the 12 couples there were clear signs of more explicit (re)negotiations over the division of care and housework during the pandemic. Ellinor’s and Stefan’s negotiations around the planning and preparation of meals have already been mentioned. They both worked from home and reported no change in the division of care and housework. The remaining two couples, both of whom worked from home, negotiated a change in what they saw as an unequal division that had originated or increased during the pandemic. Lena worked from home during the pandemic, while her partner Carlos had just started to work from home at the time of the interview. Both agreed that Lena had done more during the pandemic with regard to care and housework. Carlos was not happy about this situation and had initiated a discussion about it:

[…] and it has not been positive with having the office at home, because then she starts to say, well: ‘I’ll go and put the dish-washer or washing-machine on’ and so on. And we have had enormous talks about this, it is not wanted, no-one expects her to do the laundry during the working day. But she feels that she takes the opportunity to do things. […] and then it automatically becomes unequal. (Carlos)

Even though Lena did not mention this discussion, she stated in the interview that being the one planning the food was a ‘heavy burden’, which had been one result of her working from home and doing more housework. However, they both said that when Carlos switched to working from home they had returned to their previous and more equal division of housework.

When women like Lena did more housework during their working day (from home) it cannot simply be explained as women having weaker psychological borders between work and home. We also need to think about why their borders may have been weaker. It is likely that expectations of gender (and motherhood) are at play here. When women do, and negotiate, housework they also produce gender (cf. West & Zimmerman, 1987). Even though Lena’s partner Carlos disliked the fact that she did more housework, the theory of ‘doing gender’ implies that doing gender ‘correctly’, in accordance with expectations and gender norms, generates a positive confirmation from others.

The third and last example of an explicit negotiation was initiated by Isabella, the mother in the couple. As already indicated, she had experienced negative consequences of the home as a workplace. She was often interrupted by the children when they came home from school and as a result felt that her paid work suffered and that she often had to work in the evenings to compensate for this. Her partner, Markus, described that this had recently been an issue for negotiation:

The children come home and disturb you when you’re still at work, although at the same time it is very nice to have them home, and we have tried to make a division of who does what, who is available when they come home. […] We have talked it through, and we continue to talk about this, because it differs. […] We have tried to make weekly plans, but then it is difficult when things happen at work and you feel you need to participate in some meeting, so yes, no. It can get better. [Interviewer: do you remember how you started talking about this, who brought this up?]. It was Isabella who brought it up, because the children disturbed her more and then … I have been able to say no more, ‘I can’t’, so we have tried to divide it between us instead. (Markus)

On the one hand, Markus stressed that they had set up ‘weekly plans’ to divide the responsibility for care during the working day equally between them so that Isabella would not be disadvantaged. On the other hand, he recognized the difficulty of this due to the work conditions and expectations from employer and/or colleagues. The latter illustrates that the couple’s negotiations about care were indeed embedded in other social relationships (Alsarve, 2021; see also Fox, 2009, p. 32). In addition, these two couples had a history of rather explicit negotiations. Carlos and Lena described that there had always been an ongoing discussion between them and an outspoken shared desire to live in a gender equal way. Isabella and Markus had also negotiated a lot prior to working from home, which originated from the fact that Isabella felt that she was left with the lion’s share of responsibility for the children and the housework during the early childhood years. Thus, these more explicit negotiations during the pandemic were not entirely new for these particular couples.

Some of the above themes were also mentioned by the separated/lone parents, such as the fact that the housework expanded when they worked from home. Two of the separated mothers also stated that they helped their former partners with the children more during the pandemic. Elin, for instance, had helped her children’s father with the children’s activities at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, as he was self-employed and would suffer financially if he became ill. In contrast, Stina claimed that she and her former partner Per had helped each other out since the outbreak: ‘We have supported each other more. We really try to be there for each other when needed.’

Discussion

In this study we have explored how the COVID-19 pandemic, as an external event, affected the everyday life practices and divisions of housework and care in middle-class families with school-age children in Sweden. Two questions have guided the study: 1. How did the COVID-19 pandemic, and its restrictions, influence the interviewed parents’ everyday practices? 2. How did the pandemic necessitate (re)negotiations of care and housework among the interviewed parents and what were the outcomes?

With regard to the first question, the analyses point to changes that occurred during the pandemic and to the lack of change in certain situations. It was common for one or both of the studied parents to work from home during the pandemic; an aspect of everyday life that was central to their experiences. On the one hand, on the positive side, the reconciliation of work and family is facilitated when the spatial and temporal obstacles disappear due to working from home. The possibility to move between domains is also a key aspect. When there is no geographical distance, the borders between work and family life become more flexible. The parents also experience a slower family tempo in their everyday lives due to working from home and the reduction of activities outside work and school. This also increases the parents’ flexibility, which means that care and housework can be more dynamic and adjusted to the needs of the family, and in particular the children.

On the other hand, some changes are framed as negative outcomes, such as less contact with family and friends, less support in everyday life, and the blurred physical and temporal borders between work and family (cf. Clark, 2000). Some report less control over their working conditions when working from home, especially when the children interrupt their work on arrival home from school. Psychological borders (Clark, 2000) may also play a role here, as the parents appear to differ in their ability to avoid interruptions. Hence, weak physical, temporal, and psychological borders could have both negative and positive effects. The positive sides, such as flexibility, appear to be facilitated by control over how and when borders are moved and permeated and require certain conditions to be realized (type of job, age of children, facilities at home etc.).

Regarding the second research question, the study shows that some changes occurred in the couples’ division of care and housework. When a parent worked from home that person tended to do more childcare. Another conclusion relates to gender difference. When the father but not the mother, in the interviewed couples, worked from home, the father took more responsibility for care (which facilitated the mother’s work). In contrast, when only the mother worked from home, in addition to increased childcare she also did more housework during her working day, which the fathers did not. In our analyses there are examples of what could be interpreted as mothers having weaker psychological work borders than fathers, and perhaps a lower other-domain awareness among fathers (cf. Clark, 2000). However, the generalizability of these findings is limited and more studies, particularly quantitative ones, are needed of Swedish parents’ division of work and care during the pandemic. Nonetheless, we argue that Clark’s theory of borders alone cannot explain these gendered practices. Behind the processes described by work/family border theory lies the gendered expectations that mothers and fathers face and need to address (cf. Fox, 2009) when negotiating and carrying out care and housework. When the women do more housework (and care), it should be understood in relation to this and the fact that when gender is ‘done right’ it is appreciated, in that it lives up to the normative conceptions of femininity and masculinity (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Notably, in several of the interviewed families where both parents worked from home during the pandemic, the division of care and housework did not change but remains somewhat equal.

In the study, the examples of explicit renegotiations over work and care are surprisingly few. The renegotiations that occur are initiated when one or both partners experience that the division of housework becomes less equal, or when they discover that the housework has expanded due to working from home. On the one hand, the couples who renegotiate during the COVID-19 pandemic appear to have a long history of discussing and negotiating work and care. On the other hand, other couples who had previously discussed and settled on a (gender equal) division of work and care do not feel the need to renegotiate but instead continue with their agreed system. Generally, though, the couples appear to make gradual adjustments to their everyday lives as a result of implicit rather than explicit negotiations. One explanation for the lack of explicit negotiations could be that the pandemic was a totally unexpected ‘event’ and one that the parents had no opportunity to discuss or prepare for. It is possible that unexpected events actually lead to fewer (explicit) negotiations and renegotiations than expected changes in everyday life situations (such as becoming parents or changing jobs). In addition to the pandemic being unexpected, the parents had no knowledge about how long it would last. In the early summer of 2020, when the data collection started, no-one could foresee how long the restrictions would be in place, which could have meant that the parents saw the period of working from home as a temporary state that did not call for explicit renegotiations around the division of work and care in the home. Another explanation could be that families’ negotiation processes are often implicit in nature (Roman & Peterson, 2011, p. 37), both in and beyond the pandemic context.

The importance of the Swedish context should also be stressed here, in that Swedish schools and after-school recreation centres remained open during the pandemic. If they had been closed, the experience of a positive increase in flexibility and a slower family tempo may have been different. Had this study been conducted in a context in which parents home-schooled their children, the results would probably also have differed (see for instance Axelsson et al., 2021).

One of the limitations of this study is that the interviews were conducted over a long period of time, from the summer of 2020 to early 2021. Hence, the participants had experienced the pandemic for different lengths of time when they were interviewed. They were also interviewed at different stages of the pandemic when different restrictions were in place. This has been taken into account in the analyses as far as possible. Another aspect is that the study concerns middle-class and mostly urban parent couples. If we had interviewed parents with a lower education status and other work positions the results may have been different, especially if we had interviewed more parents who had continued to work at their workplace. As Felsted and Reutschke put it, ‘the opportunity to [work at home] is unevenly distributed with men, the better educated, the higher paid, and those in higher skilled jobs more likely to have the ability to work at home if they choose’ (Felsted & Reutschke, 2020b, p. 209). From the lone mothers in our study we get something of a glimpse of what everyday life looked like for them, although further studies would be needed to gain a more accurate picture of the impact of the pandemic for lone parents and blue-collar workers who are unable to work from home.

One question for the future is whether the above-mentioned changes will have any long-term effects. Might the changes and experiences of some of the parents lead to long-term changes, both in their working lives and in their families’ everyday lives? Several of our interviewees expressed a wish to continue working from home, at least to some extent, after the pandemic – something that is also echoed in other studies (Felsted & Reutschke, 2020a). However, as working from home also depends on employers being willing to rethink their policies relating to the workplace, working hours, meeting culture etc., it remains to be seen whether this wish will be granted.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments. We are also grateful to the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working life and Welfare for funding the study (Grant 2019-01034).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by FORTE [grant number 2019-01034].

Notes

1 This ‘Swedish exceptionalism’ has been debated both nationally and internationally (Andersson & Aylott, 2020; Irwin, 2020) and some have questioned the strategy’s effectiveness.

2 Upper secondary schools, universities and other forms of adult education were obliged to switch to online teaching (Public Health Agency of Sweden, 2020).

3 In addition to these recommendations, some legal restrictions were also put in place. Shops, bars and restaurants may have remained open, but restrictions on opening hours and numbers of visitors allowed did intensify over time, and the maximum number of participants allowed at public gatherings was as low as eight in November 2020 (Government Offices of Sweden, 2020a, 2020b). Many of these restrictions became more lenient or were withdrawn altogether in the summer of 2021.

4 The short-time work allowance programme that was introduced during the pandemic meant that employers could reduce their employees’ working hours by up to 80% and still pay 90% of their usual salaries. The government covered three quarters of the cost of staff reducing their working hours, while employers and employees shared the remaining quarter.

5 The project proposal was submitted to the Swedish Ethical Review Authority, which decided that the project did not need approval (Dnr 2020-01029).

6 No questions were asked about whether they had been ill themselves, or whether anyone in their immediate family had been ill with COVID-19. The questions relating to COVID-19 mainly concerned care and working life practices during the pandemic.

7 Maria’s partner Patrik worked one day a week at the office and four days from home at the time of the interview, while Maria worked from home five days a week.