Document Type

Article

Keywords

COVID-19, pandemic, childcare, teachers, mothers, intersectionality

Disciplines

Family, Life Course, and Society | Medicine and Health | Work, Economy and Organizations

Abstract

The pandemic adversely affected the employment of child caregivers, exacerbating already existing inequalities. The authors offer an integrated framework that considers the interdependencies between unpaid and paid child caregiving and the construction of the childcare sector as a devalued and fractionalized group. The authors outline the prepandemic positioning of mothers, childcare teachers, preschool teachers, and primary school teachers. Then, using cross-sectional and panel data from the Current Population Survey, the authors describe how the pandemic affected these four groups of child caregivers’ employment between January 2018 and December 2022. Black, Brown, and non-college-educated mothers were hit particularly hard during the pandemic. Primary school teachers were in a better position prior to the pandemic and fared much better than childcare teachers during it. The authors argue that an integrated framework helps us understand the disparities in the impact of the pandemic between child caregivers as partly a by-product of the fragmented and devalued organization of child caregiving.

Publication Title

Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World

Volume

10

Article Number

1021

Publication Date

2024

First Page

1

Last Page

17

DOI of Published Version

http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/23780231241259681

Language

English

Peer Reviewed

1

Version

Published

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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