Working mothers and lockdown: a thematic analysis study using the four existential lifeworlds to explore the lived experience of school closures during COVID-19

During the school closures of lockdown, despite the claim in the UK media, not all working mothers returned to the stereotypical ‘1950s housewife’. The current study was undertaken to explore and give voice to the holistic, lived experience of working mothers of primary school-aged children when the schools were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research question was “What was the lived experience of working mothers when the schools were closed between March 2020 and March 2021?’. Participants were eight working mothers aged 45-55 with two or more children aged 4-11. Video interviews were conducted on Zoom using a semi-structured approach. The methodology was reflexive thematic analysis. The four existential lifeworlds (physical, social, personal and spiritual) were used to ensure the holistic collection and analysis of the interview data. As researcher, my lived experience as a working mother throughout the study was recorded using a reflexive diary. The parallel sense of being-in-sway between my roles of worker, mother, researcher and student were made visible throughout the study. The overarching theme found was of paradoxes between both challenging and cherishing experiences within their lifeworlds, such as being restricted and free in their physical world, connected and disconnected in their social world, distressed and delighted in their personal world and blending and compartmentalising in their spiritual world. The paradoxes were understood using an existential frame that positions human living as being in contradiction and the constant need to hold these in tension. The concept of paradoxes was extended to include the sense of movement by arguing that the experience of paradoxes in their experience was like a constant movement, which the study names being-in-sway. Contributions from the findings from the study are to support those in clinical practice who see working mothers, organisational work practices to support working mothers and government socio-economic policy for future school closures. Future studies using a grounded theory approach could support and extend further the concept of being-in-sway as a term which can support an extension of the current literature on working mothers and overcome criticism for focusing on work-life conflict and work-life balance as binary concepts. A more nuanced term, such as being-in-sway, could illuminate further the experience of paradoxes for working mothers and help challenge the dominant discourses of the idealised mother.