Abstract
Using a survey of 7144 contributions, including the initialism WFH (working from home), posted from March 1, 2020, to April 5, 2020. The article examines how Mumsnet members talked about working from home while caring for infants and home-schooled children. Mumsnet discussions about everyday moral difficulty create a lengthy space for examining the situated sense and standardizing judgments that shape belief of how to behave as a working parent.
Introduction of Mumsnet
Emergence events, particularly those demanding remarkable responses and affecting entire communities. The strength to derange normative guesses about social roles and relations. A person may act in ways that appear to flout accepted norms of behavior and may rationalize their actions in ways that ease institutional change by contesting ruling discourses (Fairclough, 1992; Townley, 2008). This article examines one area of disruption generated by the COVID pandemic crisis, concerning gendered norms about working parents.
In the UK context, the upset to everyday life boosted from March 23, 2020. When the UK government required citizens to work from home where possible. Set in motion the country’s first COVID lockdown. This article focuses on the early period of the COVID-19 global. From early March 2020, online platforms such as Mumsnet, Urban.75, and Quora blew up with individual questions about working from home, home-schooling, and how to manage the novel situation. The article examines the early upset by exploring online debate in the five weeks from March 1, 2020, to April 5, 2020, through the data lens of Mumsnet Talk. In 2000, Mumsnet became the UK’s main discussion platform for parents.
Content of Mumsnet
In the UK, an enforced lockdown began immediately after the Prime Minister’s report on March 23, 2020. All workers must work from home (WFH) where possible.1 This announcement followed the helping messages to WFH on 12 and 16 March. Which seemed ambivalent to some firms, with the result that few workers waited at home that week. However, in the following month, 47% of employed people did some work at home, with most (86%) giving the pandemic as the reason (ONS, July 2020).
In the reference week during which the ONS managed its first study (in April 2020). There was little difference between the percentage of employed men and women WFH (47.5% for men; 45.7% for women). Some workers were dismissed and stayed at home; key workers whose jobs required an outside presence—for example, at food-processing factories, providing health care in hospitals, and collecting refuse—continued to work but using PPE2 and following risk-reduction protocols.
As an illustrative case context, the COVID pandemic can generate insights not only about how workers adapt to novel working arrangements but also about how parenting identities are reproduced and negotiated. Exogenous crises have the potential to destabilize assimilate norms because they call into question how to ‘read’ and define the situation (Goffman, 1974), and how to interpret the ‘rules of the game’ (North, 1990).
Mumsnet: Theoretical Framing
This research is guided by a commitment to post-structuralist discourse theory and ongoing debates about gender and parenthood. Central to this pure perspective is an interest in discourses, defined by Foucault (1972, p. 49) as not just signs to designate things but also practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. At any particular cultural-historical moment, an event, or role category (such as worker or mother). The social institution (such as family) is near a discursive space with multiple and potentially competing discussions. Moreover with a different story to tell (Burr 2003, p.64). There are also different ways to speak for and talk about the topic (Hall, 1997).
Discourses of Working Parenthood
This section of the article discusses parenting and working discourses already in circulation when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Societal discourse is a complex space formed from ‘different discourses which are intimately entangled with each other’ (Jager & Maier, 2009,
p.35). Mumsnet talks have varying normative effects depending on how individuals identify and interpret the local situational frame (Goffman, 1974). Also, who is the take-it audience? How they position themselves within the discourses applicable to that situation (Davies & Harré, 1990). Discourses may therefore increase their power across multiple spaces.
Research Design
The study’s focus was on how Mumsnet donor contributors talked about their domestic, parenting. Work-related duties in the time from 1 March to April 5, 2020. How they duplicated or troubled the priorities and normative assumptions related to discourses of being a good working parent. Moreover, it urgently became a platform for discussion to discuss the implications of COVID.
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