Mothers’ Accounts of Attending to Educational and Everyday Needs of Their Children at Home during COVID-19: The Case of the UAE
Open Access
- 15 April 2021
- journal article
- research article
- Published by MDPI AG in Social Sciences
- Vol. 10 (4), 141
- https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci10040141
Abstract
From March 2020 until July 2020, the UAE implemented mandatory distance learning due to COVID-19, which meant that children had to continue their learning remotely at home. Though schools concerted exemplary efforts to ensure that children received all that was necessary through advanced technology platforms and interfaces, the duty of ensuring that children continued to engage in successful learning fell solely on parents. This paper is based on a self-report study conducted during this first period of distance learning where parents were invited to anonymously complete a survey and then be interviewed. The paper relies on interviews as its main data source. Interview transcripts once transcribed were thematically analysed. One recurring theme in the data was gender differences in domestic and other duties as well as attending to the educational needs of children. Mothers, irrespective of cultural or educational background, disproportionately seemed to be the caretakers of the home and of children’s educational needs. Mothers spoke of their mental health concerns, pressures of time management, and negative effects on their own work. This paper makes an original contribution by exploring parental experiences of emergency remote learning and what these reflect about parental ethnotheories in the UAE.Keywords
Funding Information
- Zayed University (STG-011)
This publication has 17 references indexed in Scilit:
- Covid-19 and Women’s Triple Burden: Vignettes from Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Vietnam and AustraliaSocial Sciences, 2020
- Evaluating gender bias in an eating disorder risk assessment questionnaire for athletesEating Disorders, 2019
- “What I Want to Do as a Father Is Be There”: Constructions of School Involvement for Fathers of Children with Complex DisabilitiesResearch and Practice for Persons With Severe Disabilities, 2019
- Maternal PTSD and Children's Adjustment: Parenting Stress and Emotional Availability as Proposed MediatorsJournal of Clinical Psychology, 2016
- Workforce Reductions at Women-Owned Businesses in the United StatesILR Review, 2014
- Preparing and conducting interviews to collect data.Nurse Researcher, 2013
- Parental ethnotheories and family language policy in transnational adoptive familiesLanguage Policy, 2012
- Qualitative data analysis: the framework approachNurse Researcher, 2011
- Measuring basic needs satisfaction: Evaluating previous research and conducting new psychometric evaluations of the Basic Needs Satisfaction in General ScaleContemporary Educational Psychology, 2010
- Is there gender bias in participation in early childhood education programs in developing countries? Role of mother's educationJournal of International Development, 2010