Collaborative Research: Parenting, Housework, Well-being, and the COVID-19 Pandemic

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The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically altered family life in the United States. This project studies how parents’ engagement in domestic labor and paid work has changed throughout the pandemic and what factors may be driving these changes. It also investigates long-term consequences of the pandemic for the division of household labor between mothers and fathers, and the impacts of the pandemic on parents’ well-being. Starting in the first months of the pandemic and continuing for five years, this project illuminates how family and work life have changed over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Insights from this study inform decisionmakers to better meet the needs of working parents and families.This project uses longitudinal survey data from a sample of partnered U.S. parents. Parents were first surveyed in April 2020 and asked about their work and household activities prior to and one month after the pandemic began. These parents were surveyed again in November 2020 and October 2021, along with a new set of respondents at each wave. Follow-up surveys result in six waves of data spanning the period from March 2020 through September 2025. Approximately 6,500 parents are surveyed at least once during the study. These data are used to assess (a) changes in parents’ divisions of domestic labor, (b) the factors driving these changes, (c) effects on mothers’ labor force participation, and (d) changes in parents’ well-being and relationship quality. The novel nature of these data are uniquely situated to assess the long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for parents’ work and family life and their well-being.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.