Parenthood and Politics in the Era of COVID-19

Abstract

During 2020, the United States has undergone massive changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the additional demands created on parents due to working at home, on-line schooling, and caring for children 24/7, there is every reason to expect America’s parents to suffer disproportionately from the impacts of the pandemic. Using a COVID-focused nationally representative survey from September 2020, we explore how COVID-19 has uniquely affected the attitudes and life experiences of American parents. We find that COVID-19 has been unusually burdensome for parents as they are more likely to have contracted COVID, experienced negative mental health outcomes, perceived a greater threat from COVID, and had more negative personal financial impacts. Additionally, we find that parents are more skeptical of vaccines and that parents prefer on-line education. Importantly, most all of our impacts for parenthood, vaccines excepted, hold up in multi-variate models with additional demographic and political controls, strongly suggesting that parenthood itself is uniquely challenging in the current pandemic.

Keywords: Parenthood, public opinion, COVID-19