The lockdown experience of Hungarian mothers with young children facing the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about unprecedented changes to everyday life, presenting a range of emotional and practical challenges. This paper aims to identify burdens that Hungarian mothers of two-year-old children faced during the spring of 2020 and to examine the impact of employment on mothers’ adaptive behavior during the pandemic. The data presented here are based on the fourth wave of the Cohort ’18 Growing Up in Hungary longitudinal research study. The analysis uses weighted data (n = 4,408), collected between October 2020 and May 2021, covering experiences during the spring 2020 state of emergency. Besides descriptive statistics, a K-means cluster analysis was performed to identify groups of mothers with similar experiences. The correlates for the resulting clusters were analyzed using both bi- and multivariate methods. Four clusters were identified: mothers experiencing ‘mental distress and life-management difficulties’ (16.8%), ‘mental distress’ (33.7%), ‘life-management difficulties’ (15.8%) and ‘seamless adaptation’ (33.7%). In predicting cluster membership, maternal employment situation, partner’s employment, increased housework tasks, external childcare assistance, previous anxiety symptoms and previous depressive symptoms were significant. It can be concluded that the first wave of the pandemic had a marked effect on the lives of mothers raising young children, though experiences varied. On-site work was found to reduce both mental distress and life-management difficulties during the pandemic for women with young children, but for those working from home, no such adaptation effect was identified.

Keywords: COVID-19, lockdown, mothers with young children, difficulties, adaptation, Hungary