“It's that feeling that you can't get away”: Motherhood, gender inequality and the stress process during extreme events

Abstract

The impacts of extreme events can intersect with pre-disaster systemic inequalities and deficiencies, exacerbating distress. This paper contributes to the existing literature by exploring the psychosocial processes through which stressors become traumatic during an extreme event. It does so by focusing on how mothers of children and/or adolescents in the United Kingdom experienced the COVID-19 pandemic. First, qualitative interviews (N = 15) showed that participants experienced a cluster of stressors stemming from their workplaces, partners, children's behaviours and homeschooling, which caused a sense of overload and captivity, reducing their quality of life. However, individual, interpersonal and collective forms of coping were reported. Second, quantitative survey data (N = 621) showed that the relationship between stressors and perceived stress was mediated by feelings of overload due to excessive identity-related tasks and caregiving responsibilities. Moreover, community identification was associated with reduced overload and perceived stress. Overall, during extreme events, people can experience distress due to being overloaded by and trapped in particular identities and identity-related tasks, unable to perform other aspects of their social selves. We argue that social psychological analyses can be useful in tracing the complex impacts of extreme events across a range of systems and levels of analysis.