How Working Mothers Juggle Jobs and Family during COVID-19: Communicating Pathways to Resilience

ABSTRACT This qualitative study explored how working mothers communicatively constructed resilience during COVID-19. We focused on working mothers because the pandemic upended arrangements they had made previously to juggle work and family lives. Drawing on the Communication Theory of Resilience (CTR), the study analyzed data collected from 24 U.S. working mothers who were interviewed via Zoom between July and September 2020. We found five themes characterizing the triggers working mothers faced in the pandemic: financial disruptions, on-the-job issues, space-related concerns, temporal concerns, and role-related issues. Consistent with CTR, mothers responded to these disruptions by crafting resilience with the six processes suggested by previous research. Further, we found a seventh process, “communicating emotional well-being,” that mothers crafted to recalibrate emotional upsets due to the pandemic. The findings also suggested that working mothers saw their own resilience as inextricably tied to the resilience of their children and partners.