The Work/Care Interface and Parents’ Mid-pandemic Mental Health: Inequalities at the Intersection of Gender and High-risk Household Status

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic generated mental health stressors for parents as they faced new health risks and navigated disruptions to employment, schooling, and care arrangements. Drawing on 2021 survey data from Canadian parents of children 10 years old and younger, we describe the relationship between work/care pandemic stressors and mental health, and employ Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions to examine how these contribute to mental health gaps by gender and its intersection with having household members perceived to be at high risk in relation to COVID-19. We find that mothers’ mental health was more negatively affected than fathers’. Differences in exposure to work/care stressors help explain this gap, with the “mental load,” perceptions of inequity in how households responded to pandemic care demands, and greater reported deterioration in work-family balance and career prospects particularly salient. Mothers, but not fathers, with high-risk household members were also more exposed to key work/care stressors, contributing to the worst pandemic mental health for this group. While the relationship between stressors and mental health was similar for mothers and fathers overall, high-risk status moderated this relationship, with employment or care disruptions that reduced COVID-19 exposure less likely to be associated with poorer mental health for parents in high-risk families.