**2. Method**

This study employs a qualitative content-analysis-based approach to explore how socio-temporal norms are linked to intensive mothering ideologies. The methodology and choice of materials are guided by the view that new media technologies not only reflect but also constitute the discursive practice of motherhood today. Since I am specifically interested in the mechanisms through which social truths and meanings about motherhood are produced, the study is based on content analysis of online materials written for parents. As many studies suggested, parents in Western, high-resource sociocultural contexts are preoccupied with fear and confusion about the future of their children in a changing world [32]. In this climate, online advice columns, blogs, social media, and news items flourish [33]. During the pandemic, online spaces provided mothers a platform to engage with their maternal identity and share some of their difficulties. At the same time, these online spaces enabled the prosperity of ideal parenting images [5]. Therefore, online sources are considered key cultural sites for understanding some of the truths and discursive means through which the ideology of intensive motherhood is constituted, represented, and interpreted.

To locate time-related notions of mothers during the pandemic, parenting online advice columns published in popular media, blogs written by mothers, and mothers' Facebook groups were analyzed. The current research views all these sources as cultural artifacts affecting and maintaining current representations of the "good mother." The keywords "motherhood"/"parenthood" with "time," and COVID-19/ lockdown in English and Hebrew were used in the "google" search engine to locate relevant items. The data chosen for this analysis were selected from a large variety of texts published since the outbreak of the pandemic.

The data were analyzed using a thematic analysis approach, involving interpretative processes that were based on deconstructing data into thematic categories and relinking them into a holistic sequence of meanings to provide complex answers to the questions at scrutiny. The analysis process included several stages, as presented in **Figure 1** [34]. First, the entire content of each publication was read to obtain a

#### **Figure 1.**

*Schematic summary of Colaizzi's [34] method for content data analysis.*

general sense of the content as a whole. A text unit was defined as an article, advice, quote, and question and answer column. The unit of analysis was defined at the unit level, not the entire publication because we were interested in an in-depth analysis of the meaning of individual messages. In the second step, text units were read and reread to extract words and sentences relating to mothers' time experience, and segments of text were given the descriptive label of "significant statements and phrases." In the third step, highlighted significant statements were sorted into groups of similar ideas that were pasted together to begin to formulate meanings [34]. In the fourth step, the meanings from the significant statements and phrases were formulated and organized into themes. Finally, the meanings and themes that were formed in previous stages were integrated with theoretical concepts, to create an array of theoretical categories.
