**3.3 Alternative narratives of "quality time"**

Our findings suggest that the increased time at home and the collapse of workhome boundaries opened up an alternative maternal narrative that challenges some of the taken-for-granted meanings of intensive mothering. These narratives use the notions of time and temporality to question the unrealistic and persecutory nature of the cultural, moral standards of "good" motherhood.

*Exploring the Quality of "Quality Time": A Temporal View on Mothers' Experiences… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101174*

Two mothers, interviewed for an Israeli online advice column, targeted the assumptions that women can "have it all" and that family time during a pandemic could be dedicated to children's needs [50].

*"Before lockdown, we had an organized timetable hanging on the refrigerator, so we could monitor the assignments and schedules of different family members. Now? We have just given everything up. Time is not relevant anymore."*

Another mother has recognized the impossibility of struggling between working from home and taking care of her small children:

*"I am not apologizing for missing a job meeting or two because I fell asleep with my child at 2 PM. I am just too tired."*

An interesting perspective on how parents use notions of time to challenge social truths about parenting during the COVID-19 can be found in parents' use of humor. In their analysis of humor circulating on Israeli social networks during the COVID-19 lockdown, Lamish and Elias [33] revealed that humor played as an outlet for parents', especially mothers', anxieties and distress. In contrast to the idealized and romanticized perspective of mothers' time, mothers in their study took a cynical approach to their time at home in order to uncover the "real" quality of their family life during the pandemic. By targeting concepts of "leisure" and "quality time" [33], mothers struggled to resist the social construction of time at home as optimal for children's well-being. The following example, published by an artistic mother in August 2020, shows how parent-child "quality time" was ridiculed:

*"Do you Remember the times when August arrived and you asked yourself: Ho no, what are going to do with the children the whole month of school vacation? Wow, that was a fantastic time."*

Other mothers used cynical descriptions of children's timetables, admitting that children were mainly busy with food and screen consumption [33]. As one mother posted on Facebook during December 2020:

*"My children's C.V: 12 years of school. Of them, one year on Netflix."*

Realistic notions of time allowed mothers to re-consider the social construction of motherhood that expects women to be constantly available to nurture the success of their children while being constantly available as highly productive workers. As Whiley et al. [5] suggested, the impossibility of being the perfect mother and the perfect worker became more pronounced during the COVID-19 as the fragile boundaries between home and work collapsed, and mothers found themselves more and more immersed in the domestic sphere. Paradoxically, the additional burden on mothers' shoulders and the complex reality of raising children during a global crisis allowed mothers to challenge some of the social truths about mothering that appear natural and unquestionable, including why women still shoulder the parenting burden and what are the effects of this burden on women's mental health.

#### **4. Limitations**

This research serves as an exploratory step in understanding how notions of time inform, and interpret, but also challenges the social construction of being a

#### *Parenting - Challenges of Child Rearing in a Changing Society*

mother during a pandemic. As such, several limitations must be considered. First, analyzed data is limited to Western mothers from high-resource sociocultural contexts. Therefore, certain ideologies and practices observed here might not appeal to mothers from diverse sociocultural and economic backgrounds. Second, data selection and analysis were conducted solely by the author, thus limiting the reliability of the reported findings. Finally, the study did not consider time-related dynamics in mothers' experiences of the COVID-19. Future research should explore how intensive mothering ideologies are further modified during recurrent waves of the pandemic.
