The expansion of contraception over the last several decades has made it possible for more people to avoid having a child, or another child, when they don’t want one.

But, contraceptive access is far from universal, and contraceptives—and the humans who use them—aren’t perfect, so unintended pregnancies still make up almost half of all pregnancies worldwide. Barriers to abortion—in many parts of the world, strict legal barriers—mean that pregnant people have no option but to keep the pregnancy.

So, what happens when someone becomes pregnant unintentionally and must carry it to term? Does it harm their health? It’s a surprisingly tricky question to answer in a scientifically sound way because it takes both a significant amount of time and specific types of data that are not typically collected. Given these constraints, a few studies have tried creative approaches; for example, one compared the health of women who were denied an abortion in the U.S. to that of women who were able to obtain one just under the gestational limit.

Rather than focus on the extreme case of carrying a pregnancy after having sought an abortion, we opted to study a general population of women to develop a broader sense of the implications of unintended pregnancies for those who give birth. This allowed us to study not only the diverse group of women who had an unintended birth, but also women who had an intended birth, as well as the many women who were able to avoid getting pregnant all together.

We focused our study on Malawi, a country in southeastern Africa where fertility is high and abortion is heavily restricted. We followed women ages 15 to 25 over six years, interviewing them frequently about their fertility desires, offering them pregnancy tests, and studying their health over time.

What did we find? Unintended pregnancies were common among women in our study. Importantly, and consistent with other research, not all women responded negatively to these pregnancies. When we asked women how they felt about their unintended pregnancy soon after they learned of it, we found that although many women were distressed, others were okay—and even happy—with the unexpected outcome.

Women’s distinct responses to their unintended pregnancies proved to be more than just offhand reactions. Negative feelings helped distinguish the women whose health declined in the 3 to 5 years after they gave birth. But what about the women who had a positive reaction to the pregnancy? These women didn’t fare any worse than comparison groups (see Figure).

Encouragingly, our study suggests that—even in a part of the world with high maternal morbidity and widespread poverty—certain unintended births are not harmful for women’s health. Women who welcome an unintended pregnancy exhibit resiliency and the ability to cope with the unanticipated development.

Also good news is that asking people how they feel about their unintended pregnancy is a simple piece of information that clinicians can easily collect and use in their efforts to counsel pregnant women on their options going forward. For those who feel bad about an unintended pregnancy, ensuring they have the option to terminate their pregnancy would allow them to protect their own health, and by extension, their family’s health. Unfortunately, many people around the globe, as well as increasing numbers in the U.S., lack access to safe and accessible abortion care, meaning that they will have little choice but to continue the unintended pregnancies that are most likely to do them harm.

Finally, when women continue their pregnancies—whether through choice or necessity—healthcare professionals should also ask them their feelings about the pregnancy in pre- and post-natal care. These feelings are important harbingers of the pregnancy’s consequences and, when necessary, should trigger additional counseling and resources to support women and their children.

Acknowledgements: This research was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R03-HD097360, R01-HD058366, R01-HD077873) and by the NICHD-funded University of Colorado Population Center (P2C HD066613).

Sara Yeatman (sara.yeatman@ucdenver.edu) is Professor of Health and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Colorado Denver. She researches the causes and consequences of unintended fertility in the United States and Malawi. You can find them at Twitter @sarayeatman

Emily Smith-Greenaway (smithgre@usc.edu) is Associate Professor of Sociology and Spatial Sciences at the University of Southern California. Her research centers on understanding social and health inequality.  You can find them on Twitter @smithgreenaway

Reposted with Permission from USA Today.

Imagine spending decades trying to unlock doors to secure your loved ones’ survival. You pull at frozen doorknobs, bang on doors, camp out waiting for them to open, try charming the bouncer to let you in. Finding the door often requires navigating a maze of dim corridors. You hit detours and dead ends. Sometimes you succeed and pass through. But inevitably, you encounter another locked door.

Then one day, imagine your incredible fortune. You receive a magical key that unlocks every door. The only catch – this golden period lasts one brief week. And the beloved person you are trying to save will die at the end of those seven days.

This may sound like a cruel fairy tale or an impossible video game. But this scenario reflects reality for millions of Americans like me trying to obtain lifesaving health care for ourselves and those we love. When my father was dying from metastatic lung cancer in May, the ease of accessing end-of-life care, services and medical equipment through a home hospice program felt like receiving a magical key that unlocked doors we had tried to break down for years.

Complexity fuels health inequities

Why does the most accessible health care of my father’s life come only at the end? It doesn’t have to be this hard. My father’s one week in hospice pried my eyes open to how much better our fragmented American health care system could function if we eased the “administrative burdens” that stymie patients, families and their health care providers.

In their powerful treatise, professors Pamela Herd and Donald P. Moynihan define administrative burdens as “onerous” experiences people face when trying to access government benefits and social services. People struggle with learning, compliance and psychological costs when attempting to determine their eligibility, keep their benefits and endure the stigma of using them, a shame unique to the United States with its meritocracy myth and threadbare social safety net. These burdens disproportionately harm those with less money and education and lower cognitive reserves.

Paid leave is an increasingly popular and important issue in the United States. The problems associated with not having a national paid leave policy in the U.S. were clearly evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic. As congressional leaders currently debate implementing a federal paid parental leave policy, it is important to reflect on the benefits of paid leave for society and how to design paid parental leave policies that will work for American workers.

The benefits of paid parental leave are well-known. Paid leave is associated with better health for parents and children, greater father involvement, and stronger coparenting relationships. Paid leave also helps businesses attract and retain productive employees. Paid leave may also facilitate greater gender equality within the U.S. Despite these benefits, workers are often discouraged from using leave due to our work-first culture. Specifically, taking leave signals that workers are less committed to their jobs, resulting in workers being stigmatized and penalized for taking leave.

While implementing a national paid parental leave policy is essential and long overdue, such a policy will only be useful if workers actually use paid leave and are not penalized for doing so. In a recent study published in Social Science Research, we sought to identify aspects of leave policy design and workplace culture that reduce the stigma associated with leave-taking. We conducted a survey experiment involving approximately 1,700 participants. We presented participants with an HR form detailing an employee’s inquiry about taking paid leave for the birth of a new child, and manipulated various aspects of the leave policy that the worker had had access to (length of leave offered, amount of wage replacement, whether the policy is a “parental” or gender-specific leave policy, and whether the policy is a state or company policy) and whether the workplace culture was supportive of leave-taking. Participants then reported on their perceptions of the leave-taking employee’s commitment to their job.

We find that both mothers and fathers experience a commitment penalty for taking paid parental leave, and penalties are higher when parents take longer leave. But, we find that perceived commitment varies by context. When paid leave is taken in a more supportive context – specifically when parents receive longer periods of paid leave and higher pay while on leave – perceived commitment is higher. Favorable leave policies may signal that organizations are willing to support their employees, which may in turn increase employee commitment. We find that perceived commitment is higher in organizations with favorable leave policies for all workers, regardless of workers’ leave-taking behaviors. As such, implementing better paid leave policies could help change our perceptions of workers.

We also find that perceived commitment is higher for fathers when there is a specific paternity leave policy and workplaces support leave-taking. Because fathers are less likely to take leave and may be uniquely penalized for valuing family over work, organizational context is particularly key for increasing the acceptance of fathers’ leave-taking. However, because favorable leave policies have a larger effect on perceived commitment for fathers than mothers, these policies actually exacerbate gender gaps in perceived commitment. That is, the gender gap in perceived commitment is greater within organizations with better leave policies than in organizations with less favorable leave policies. While this unintended consequence is concerning, more favorable leave policies may still help facilitate greater gender equality over the long-term if these policies encourage and enable more fathers to take leave and be engaged in their family life.

Passing a national paid leave policy is essential for providing needed support to millions of Americans who have caregiving responsibilities yet currently lack access to leave. Based on our experiment, relatively low wage replacement for some workers (as low as 66%) in the national proposal may affect perceived commitment. The lack of leave specific for fathers may also have the unintended consequence of perpetuating the idea that leave policies are for women and not men. As such, we must continue to not only increase access to leave, but to design policies and change the culture surrounding leave to enable more workers to take leave when needed and without penalty. By doing so, the benefits of paid leave for families, companies, and society can be better realized.

Richard J. Petts is a Professor of Sociology at Ball State University. You can read more about his research at www.richardpetts.com and can follow him on Twitter @pettsric.

Trenton D. Mize is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Purdue University. You can read more about his research at www.trentonmize.com and can follow him on Twitter @MizeTrenton.

Gayle Kaufman is Nancy and Erwin Maddrey Professor of Sociology and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Davidson College. You can read more about their research at www.gaylekaufman.com and can follow them on Twitter @gakaufman22.

I am thrilled to announce that Dr. Alicia Walker has take over as the new editor of this blog. Dr. Walker is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University, and author of two books: The Secret Life of the Cheating Wife: Power, Pragmatism and Pleasure in Women’s Infidelity (Rowman & Littlefield,  2017) and Chasing Masculinity: Men, Validation and Infidelity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). More broadly her research focuses on concealed sexual practices, and I have been lucky enough to coauthor two articles with her – one on self-described heterosexual college students who hookup with same sex partners, and a forthcoming article on patterns of entry into BDSM. Below I interview Dr. Walker:

AK: Your research has been discussed widely in the media, and you have worked to help CCF in various capacities before now. Can you tell us about your experience with and commitment to Public Sociology?

AM: In order for our research to have a wider impact, it must reach a wider audience. We don’t just research for the benefit of other scholars. Yes, we research to answer our own questions, but we hope others have those questions as well. Having other scholars read and engage with your work is terrific. But I hope to produce scholarship that helps folks outside the academy as well.

Because I’ve been lucky enough to have my work discussed in the media, people sometimes reach out to let me know that they saw themselves in my work, or that my findings helped them make sense of their situation. Nothing moves me more than knowing that my work has touched someone, made their life easier, or helped them process their feelings. And that cannot happen if my work is only ever read by other scholars doing similar work.

When I published my first book, The Secret Life of the Cheating Wife: Power, Pragmatism, and Pleasure in Women’s Infidelity, I was just a couple years out of graduate school. But thankfully, someone involved with CCF took an interest in me and my work, which helped me engage with a wider audience. I have even written some blog posts for CCF about previous research.

I later entered the Twitterverse, which has also connected me with a wider audience as well. I’ve met such amazing people on Twitter.

Publication can’t be the final step in our research. We have to make sure our work reaches beyond other scholars in our field. Writing about it for blogs, tweeting about it, sharing our findings with journalists are all ways we can reach out and share what we’ve learned.

AK: What are your favorite sociology blogs and/or twitters to follow?

AM: There are so many terrific scholars on Twitter. I follow lists of nonbinary scholars, female scholars, and academic moms. I also maintain lists of scholars: sociologists, sex researchers, and other researchers. Twitter is a terrific place to meet new scholars and find out about newly published work. I follow a variety of scholars who study a wide range of topics and disciplines. As a result, I get exposed to research I wouldn’t otherwise see.

My favorite sociology blogs include Sociological Images and the Sociologist’s Dojo.

AK: What topics are you hoping to feature more on the CCF blog?

AM: I am excited to showcase researchers doing interesting work on topics of family, relationships, sexuality, childhood, race, non-heterosexual families and relationships, and the ways that gender comes to bear on those dynamics.

I’d love to showcase junior scholars as well as more senior researchers. I’m excited to connect with more scholars.

Arielle Kuperberg is Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is the chair of the Council of Contemporary Families and was editor of this blog from  2017-2021. Follow her on Twitter at @ATKuperberg.

A few days before Father’s Day in June 2021, I found myself in the greeting card aisle leafing through the rows of cards capitalizing on the celebration of men’s parenting. One in particular caught my attention. On the front was a pale-yellow image of a modern living room scene with an open pizza box on the coffee table and books and a stuffed teddy bear lying on the floor. The caption read: “Thanks for being the kind of dad who never refers to watching our kids as ‘babysitting’,” and upon opening, “You’re a good one. Happy Father’s Day.” Did the card represent progress by implying that “good” dads take for granted that caring for their own children is parenting, not babysitting? Or did it reflect the ever-low bar for fathering and the idea that men deserve appreciation when they do the bare minimum of carework?

My card conundrum took on special meaning given that 2021 marked the 111^th annual Father’s Day, a holiday that can be traced back to Sonora Smart Dodd’s efforts to honor her father, a widower who single-handedly raised six children. It also marked 15 months – well over a full year – that many families had been working and learning remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In a country where the vast majority of fathers take less than 10 days of paternity leave from paid work after the birth or adoption of a child, the pandemic was the first time many men spent most of their awake hours in the vicinity of their children. Historically, moms have done the bulk of childcare, homework help, and housework necessary to keep kids clean, educated, fed, and clothed. Has the pandemic changed that?

Much like with that Father’s Day card, the answer depends on how you look at it. The pandemic compelled many families to reevaluate the starkly lopsided gendered division of household and parenting labor. Early in the pandemic, both mothers and fathers reported that they were sharing housework and childcare more equitably. Lost jobs, income, and work hours meant more economic stress for families, while closed workplaces, schools, and daycares forced more paid and unpaid labor into the home. Fathers picked up some of the slack. But mothers picked up even more. And they didn’t always agree about who was doing how much. The pandemic certainly hasn’t closed the persistent gap between our cultural views of fatherhood that have long included expectations for men to be involved dads who provide care and time, not just money, and men’s actual parenting behaviors. The lag separating the culture and conduct of fatherhood that historian Ralph LaRossa described over three decades ago endures.

Yet, now over a year and a half into the pandemic, evidence suggests that we have reasons to celebrate. Fathers have spent more time with and felt closer to their children. They’ve gotten to know their children more and discovered new shared interests. Some laud more paternal playtime as a “gift of the pandemic.” Many became more involved in their children’s education and stepped up in other ways around the house that became workplace, schoolroom, and daycare facility all wrapped into one.

But the pandemic didn’t upend deeply entrenched gender inequities in carework – the devalued, often invisible, and less playful aspects of parenting that include cleaning, cooking, and cognitive burdens such as grocery list-making and tracking homework due dates. A huge gap remains between our cultural ideas of “involved” dads and the reality that the labor burdens of parenthood still fall much more heavily on women. A major reason for that is that American fathers tend to fall back on their breadwinner responsibilities in times of economic crisis. It didn’t help that women lost more paid jobs during the height of COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders, nor that governmental responses to the crisis were slow and uneven across different states and communities.

In our work-first culture, we still hold men accountable for families’ financial well-being, despite how women have long been primary or co-breadwinners in most families. This was especially evident in my research on fatherhood programs for low-income fathers of color who worked hard to cast off the “deadbeat dad” label so often applied to marginalized men who struggle to live up the masculine breadwinner norm. Directly challenging racist stereotypes that fathers of color are more likely to be absent and less involved with children, Black fathers are actually more likely than white dads to feed, eat meals with, bathe, diaper, dress, play with, and read to their children. Provider expectations, especially for men who face limited job prospects, can undermine a personal sense of parental value and worth.

We saw this too during the pandemic. During a social and economic crisis when mothers were more likely to lose their jobs and governments and employers did little overall to help them manage the unprecedented COVID care burdens, it’s no wonder that traditionally gendered roles of parental responsibility shaped how much dads stepped up – and then stepped out. We still give dads more credit for paid work and breadwinning than for unpaid care and breadmaking.

I’m still not sure how I feel about that Father’s Day card and whether it reflects how far we’ve come in creating equitable conditions of parenting – or rather just how far we have left to go. One thing is certain. Regardless of gender, parents in the United States lack adequate public support for the labors of parenting as the pandemic continues to unfold. Maybe next year there will be a Father’s Day card that honors the work, both paid and unpaid, that it really takes to raise children. Perhaps I’ll find one that harkens back to the original vision of Sonora Smart Dodd who wanted to celebrate her father stepping up to the role of primary parent – not babysitter – when a crisis demanded it.

Jennifer Randles is Professor and Chair of Sociology, California State University, Fresno

Quick Summary: New study shows that couples justified relying on mothers as the “default” parent during the pandemic, seeing those arrangements as “practical” and “natural” because of longstanding gendered norms about caregiving and inequalities in parents’ work roles.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many mothers stepped into the “default” parent role. They took on more of the parenting, even when they were working for pay. And they often did so without any real discussion or negotiation over who would do more of the care.

Given the toll these arrangements took on mothers – undermining their mental health, causing stress in their relationships, forcing them to scale back their work hours, or even pushing them out of their careers – it’s important to ask: how did couples justify having mothers do so much more?

My coauthors Emily Meanwell, Elizabeth M. Anderson, Amelia S. Knopf and I answer this question in a new study, recently published in the open access journal Socius, and supported in part with funding from the NIH through the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute.

Drawing on two waves of in-depth interviews with 55 mothers and 14 fathers in different-sex dual-earner couples, we found that cultural and structural inequalities made it seem practical and natural for couples to rely on mothers as the “default” parent for care. Justifying these arrangements, mothers and fathers pointed to fathers’ status as primary breadwinners, mothers’ disproportionate availability at home, and gendered ideas about who would be more patient with the kids.

In couples where fathers were the primary breadwinners, both mothers and fathers described mothers’ work as “less valuable” than fathers’ and thus more easily sacrificed during the pandemic. Because dads earned more and usually worked more hours, they were allowed to “hole up” during the workday while moms had to simultaneously managing working and caring for the kids. As a Latina mother told us, explaining why she did her part-time data analysis job while caring for her two children, while her husband worked from their bedroom all day: “whatever pays the most wins.”

In other couples, particularly where moms had higher levels of education than dads, moms were able to work from home while dads had to work outside the home. This led moms to do more of the caregiving at home, even when they were the primary earner and working from home full-time. As a Black mother told us, explaining why she was the one caring for her three children during the day while also working full-time as a customer service representative: “[My husband] works in construction. I work from home.”

Gendered caregiving norms allowed couples to justify these arrangements as natural and desirable. Some mothers even described themselves as fortunate to have lost their jobs during the pandemic, because it allowed them to give their undivided attention to their kids. That included a white mother who lost her job in food service and told us: “With my older kids being out of school… I realize how fortunate I am that I got to be home. So I didn’t get faced with daycares being closed and schools being closed but still having to go to work…. I got the easy option.”

At the same time, gendered caregiving norms also limited mothers’ sense of entitlement to support with childcare from partners and other potential caregivers. A white mother we interviewed, who we call Candice, continued working full-time from home as a nonprofit administrator. When her husband lost his job in food service, they planned to have him provide full-time care. Yet, because their toddler gravitated toward Candice, she remained highly involved in care, saying: “It’s mostly [my husband]’s responsibility, I guess, to watch her, but I’m definitely involved throughout the day, as well. I sit on the couch with her playing in her toys. So I’m there and interacting with her but also still doing work…. So it’s not the same quality of work, but it’ll pay.”

Those norms also made mothers feel guilty and selfish for sending their children back to in-person school and childcare. As a white mother we interviewed explained, “[My daughter has] really struggled with in-person kindergarten…. And then [sending my toddler back to childcare] just broke my heart. I was so scared for her because she had no recollection of being in daycare because she’d been out for almost a year.” Similarly, a Black mother we interviewed called herself “selfish” for choosing in-person school and childcare, saying “without it I wouldn’t be able to do what I need to do from a work aspect.”

Of course, there were some couples that divided care more equally during the pandemic, and a few where fathers did more. Over time, though, many of those couples abandoned their more egalitarian arrangements. Particularly when fathers who were working from home had the chance to go back to work in the office. Or when couples perceived mothers as more suited for care. Fathers in these couples told us things like: “How she does it, I don’t know. Like, where she finds the time. Days I’m home with the boys by myself, all I can do is focus on keeping ’em alive, and she’s doing it all.”

In sum, we found that many mothers and fathers in dual-earner different-sex couples perceived traditional parenting arrangements as justified and desirable even when those arrangements damaged mothers’ careers, relationships, and well-being.

These findings help explain why many women have remained out of the workforce even as hiring signs have returned. They help explain why early increases in father involvement declined over the pandemic. And they help explain why opinion polls show growing preference in the United States for traditionally gendered divisions of parenting and paid work.

We conclude that structural changes—things like paid family leave, affordable childcare, and higher minimum wages–are needed to keep women from becoming the “default” parent when care arrangements break down. And yet, we also acknowledge that because current structural and cultural inequalities allow couples to justify mothers’ default status, those same couples may not advocate for policies that would support a more egalitarian division of care. Essentially, some mothers may reject the need for big structural and cultural changes, even if they would benefit the most.

The Great Recession a decade ago led a lot of college students back to their parents’ homes because they couldn’t find jobs and had a lot of student debt, thus stalling the path toward financial and housing independence for these “boomerang kids.” The COVID-19 pandemic led more young adults ages 18-29 to live with their parents than we have seen since the Great Depression (the Pew Research Center reported 52%); some researchers note that the pandemic has stalled young people’s paths to adulthood, especially those in economic precarity and in racial groups underrepresented at U.S. colleges and universities.

Many of us have had our temporal and spatial worlds disrupted by the pandemic, moving workspaces into dining rooms (like me), shifting schedules to accommodate the harrowing (and gendered) tasks of doing paid work while helping children with at-home online learning, and spending time worrying (at home) about whether there’ll be another paycheck from jobs that were eliminated or stalled due to pandemic restrictions and economic precarity.

I study how living spaces matter in people’s social roles and relationships, and how the boundaries between spaces and time periods come to be socially defined and made salient by people in their everyday lives. I’m interested not just in how the transition into adulthood is studied using concrete markers such as financial independence and moving out of a childhood bedroom, but also in the ways these markers subjectively matter. After seeing my own undergraduate students have their lives, homes, and learning disrupted in the spring of 2020 (and then deal with the uncertainty of what college would look like in the fall of 2020), I wondered what impact the COVID-19 pandemic had on college student living situations and, in turn, how these living situations mattered in how students perceived their transition into adulthood. When I started working with several undergraduate research assistants, we agreed on some questions to further investigate in a survey of 339 U.S. college students: Did students who stayed or returned to their parents’ homes during college perceive a stall on their path toward adulthood? Did students who left home during the pandemic see themselves as more adult-like?

As we have been analyzing the survey responses, we have found not only that the interplay between time and living spaces plays a role in college students’ perceptions of adult-like experiences, but also that these perceptions come about when students make relative comparisons between time periods and living spaces based on changes in their living arrangements.

We focused on group differences, with four groups defined in terms of changes in their pre-Fall 2020 and Fall 2020 living arrangements:

• those who lived in their childhood homes before and during Fall 2020
• those who lived in their childhood homes before Fall 2020 but left during Fall 2020
• those who lived away from their childhood home before Fall 2020 and returned home during Fall 2020
• those who lived away from their childhood home before and during Fall 2020

We defined “childhood home” as “the primary place(s) you lived when you were a teenager.” We included a Global Change in Adulthood index consisting of 27 individual measures compiled from past studies and conversations with current college students. These measures were also subdivided into four sub-indexes of Autonomy (e.g., “I had control over my living spaces”), Financial Independence (e.g., “I was financially independent”), Responsibility (e.g., “I had adult responsibilities”), and Identity (e.g., “I thought of myself as an adult”). We asked students to note if these markers occurred in both or neither time periods, or if they occurred more in 2020 than 2019 or more in 2019 than 2020.

The Global Change in Adulthood index and the sub-indexes of Autonomy and Responsibility showed statistically significant group mean differences. Despite being younger and less likely to have started college, students who left their childhood home in Fall 2020 showed the greatest perceived increase in adult experiences, especially when compared to students who had already left and returned home.

Importantly, the questions asking about whether there was a change in adulthood markers between 2019 and 2020 required a comparative assessment across time and space. To unpack our findings, we delved into social comparison and temporal comparison theories. Intrapersonal (rather than just interpersonal) comparisons are important to consider when individuals assess their opinions, abilities, and experiences. Temporal comparison theory suggests that a person may assess the efficacy of their present situation in terms of their own history, thus subjectively deciding whether their current self is better off than their past self. This comparison can exist alongside an assessment of whether their situation diverges or converges with social expectations for their group, which is the primary focus of social comparison theory.

Students who left home in Fall 2020 comprised the only group of students who followed a normative path toward adulthood that was embedded within our living arrangements variable: leaving home. What someone thinks about where they live now may be impacted by whether they compare their living situation with a previous residence, rather than a static assessment isolated from past conditions. If a college student who leaves home perceives their path as aligning with group norms for young adults who are supposed to venture away from a parental home, and if that student perceives leaving home as making sense in light of their own personal history as they move from childhood into adulthood, then it is more likely that this student would consider their path to be normal and acceptable. Further, this student may perceive this path to be acceptable even in light of other more objective measures that may indicate a stall or movement backwards on the path toward adulthood, such as decreased household responsibilities.

For students who left and then returned to a childhood home because their college shut down, they had health concerns, or they had financial strain, the same processes of social and temporal comparison apply. This is the group who showed the biggest perceived decline in adulthood markers. Students who returned home after being away were disrupting their trajectory toward adulthood by virtue of going “backwards” into a parental home. This reversal, along with challenging role negotiations and the violation of a social ideal, likely had a powerful impact on students’ belief that they were moving less into adulthood because of returning home. That they were a year older or had gained autonomy as a result of moving away from home did not add up to enough adult-like currency to counteract the relative impact of moving back home, which was likely seen as taking a step backwards on the path toward adulthood. As Arnold Mont’Alvao, Pamela Aronson, and Jeylan Mortimer reveal in their study of COVID-19 impacts on paths to adulthood, “delay in family related transitions interferes with adult identity formation and fosters feelings of being ‘off time’ in acquiring markers of adulthood. Thus, those who perceive themselves as ‘late’ with respect to family-related markers have difficulty thinking of themselves as adults.” For these students, while they may not be objectively delayed as compared to the numerous others in their group who may also be returning home (due to the pandemic), they may perceive themselves to be delayed in terms of a normative idealized path to adulthood, as if they are going backwards to a moment in time in their own biographies that signifies childhood.

What the survey data in our study reveal is that a temporal comparison not only consists of assessing one’s current situation with a past one; it may also consist of assessing one’s current situation with an imagined current situation that would signify a preferred temporal trajectory and a preferred spatial transition: moving from childhood toward adulthood over time and in spaces that move away from a childhood home, and not the other way around.

Analyzing what students think about where they lived, especially when they compare the arrangements from one year to the next in terms of a childhood home (and, by extension, they compare their current selves with both past selves and idealized current selves that develop from past selves), adds nuance to existing knowledge about college student living experiences, the boundary between childhood and adulthood, and COVID-19 social impacts.

More practically, findings like ours can help parents understand why their pandemic-induced “boomerang” kids may be feeling out of sorts and why role renegotiation that was already challenging became even more harrowing in a world filled with social disruption and confusion. College and university residence life professionals can see how the ways that living spaces are seen by students often involves a comparison, which can be difficult to reframe if powerful ideals about social roles are attached to those spaces in a time when being “at college” has changed meaning. And students themselves can use our research to better equip themselves for enhanced self-awareness as they navigate the difficult path to adulthood in times where disruption and uncertainty are the new normal.

Why do time and space feel weird for college students? Because both real and imagined reference points for both have been turned upside down. That weird feeling, though, can have a poignant impact on future assessments of life stage transitions, which is why it is crucial to study the perceptions themselves.

Thanks to student researchers Julian Landau, Jess Lilly, Ruby Matthews, and Kaia Roast.

Michelle Janning is the Raymond and Elsie Gipson DeBurgh Chair of Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Her research focuses on the intersection of spaces, material culture, and interpersonal roles and relationships. She has conducted several studies about the impact of COVID-19 on social roles and inequalities. Her son attended high school online in their basement while she taught and researched in the dining room upstairs during 2020-21. Her work is featured at www.michellejanning.com.