What is the daily life of a family in French-speaking Switzerland like during the pandemic?

What is daily life like for a family in French-speaking Switzerland during the pandemic? 

At the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, I interviewed families and asked them how they had experienced the semi-lockdown of spring 2020. Most of them are a group of families living in French-speaking Switzerland that we have been following with various colleagues since the end of the 2000s, when their first child was born. I had also seen them the year before the confinement. Interviewing the participants again offered the possibility to compare the daily life before and after the lockdown.

One thing surprised me a lot in the interviews that were conducted before the pandemic. I was struck by the stress that parents, particularly middle class parents, both fathers and mothers, were experiencing, although this stress and the fatigue caused by this stress was more often expressed by mothers. This stress was related to daily life. It is easy to talk about the difficulties young parents, young mothers, have in organising childcare and reconciling family and professional life. However, we talk much less about family life when the children are older, between the ages of 6 and 12 or so. Parents are very busy organising their children's extracurricular activities. The children practice one or two sports, have a cultural activity, such as music. The difficulty for parents is to manage or synchronise the schedules and rhythms of each child, between professional activities, school, extra-curricular activities, appointments with the doctor, the speech therapist, etc. I was therefore very curious to see how things had evolved after the pandemic.

The father was in the process of retraining to become a secondary school teacher. He was working 50% of the time as a trainee in a secondary school where he was practising his teaching profession. He has just finished a master's degree in pedagogy, which he prepared for three years. His wife is a senior manager in an insurance company, working at 40%. She has actually reduced her working hours for health reasons and receives a bit of IV. She works two half-days a week, telecommuting. The Douve family has been living in a village in the canton of Vaud for about ten years. The children have to take the bus to school. The eldest son is in the penultimate year of compulsory school, while his sister is in the 6th year of Harmos. The boy practices aikido and drums while the girl plays basketball and the guitar. Both have scouting activities on Saturdays and go to Sunday school more or less regularly. These activities take place outside their village and a major difficulty for the parents is to organise transport for the children to and from each of their activities.

Before the lockdown, Mrs Douve tells me that she feels like the head of a small business. As in many families, she is the one who manages the daily life and the domestic chores in the household. Her husband, moreover, is not very involved in domestic activities, as his career change requires him to prepare his teaching while working on his Master's degree.
The lockdown of the spring of 2020 has had the effect of fundamentally transforming the daily life of this family. The children no longer go to school but have school at home. All their extra-curricular activities have ceased. The two parents have switched to full-time teleworking, so there is no longer any travel time for them, especially for him, who had to drive to a station where he could take a direct train to Lausanne. 

After one or two weeks of confinement, especially while the organisation of the school at home is being put in place, the daily rhythms become routine. In the morning, parents and children wake up at about the same time, a little later than before the lockdown. Breakfast is taken together. The morning is devoted to the professional activities of each of the two parents, and to schoolwork for the two children. The children are already autonomous from the point of view of school. Just before the lockdown, the parents equipped the child's room with a desk, so that everyone has their own work space. The children work normally in their rooms, while the father has an office in the attic of their house, where he can prepare his lessons and zoom in and out. He is sometimes joined by his son when he needs the computer. The mother is the least well housed, having set up a workspace in a fairly wide corridor next to the attic. Everyone works in silence, as if in a monastery. At lunchtime, the father prepares the meal, which he did not do before, so that his partner can continue and finish her morning's work. The mother works four half-days a week, but on Friday mornings she goes shopping, not only for the family, but also for her elderly parents who live in Lausanne. She takes the opportunity to visit them at the end of the morning, respecting the rules of sanitation and social distance. Except on Fridays, the family has lunch together.

Then in the afternoon, once the mother has checked her daughter's homework, the time is devoted to leisure activities, together or alone. As the weather is good, the family spends a lot of time in the garden. The ping-pong table was set up very quickly. The father enjoys discussing the ecology of the garden with his daughter. They also go for walks together outside their house, in the forest, and get to know the surroundings of their village better, which they did not know so well before. The children are also allowed to use the screens. Even though screen time is still limited, the duration of use is longer than before the pandemic. They can play, communicate with their friends. After the meal, the evening is again devoted to leisure activities, sometimes board games, sometimes reading. Mrs Douve has some time to herself, which she likes to spend reading. The family goes to bed quite early in the evening.

In reviewing this period, Mrs Douve recalls once again that she feels like a director of a small business, but she also tells me that she appreciated the lockdown very much, as this period had allowed the family to strengthen its links. Similarly, her husband said that he seemed to have lived this period according to his values, which are close to the ecological values. The idea of economic decline, or growth that is not so necessary, of less consumption. More prosaically, he was also very satisfied to no longer have to travel, realising that his commute to work took him more than an hour and a half, round trip.  

The story of this family's daily life during lockdown is very intriguing, because it shows an improvement in the parents' well-being. However, one cannot generalise, other families I have seen have not experienced an improvement in well-being, not least because time remained a scarce resource, the children not being as independent as those of the Douve family. Nor can we generalise to the whole of the Douve family, since, according to his parents, the eldest son, who was on the verge of adolescence at the time of the semi-confinement, was very bored and spent a lot of time in his room, not being able to see his friends, who for the most part live far from his village.

It is true that the husband cooked at lunchtime, but he followed a menu drawn up beforehand by his partner. In fact, every Thursday evening, the day before the shopping day, Mrs Douve prepared on an Excel sheet the menus for the week to come. All in all, all the mental workload associated with daily life was left to her. And this was also the case for many of the families we saw. The lockdown did not really allow for a sharing of domestic tasks and a sharing of the mental load that daily life requires. Improved welfare is not the same as emancipation. The question also is, and now time has passed, how has this lockdown been digested? How is the imbalance in domestic organisation dealt with by both men and women?