Manoeuvring Among Institutions and Pandemic Restrictions: When the Fantasy of Parenting After Divorce or Breakup and the Respective Emotions Matter

Abstract

Understanding social factors that affected how people interpreted the meanings of COVID‐19 measures is important in postpandemic times. This study applies perspectives from research on emotions as one of the possible explanations and focuses on how institutions and their measures are perceived in the context of individual emotional situations. The aim of the study is to understand how parents with joint or shared custody arrangements in Czechia understood COVID‐19–related state interventions and how they dealt with those interventions in their lives. Analysing 16 interviews with these parents, who are considered a potentially vulnerable group, and their interplay with pandemic public policy, the paper suggests the importance of parenting fantasy. The term ‘fantasy’ builds on Illouz's scholarship and reflects individual sense‐making (ideas or practices) based on close and intense personal relationships related to parenting. This paper claims that the existence of this fantasy (in the form of a fulfilled parenting fantasy) or its non‐existence (in the form of a disruption of parenting, called a negative relationship by Illouz) codetermined how these parents dealt with the pandemic measures—whether (and how strongly) they conformed to them or whether they perceived (or used) them as a threat.