Past-present-future childhoods: Technology, time, and childhoods in narratives of pandemic parenting.

Abstract

Re-turning interviews with 15 mothers in Southern Ontario about parenting during the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper explores meanings and experiences of childhood, children, and technology. Thinking with Karen Barad I ask: how is temporality evoked in stories of childhood and parenting in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic? Entangling with some of the material-discursive arrangements of childhood in the mothers' narratives, I trace the differences that time, technology, and space enact for the boundaries of childhood. This theorizing can complicate conceptualizations of childhood, time, and linearity, by illustrating how past, present, and future childhoods are co-existing and co-constituting.