“We all agree that the best thing to do is be kind to ourselves”: Emotionally reflexive reorientations of childcare during the COVID pandemic

In the face of a crisis like COVID-19, people in the UK mused on how they felt and how to care, including how to care for children. This musing can be understood as emotional reflexivity: which means reflecting on how to feel and how to use those reflections in our emotional practices. I illustrate emotional reflexivity at work in 47 volunteer writers’ responses to the Mass Observation Project’s special COVID directive in March 2020. It asked the writers to share their experiences as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. They did their emotional reflexivity with other people and sometimes reoriented caring for children. These writers reflected on their own, and other people’s, feelings about and practices of caring for children. Some reflected more widely on how society cares for children. These reflections occasionally led to different possibilities and practices of childcare. The paper considers what these accounts can contribute to debates about care by illustrating the importance of support from friends and children in caring, how to care at a distance and the part that strangers can play in sharing childcare as a social task.