Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic has greatly disrupted the education of first-generation college students (first-gens)—those whose parents did not complete a college degree. With campuses closed, activities canceled, and support services curtailed, many first-gens have increasingly relied on their parents for mental, emotional, and logistical support. At the same time, their parents face compounding stresses and challenges stemming from the prolonged effects of the Covid pandemic. We examined the role that relational dynamics between first-gens and their parents played in how they weathered the first 2 years of the Covid pandemic together. We draw upon journals submitted by self-identified first-gens and parents of first-gens to the Pandemic Journaling Project between October 2021 and May 2022 as part of a pilot study of first-gen family experiences of Covid-19, along with a series of interviews conducted with three student–parent dyads. We argue that what we term the micropractices of care—the “little things,” like a kind word, small gift, or car ride, that were regularly exchanged between parents and students—played a key role in mental wellness and educational persistence. We find that when there is synchrony between practices offered by one dyad member and their reception by the other, mental wellbeing is preserved. When there is asynchrony, mental health is destabilized. These findings reflect the strategies on which first-gen families have creatively relied to maintain shared mental wellness and student success during a time of crisis. We show how everyday mental wellness is forged in the intersubjective space between two people engaged in achieving shared life goals.
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Data Availability
The data is not currently in a depository, but will be deposited in the Qualitative Research Repository. Twenty-five years after the study’s conclusion, the corpus will be converted into a publicly accessible archive.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful above all to the student and parent participants in our study. We also are extremely grateful to our research assistants, Alishba Sardar and Jessica Meza, for their hard work in coding the data. We acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (Grant #2148566), Brown University’s Office of the Vice President for Research, and the Population Studies and Training Center, which is funded by an NIH Center Grant (#P2C HD041020).
Funding
This research was funded by Brown University Salomon Research Awards (Office of the Vice President for Research) and the National Science Foundation Cultural Anthropology Program Senior Research Awards (2148566). Research reported in this publication was also supported by the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University through the generosity of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P2C HD041020).
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. The study was approved (No. HR20-0065) by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Connecticut, which is the IRB of record in this collaborative work between University of Connecticut and Brown University.
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Flores, A., Mason, K.A. “You would think she would hug me”: Micropractices of Care Between First-Generation College Students and Their Parents During Covid-19. Cult Med Psychiatry 48, 91–112 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-023-09833-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-023-09833-5