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

## TL;DR

This paper examines how pandemic parenting stories reflect changing ideas of childhood, time, and technology through interviews with mothers in Southern Ontario.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of childhood temporality using Barad's theory to show how past, present, and future childhoods intertwine during the pandemic.

## Key findings

- Mothers' narratives reveal how time, technology, and space shape childhood boundaries.
- The pandemic evokes co-existing past, present, and future childhoods in parenting experiences.
- Material-discursive arrangements complicate linear understandings of childhood and time.

## 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.