When home becomes classroom: The shifting roles of Korean immigrant mothers in the management of children's education during COVID-19 in the US.

COVID-19 has disrupted women's lives by increasing their childcare and household labor responsibilities. This has detrimentally affected immigrant women with limited resources, who invest in their children's education for upward mobility. Based on a content analysis of 478 posts on the MissyUSA website, this study explores the ways in which Korean immigrant mothers in the U.S. navigate the management of middle and high school children's online education during lockdown. Before the pandemic, mothers' tasks were largely limited to scheduling and coordinating private-paid after-school programs that occurred outside the home. However, the pandemic transformed mothers into active coordinators of public middle and high school classes and of private online tutoring, and de facto schoolteachers at home. This breakdown of boundaries between the home and tasks normally relegated to the outside world has burdened mothers with augmented roles managing the ordinary functioning of their children's education during the pandemic.

Introduction

The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has affected people's lives worldwide, but women have experienced more change because of the greater burden of unpaid housework and care work on them as compared to their male counterparts (Hamel & Salganicoff, 2020; Power, 2020; United Nations, 2020). In particular, mothers—both working and stay-at-home mothers—faced more stress due to the so-called “pandemic parenting,” including decreased productivity when working from home, increased domestic chores, and the need to take care of their children at home all day because of the closure of childcare institutions and the transition to online learning in schools (Calarco et al., 2020a, Calarco et al., 2020b; Guatimosim, 2020; Guy & Arthur, 2020; Hamel & Salganicoff, 2020; Power, 2020). While immigrant mothers are known to generally have limited language proficiency and social capital in destination countries (Calderon-Berumen, 2020; Oerther et al., 2020), Asian immigrant mothers maintain a higher standard of success than their native-born counterparts by living vicariously through their children's educational achievements, in keeping with the “successful image” of Asians (Manohar, 2013). Therefore, during the COVID-19 pandemic, immigrant mothers who are under-resourced (Falicov et al., 2020) might have additional burdens and more concerns about their children's education than native-born mothers; however, little is known about the changes in the practices of immigrant mothers in managing their children's education during COVID-19.

Gender scholars looking into intensive mothering have found that mothers spend more time and feel more responsible for the management of household labor and children's education than fathers and may even feel guilty when mothers think they did not meet the idealized standard of motherhood (Hays, 1996; Hochschild & Machung, 2012). Intensive mothering (Hays, 1996) suitably captures the gendered parenting strategy for children's educational success, which symbolically epitomizes middle-class families' pursuit of class mobility through the transmission of economic and cultural capital (Park, 2007). For Asians and Asian Americans, who cherish the value of education tremendously as a family project, various patterns of intensive mothering have emerged, including the models of “tiger mothers” for Chinese Americans and “education manager mothers” for Koreans (Chua, 2008; Park, 2007). A tacit assumption of this scholarship is that mothers' involvement in the management of children's education existed to support the operation of public and private education outside the home. As suggested by the concept of education manager mothers, who chauffeur their elementary school children to private after-school programs, provide quick meals inside the cars to save time, and use thick day calendars to keep track of their children's after-school programs (Park, 2007), most of their care work once operated in the public sphere, where schools and paid educational experts offer professional teaching. However, the closure of private academies and the transition to online learning in schools have led to questions about how mothers' managing roles have shifted during the pandemic.

Among many racial and ethnic groups, Korean immigrant mothers constitute a meaningful group for study given that they have long been known for their intense enthusiasm for their children's education, the so-called “education fever,” rooted in Confucian tradition and individuals' desires for successful upward mobility in an extremely competitive social setting (Kim et al., 2005; Lee et al., 2010; Seth, 2002, 9–11). To secure better educational opportunities for their children in a new land, Korean immigrants' adaptation pathways cannot be separated from their strong parenting interests. Providing better education to guarantee their children's admission to top universities and their attainment of professional jobs is a marker of first-generation Asian immigrants' success.

Furthermore, middle-class and affluent Asian Americans with transnational backgrounds are likely to show concern for their children's education, pressuring their children toward high academic achievement through a slew of different strategies, including after-school tutoring to maintain high GPAs, high-stakes test preparation to garner top scores for elite programs and school admissions, and private extracurricular programs to improve their résumés for university applications (Chang, 2017). Scores from entrance exams such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and American College Testing (ACT), documents such as Statements of Purpose (SOPs), and letters of recommendations are some of the materials that students must prepare for college applications in the U.S. (Ross & Josh, 2021). Regarding choosing the colleges to which to apply, advice from teachers, high school counselors, and parents is significant (Poon & Byrd, 2013).

Parents in Korea who are strongly involved in their children's education often pay for private supplementary tutoring or coaching aimed at providing additional help to students outside of school to prepare for a variety of examinations; this is known as “shadow education” (Byun, 2014), and is also practiced in the U.S. (Chang, 2017). While Korean immigrant women may have such interest in their children's education, the COVID-19 outbreak might have left them perplexed by the closure of schools and unexpected shifts in the educational system, causing them to experience multiple challenges and concerns. Therefore, examining how Korean immigrant mothers narrate their changing roles in the management of children's online education offers an opportunity to assess how mothering practices for education have shifted during the pandemic.

In this study, we conducted a content analysis of 478 posts from , one of the largest ethnic online communities of Korean immigrant women. As a platform used by immigrants to build social capital by sharing information and exchanging emotional support (Lee, 2012; Oh, 2016), this ethnic online community is a unique online space for capturing various aspects of immigrants' experiences. Drawing on the concepts of intensive mothering and education manager mothers, this study examined the newly emerging mothering practices for middle and high school students' online learning during the pandemic. While first-generation Korean immigrant women are forced to chase and perform the idealized image of intensive motherhood, which is culturally aligned with the ideals of tiger mothers and manager mothers among Asian Americans, the societal lockdown dramatically elucidated a transition to online education that incrementally burdened mothers. This resulted in anxiety and practical challenges for them in overseeing the operation of online classes at home. Overall, the findings of this research shed light on how mothers have navigated the education manager mother ideal, a romanticized norm of intensive mothering for Koreans, during the pandemic and the nuances underlying the nascent ways of coordinating their middle and high school children's education at home.

Intensive motherhood

Mothering is a material and discursive project, one that is shaped by dominant gender ideologies but also performed and transformed through daily practices. Among middle-class women, motherhood is often seen as an opportunity to choose and perform one's identity (Atkinson, 2014). In the U.S., dominant ideologies and gendered expectations shape how women perceive and perform good motherhood (Christopher, 2012; Hays, 1996; Thurer, 1994). By doing the work of a mother, women contribute to producing family arrangements and discourses of family life through mundane activities, such as the repetitive and mechanical tasks of cooking, feeding, and childcare (DeVault, 1994). The origin of this mothering task is related to the industrialization process, whereby the ideology of separate spheres, or “public” and “private” realms, assigned wage work outside the home to men. Meanwhile, women at home were to do the work of transforming wages into the goods and services needed to maintain the household (Coontz, 2016). Caring work for women is an outcome of the division of labor that benefits capitalists and male workers (Hartmann, 1981) and obscures women's social subordination and service in the interest of capital by providing essential childbearing, childcare, and housework at a minimal cost to the state (Segura, 1994).

Constructing motherhood is one of the critical ways to perform the feminine accomplishment of gender; the intensive mothering ideology, a gendered parenting technique for middle-class women, embraces the idea that mothers should be the central caregivers of children (Hays, 1996). Hays (1996, 54) identified three primary characteristics of intensive mothering: first, “that childcare is primarily the responsibility of the individual mother”; second, that the recommended methods are “child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive”; and third, that childrearing decisions should be entirely separated from “market valuation…efficiency or financial profitability.” The notion of intensive motherhood pressures women to perform the “day-to-day labor of nurturing the child, listening to the child, attempting to decipher the child's needs and desires, struggling to meet the child's wishes, and placing the child's well-being ahead of their [mothers'] own convenience” (Hays, 1996, 115). Intensive motherhood may intersect with the family's socioeconomic background, not only as a gendered parenting project but also as a class-based parenting practice. As suggested by Lareau's (2011) middle-class strategy of “concerted cultivation,” middle-class mothers are more likely to feel pressured to devote their time to child-centered activities for their educational success by offering extensive extracurricular enrichment. This type of professional-class strategy includes out-of-control parenting, consisting of constant monitoring, risk management, and high levels of emotional intimacy (Nelson, 2010).

As a regulating force on mothers' behaviors, the social expectations of intensive mothering pressure women into “feeling a little guilty, a bit inadequate, and somewhat ambivalent about their position” (Hays, 1996, 151). This feeling of guilt, experienced when the mother is not entirely devoted to her children, operates even more strongly in working mothers, who struggle to manage their multiple roles of mother and worker, given the norms of the ideal worker prevalent in the labor market (Williams, 2001). Some mothers may feel joy and pleasure in their mothering but also feel pressured to provide ideal health and learning environments for their children, which eventually results in feelings of stress, exhaustion, anxiety, and failure (Guendouzi, 2006; Rizzo et al., 2013; Sutherland, 2010; Vincent & Ball, 2007). Importantly, the dominant discourse elevates intensive, self-sacrificing motherhood as the ideal, and non-conforming mothers may experience guilt and/or be framed as inferior (Elliott et al., 2015; Johnston & Swanson, 2003; Romagnoli & Wall, 2012). For instance, mothers in England engaged in self-monitoring to optimize their infants' cognitive development and experienced guilt and worry when they felt they did not match up to the ideal of constantly entertaining and stimulating their children (Budds et al., 2017). However, this intensive motherhood ideology encompasses multiple contradictions, romanticizing mothers as life-giving, self-sacrificing, and forgiving, but also demonizing them as smothering, overly involved, aggressive, and destructive. Mothers are seen as all powerful beings, responsible for the fate of their children, but are also seen as powerless subordinate beings simultaneously (Glenn, 1994).

Immigrant motherhood: the ideal of tiger mothers and education manager mothers for Asian mothers

Although research on intensive motherhood originated in the North American context, it is not a static ideal and has garnered specific interpretations that vary across historical and social backgrounds (Collins, 1994; Lamphere et al., 1993). Women of color situated in disadvantaged racial/ethnic and economic circumstances conceive of motherhood differently; for example, black women interweave motherhood and paid work (Collins, 2000). Mothering could empower their vulnerable social position to some extent as they value motherhood more than other identities (Collins, 1994, Collins, 2000). Asian immigrant mothers and mothers in some Asian countries have been portrayed ambivalently as strict authoritarians whose educational pedagogy centers on the development of inner strength through discipline, which differs from that of white mothers, whose parenting focuses on the development of children's self-esteem. These mothers have been depicted as excessively aggressive mothers who coordinate private after-school programs for the strategic success of children's education (Chua, 2008; Park, 2007). The best-selling book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2008), written by Amy Chua, reflects such authoritarian or disciplinary parenting in the Chinese way by placing enormous value on academic achievement as a litmus of successful parenting. In contrast to Western soccer moms, Chinese mothers stress a performance-oriented, disciplinary, inner self-building mentality, based on disciplined schoolwork, perfect grades, advanced academic preparation, respect for teachers and coaches, and winning medals in activities (Chua, 2008).

Like the tiger mothers among the sample of Chinese Americans, mothers in Korea and Korean immigrant mothers are equally known for their educational fever and investment in resources for their children's educational success. Although it imposes an economic burden on parents and requires time and effort, a heavy emphasis on private tutoring and after-school programs is an important strategy for parents seeking to enhance their children's education at public schools and ensure their entry into the best universities (Park et al., 2011). However, such parenting is gendered, and the ideal of the education manager mother (maenijeo eomma) portrays Korean mothers as giving rides to their children, preparing their meals, and managing tight after-school program schedules (Park, 2007). In Korea, the legacy of gendered education fever is reflected in the modern ideal of the “swish of the skirt” (chimat baram) in the 1970s and 1980s, comparable to “apron strings,” which in the American context means that a student is strongly influenced and controlled by the mother (Park, 2007). What is distinctive about Park's (2007) education manager mother is her interpretation of the rise of intensive mothering among Korean middle-class housewives under the macro-transformation in Korea, whereby the neoliberal education reforms of the Kim Young-Sam government and the subsequent emphasis on creative citizenship promoted the expansion of the private after-school market. As a result, the dominant discourse of education manager mothers, although it is only possible for middle-class women, universalizes the norms of manager mothering in such a way as to imply that anybody could be a manager mother with enough effort (Park, 2007).

First-generation Korean immigrant mothers are likely to carry out such gendered parenting practices in the U.S., as they see their children's educational achievement as an indicator of their own success. Educational achievement is known to be a measure of successful assimilation (Alba & Nee, 1997), and Korean Americans are likely to concentrate on the second generation's educational success, which ensures the upward mobility of the entire family. Research shows that East Asian American students rely on commercial SAT test preparation services, private one-on-one tutoring, and SAT coaching, defined as the American style of shadow education (Byun & Park, 2012). Many Koreans tend to invest in their children's education even after migrating to the U.S. (Zhou & Kim, 2006; Zhou & Li, 2003). Studies have suggested that children's education is one of the strongest factors in the decision of Korean immigrant parents to settle in the suburbs and try to assimilate into mainstream white American society (Zhou & Kim, 2006). To support their children in achieving academic success, they send them to hagwon, a private ethnic supplementary academy that provides many academy-related services, such as tutoring and test prep, although they did not portray themselves as tiger parents (Park, 2020; also see Zhou & Kim, 2006).

Drawing on this scholarship on intensive motherhood and Asian and Asian American motherhood, we examined the shifting patterns in Korean immigrants' mothering practices for their middle and high school children's public and private education at home during the pandemic. The global COVID-19 outbreak provided an opportunity to examine how narratives on intensive motherhood and Asian American mother ideals have been powerfully maintained, in the case of Korean immigrant women, in a static form that is resistant to radical changes in societal structure. In contrast to the pre-COVID-19 era, when the operation of public middle and high schools, as well as private schools, occurred outside the home, the disruption of such institutional operational routines during COVID-19 has foregrounded mothering practices for the coordination of public middle/high and private online learning within the home. To better understand how the pandemic has affected Korean immigrants' mothering practices, we focused on the types of challenges they experienced in the unusual circumstances of the pandemic and examined the ways in which intensive mothering practices were exhibited through an analysis of Korean immigrant mothers' narratives. These narratives provide insight into how Korean immigrant mothers defined desirable mothering in the context of collapsing external paid education institutions during the pandemic.

Methods

This study analyzed online postings from collected from March 2020 to September 2020. is one of the most popular websites among Korean immigrant women in the U.S. Since its launch in 2002, the website has become the largest ethnic online community in the U.S. The sheer number of new posts and clicks shows the popularity of this online community. On average, 200–300 new posts are added daily and receive up to 1000 clicks (per day), depending on the type of message board and specific topic.

The website was established to help Korean immigrant women share information on various topics and provide reciprocal emotional support while adjusting to their new lives as immigrants. These website functions allow Korean immigrants to build social capital in their host society. The website also serves as a “digital diaspora space,” where they can maintain their connection to the homeland (Lee, 2012). Given these important functions, researchers have used to analyze the lived experiences of Korean immigrants from various perspectives (Lee, 2012; Oh, 2016).

The content of is broadly divided into eight sections, and there are 60 specific message boards dedicated to discussing specific topics in each section. The sections are Talk Lounge (with 13 message boards), Health & Beauty (with 5 message boards), Home & Food (with 10 message boards), Motherhood (with 12 message boards), Life Info (with 10 message boards), Buy & Sell (with 10 message boards), Missy Write, and Missy Gallery. Through these specific message boards, members can ask questions, exchange know-how on various issues related to immigrant life, and share their emotions to support one another. According to the website's service provision (as of September 2020), full membership is only given to married female Korean immigrants currently living in the U.S. While the content of some message boards is available to read without signing up as a member, one must be approved as a member to gain full access to most of the other message boards and write posts and comments. However, all the written content is posted anonymously, except for some topical columns written by dedicated columnists.

For this study, we collected data from the “Motherhood” section. The “Motherhood” section has 12 specific message boards that cover the following topics: Pregnancy/Childbirth, Child delivery, Postpartum, Infertility, Child rearing, Autism/Developmental disorder, Day care/Free school, Kindergarten/Elementary school, Middle/High school, College admission, College/Graduate school, and Advertisement. Among these message boards, we chose to look at the “Middle/High school” message board to specifically examine the experiences of Korean immigrant mothers with 7th–12th graders for the following two reasons. First, children in this age group are going through a crucial educational phase because they are preparing for college. Therefore, in general, mothers' roles as educational managers become more significant at this stage. Given this crucial phase, it is likely that the role of mothers would experience significant changes due to the impact of COVID-19. It is therefore ideal to examine how Korean immigrant mothers' roles as “manager mothers” shifted under the pandemic, when there was a phenomenal change in the existing educational system.

Of the 3183 postings uploaded on the “Middle/High school” message board between March 1 and September 30, 2020, we analyzed 478 posts that contained the following 16 keywords: Corona, COVID, cancel, online, Zoom, in-person, distance learning, situation, fall, this semester, infection, back to school, Pass/Fail, stop, these days, and closed. To decide which keywords to use, we first conducted an initial screening of all the posts to identify a number of relevant keywords to maximize the volume of data. At first glance, “COVID” or “Coronavirus” seemed like the only obvious reasonable keywords to examine the impact of the pandemic. However, we noticed that many discussions related to the pandemic were not detected using only the two keywords, as some mothers were talking about the impact of the pandemic on their children's education without directly mentioning the two terms. By including a wide range of keywords, we were able to identify and include more postings that illuminate challenges and struggles that Korean immigrant mothers were experiencing. This also enabled us to depict a more holistic picture of Korean immigrant motherhood during the pandemic.

We treated each original post and reply comment(s) as a single separate case. The length of each post and comment varies significantly, ranging from a single sentence or word (for comments) to several paragraphs. We used qualitative content analysis with a focus on discovering latent meaning, that is, themes that were not immediately obvious, as opposed to quantitative content analysis, which tends to focus on manifest, literal meanings (Schreier, 2012). Qualitative content analysis requires researchers to pay closer attention to the context to infer hidden meanings within a given content. The more hidden the meaning, the harder it is for researchers to read the context and make inferences. In this case, it is more likely that multiple people will read the meaning differently (Neuendorf, 2002); therefore, in this study, the three authors strove to reach conclusions through continuous and dialectical processes of comparing and contrasting our data while referencing the literature on intensive motherhood, manager mothering, and immigrant motherhood (Schreier, 2012).

The three authors independently read the entire data and tried to understand the general patterns of mothering practices during the pandemic. As the first author was familiar with the literature on intensive motherhood and manager mothering and the second and third authors were familiar with the literature on immigrant motherhood, we first individually identified and coded the emerging themes that were most comfortable for each of us, through independent note-taking. Then, by going through multiple rounds of comparing and discussing the individual coding results, we were able to reach a consensus and identified three major themes related to critical challenges Korean immigrant mothers were experiencing that shaped their mothering experiences. The three themes include 1) managing public education at home, 2) managing private education at home, and 3) searching for alternative education methods. The primary language used on the website is Korean. However, as all three authors are Korean-English bilinguals, we translated all the content into English in this paper. The current study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the corresponding author's affiliated institution.

Managing public education at home: barriers to and preparing for online classes

On the MissyUSA website, many mothers expressed their emotional challenges in managing online education and sought information and advice on how to deal with the transformations in learning environments. Before the pandemic, the major role of education manager mothers was coordinating private after-school programs for their children's educational success at their public schools, including elementary, middle, and high schools, to smooth their entrance into top universities. However, since the outbreak of COVID-19, Korean immigrant mothers have had to “manage” additional work, such as taking care of the logistics of online classes for public schools and other academic activities, including checking children's lessons and exams. They also seemed concerned about the format and difficulty of online exams and the feasibility of fair grading.

Coordinating and managing their children's grades seemed particularly challenging for some mothers, as they did not find the grading criteria to be generous enough considering the challenging circumstances they were going through. One California mother whose child had started taking classes online since mid-March 2020 wrote a post describing her child's specific class requirements and shared her concerns in managing the online learning system and asked for feedback, stating, “Now my child has to take exams starting next week. I heard that some schools are canceling classes or implementing the pass/fail method, but our (child's) school is (still) giving a lot of assignments and is really strict in terms of grading, which I find very annoying. I am worried about how hard the online test will be and what the format would be like. If your child has already taken quizzes or exams online, please share your experiences.” [Post A]. Following Post [A], some mothers responded by sharing their children's specific circumstances related to taking online tests and grades.

In our case, the quiz is due by the end of a given day at 11:59 pm, so we can access it at any time. However, once accessed, it must be completed within a certain time frame set by the teacher. [Reply #1 to Post A].

Does your school district offer a detailed grade breakdown? [Reply #2 to Post A].

The grade of each homework has been posted (online). So, I can view how my child's grades have been fluctuating since January, when the second semester started. Our school district has never (officially) announced how they are going to deal with students' grades, so it seems that both teachers and students are assuming that things would be the same regarding the grades. [Reply #3 to Post A].

Grades have been posted online, but I heard that (the school) is not sure how they are going to accommodate the current situation in terms of grading. [Reply by the author of reply #1 to Post A].

Both the initial posting and responses illustrate the added burdens on mothers in terms of becoming more actively and deeply engaged in setting up their children's online learning environment and monitoring their grades. For instance, prior to the pandemic, mothers did not need to pay much attention to “what time” and “in what ways” their children took quizzes or exams, as this was done at school away from mothers' sights. However, now that the home has become a de facto classroom, mothers are pressured to make sure their children take online quizzes or exams on time without issues. In addition, as mothers are more deeply engaged in these academic activities, they might be more concerned about the immediate outcomes by further thinking about the fairness of grading. This could potentially affect mothers negatively by increasing their anxiety levels. Relatedly, the drastically changing educational environment has brought new challenges for Korean immigrant women. Many of the women's narratives on the system change suggested that their worries increased in terms of the new pass or fail evaluation system; they were also curious about how the change would impact their children's university applications and competition for admission.

One mother stated, “My child has a bad GPA. I am disappointed to hear that the grading system will be pass or fail this semester because my child has been working very hard on five APs to raise his GPA since his junior year. I told him to prepare well for the AP test, but I don't think it will be easy to apply to the university with his current GPA. Please give me some advice.” [Post B]. The mother who wrote Post [B] is an example of a manager mother with selfless devotion of emotional and mental energy in coordinating the best strategies for her child's successful university admission. She eagerly pushed her son to prepare for AP subjects and raise his GPA. As suggested in the case of Post B, one characteristic of intensive mothering is that mothers perceive and respond to environmental risks to offer the best circumstances for childrearing, along with their devotion of physical, emotional, and mental energy. Through the discourse, we were able to witness the mothers' frustrations about having to change their pre-established plans for their children.

Korean immigrant mothers candidly expressed their worries about and burdens of creating an academic atmosphere like a school during the period when public education classes for middle and high school students were taking place at home. Since public education is done virtually, the critical spatial boundaries of inside and outside the home have collapsed. Consequently, mothers had the extra burden of playing an important role in creating a classroom-like atmosphere in a variety of ways. Such efforts indicate that educational institutions have passed on many practical educational functions to the home. For example, Post [C] epitomizes Korean immigrant mothers' efforts to create an academic atmosphere at home while their child was taking online classes.

While my son takes classes in the kitchen, I try to not make any noise, even as small as putting down a coffee cup or opening and closing the refrigerator door … he (my son) does not seem to have any issues, but I wonder if I should let my son take his class in a quieter environment. Where do other kids, especially high school students, take online classes?

The way the mother in this post prioritizes her son's education over herself by regulating her behaviors is a good reflection of the added psychological burdens on mothers. This also illustrates a specific form of intensive mothering in the context of the pandemic. In addition, some mothers raised concerns about the increased amount of schoolwork their children had to do because of the changed school system. In particular, mothers who were not fluent in English seemed to have a harder time assisting with their children's incremental challenges in completing homework. Consequently, these mothers seemed to experience a variety of emotional difficulties, as Post [D] exemplifies: “I came to America from Korea last February. My child went to school for two weeks, and the school was closed. She was in the ELL (English Language Learners) course for those two weeks, and then she went up to an upper-level class. However, the school closed because of COVID after my child had taken only 2–3 classes… She cried a lot because she did not know what to do with her online homework, but I am a mother who is not good at English, so I do not know how to help her.” [Post D].

As hinted at in Post [D], the emotional toll on mothers with limited resources and experience seemed much greater than for others. Therefore, they actively sought advice from fellow Korean immigrant mothers by sharing their stories on the message board. In the pre-COVID-19 era, all public education, including elementary, middle, and high schools, existed outside of their homes, and mothers were sporadically involved in monitoring and managing exams and performance evaluations for their children's college entrance. However, due to the collapse of territoriality and the rise of virtual education caused by the pandemic lockdown, Korean immigrant mothers took on another role—that of helping to provide an identical environment for the operation of middle/high education in their homes. This change has caused Korean immigrant mothers to encounter an increasing number of challenges and barriers, as their managing tasks have doubled.

Managing private education at home: searching for and coordinating online tutoring

COVID-19 imposed more burdens on Korean immigrant mothers than simply dealing with public education at home. Although online tutors existed before COVID-19, the needs and role of online tutoring have been strengthened and emphasized during the pandemic because it is difficult to send children to private academies. As mainly first-generation immigrants from Korea, the members of MissyUSA showed the greatest interest in sending their children to after-school programs and private tutoring, as Korean mothers in Seoul do. As the definition of manager mothers suggests, traditional managing work by Korean mothers mostly appears in private education. This managing work was not curtailed during the pandemic, but mothers' work was transformed as the private market of after-school programs transitioned to the virtual world. Korean immigrant mothers came to have other types of coordinating tasks for their children's educational achievements.

Before COVID-19, mothers' managing work was limited to giving their children rides, preparing meals, searching for the best after-school programs, and so on. This kind of work occurred outside of the household, where mothers diligently tried to coordinate private after-school programs. However, since the pandemic, this territorial boundary has collapsed, leading to the operation of private education within the household. As a result, Korean immigrant mothers actively sought online tutors in various subjects (e.g., science, math, physics, and writing) during the pandemic to ensure that their children did not fall behind academically.

Regarding the management of private education, the major role of Korean immigrant mothers during COVID-19 includes exchanging and managing information about different types of tutoring occurring in online spaces. A number of posts showed that mothers were vigorously searching for the best online tutors for their children's extracurricular development. These included assistance for regular subjects that are important for university entrance in the U.S., including mathematics, physics, chemistry, and grammar and writing. Moreover, many mothers wanted to find tutors for extracurricular activities, including various instruments (e.g., violin).

I feel like my child is just wasting his time every day at home, and he should be doing more than just his schoolwork. … What are other moms doing? Does your child meet a tutor like he did before COVID-19? Or does your child have an online tutor? Can you also please let me know any good math tutors if you are in New Jersey? Thank you.

My child is going into seventh grade. I want to help her in writing, but… I do not think I am going to be able to do it because of COVID-19. Can anybody please recommend a good website where she can get some writing tutoring services? She needs some help with grammar and vocabulary.

As posts [E] and [F] illustrate, several mothers wanted to find excellent private tutors providing virtual lectures. Considering that their children were lagging in comparison to others because they had too much free time without private after-school programs, the mothers deeply wanted to offer the best learning experiences by connecting with online tutors for their children. One mother said, “I can endure other difficulties due to COVID-19, but it's really hard to see the children's academic schedule delayed and to see them just playing at home.”

Meanwhile, the Korean immigrant mothers' seeking and sharing of information about online tutors was not limited to core subjects such as math and writing and extracurricular courses such as musical instruments (e.g., violin) but also included extra courses that may be conducive to their children's university entrance. The mothers tried to introduce and explain the benefits of different online university and Coursera classes (e.g., Python) to better prepare for the college entrance exam. Their discussions, as part of their managing work, appeared to involve looking for resources, comparing prices, evaluating the benefits, and offering self-reflective advice and lessons for fellow mothers, as in posts [G] and [H] below:

My child is a junior now and has a strong mathematics, physics, and chemistry background. In the case of physics, it ends this year up to AP Physics. Is there any online class offered by universities to take when he is a senior? Can you recommend one?

I do not fully understand how private tutoring for musical instruments works. Private lessons are given one-on-one, next to each other, with body and eye contact. I think it makes sense if people do online private tutoring of a foreign language, English, or social studies. I believe that math tutoring could be effective when you read the instructions and listen to the teacher online. I would like to know about your online tutoring experience of musical instruments and your opinions.

As these two posts suggest, the mothers were eager to find online private tutors and circulate information about where to search for them, tutoring costs, and the benefits of hiring an online tutor. Furthermore, Post [I] exemplifies Korean immigrant mothers' worrisome and efforts to check the “quality” of the online tutors since they cannot check them in person as they did before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Do you all know which schools your online tutors attended? I have mixed feelings about whether I should check that information. I wonder how everyone picks an online tutor. I found a tutor from this website who claims that he used to teach at school for years and currently works at the Department of Education. However, he never talks about his alma mater. Well, even if he says which school he graduated from, I do not know how to verify that information. Since I do not have a great connection in America, it is hard to find a trustworthy online tutor.

Interestingly, the mothers' search for children's private after-school programs did not end even after finding one. As shown in the following replies to Post J, which asked whether online tutoring is efficient and how to make it more efficient, Korean immigrant mothers sought and shared information about tools for online tutoring such as iPads or software programs that make online tutoring more interactive.

We are doing (virtual online tutoring) well. I use an iPad and Apple pencil. The teacher can see what my child writes on the iPad, and the teacher seems to be doing real-time correction. The teacher's explanation can be seen as soon as you write it on the screen that way. [Reply #1 to Post J].

Can you let me know which program you use where you can see the teacher writing on your child's iPad? [Reply #2 to Post J].

Try using this program. I was totally surprised when I saw this. Share it with your child and teacher. If the child writes it in black, fix the frame right above it to blue. [Reply #3 to Post J].

Moreover, mothers were continuously making efforts to evaluate the effectiveness of the programs. While some Korean immigrant mothers claimed that online private tutoring could be as effective as offline tutoring in their reply posts, most insisted that online private tutoring was ineffective and suggested free online classes. In this way, the mothers tried to use the MissyUSA site as a forum to gather useful information for the performance of successful manager mothering during the pandemic. All these narratives suggest that the managing work of Korean immigrant mothers was not curtailed but became more pronounced during the pandemic.

Dissolution of education outside of the home and mothers' search for alternative education: homeschooling or online school

Homeschooling and independent online schools have emerged as new substitute methods in response to the shutdown of public and private schools outside of the home during COVID-19 among Korean immigrant mothers. Although the mothers were considering some new options, such as homeschooling and sending their children to an online school, their narratives reflected a great deal of concern and hesitancy about the different types of alternative education. These concerns included 1) not being able to provide quality education by homeschooling their children on their own, and 2) having their children fall behind and become less competent for college admission by switching to alternative education. Therefore, there were lively discussions on these issues.

For example, the mother who wrote Post [K] stated that her sixth-grade daughter had been taking online classes from a private school at home for months. Since she and her husband did not think it was worth spending a great deal of money on private school tuition when all classes were offered online, they were thinking about sending their daughter to an online school. The mother also mentioned that she was considering homeschooling, but she was not confident about whether she could provide adequate education for her daughter.

My husband says that it is meaningless to pay a lot of money for her to go to a private school if the classes are given virtually. He also insists that we should send our daughter to an online school that is about to open in our school district. I think that if we send our daughter to an online school, our family can continue to spend a lot of time together at home. However, the downside would be that she is always going to be at home. I also thought about homeschooling our daughter, but I am not confident about that either since I do not know much about the American education system. What do you all think about these options? Is there anyone who sends their children to an online school? Thank you for your reply in advance.

Similar to the mother in Post [K], quite a few mothers were also thinking about homeschooling their children. However, most seemed hesitant about it and questioned their qualifications as the main instructor at home. Although these mothers hoped to do the best they could for their children's future academic success, they seemed less confident about taking sole charge of their children's education. Another mother wrote, “Homeschooling my child or sending him to an online school has never occurred to me as an option, but the pandemic is making me seriously think about all available options […].” She stated that her 14-year-old son, who was attending high school, was against going back to Korea, as she and her husband had suggested, and even if he studied for a short period in Korea, she was worried about him maintaining a high GPA; therefore, she was thinking about sending her son to an online school. Like her, Korean immigrant mothers were trying to figure out how beneficial it would be to enroll in an independent online school, how many courses would be available online, and what the possible problems or difficulties of entering as a high school student would be. She ended her post by wondering whether her child could fall behind when taking only online school, in comparison to other students.

With such issues concerning the choice of homeschooling or online school, the mothers were eager to hear the experiences of people who had enrolled their children in online school or homeschooling in advance. They seemed to be curious about what the homeschooling method was, how the tests would proceed when the semester would end, and what the graduation test would be. One mother stated that she had long considered homeschooling her child, but during the pandemic, she started seriously searching for related information because she could not wait anymore. After stumbling upon the possibility of homeschooling or online schooling as an alternative option on the Internet, one mother wanted to learn more about others' experiences with homeschooling [Post L]. Several mothers talked about the absence of possible events such as graduation exams and ceremonies in virtual education, which would lead to a lack of opportunities to socially interact with friends and teachers. In response to this original post [L], many mothers offered their own thoughts and advice about the operation of homeschooling.

In reality, homeschooling is difficult for instructors who lack English skills, and it also requires a lot of information gathering in order to succeed. Each state has different requirements, so you must be familiar with them as well. If you are not satisfied with how your kid's school is offering online classes, you might as well find a full-time online public/private school. Be mindful that this option needs a lot of management from the mother's end, too. [Reply #1 to Post L].

I do not know whether you have ever heard about homeschool. Do not just switch to homeschooling. You should search for more information beforehand. [Reply #2 to Post L].

There are requirements for homeschooling. The parents' educational background is important, and there are regular exams in the curriculum. [Reply #3 to Post L].

There are requirements for homeschooling. The requirements change every week, so you should carefully check them out. Homeschool has rules, and you have to take all subjects. [Reply #4 to Post L].

As Post [L] suggests, some mothers were seriously thinking about homeschooling for the first time. However, as other mothers who responded suggested, there are several elements to be considered, including parents' knowledge and experiences, and a series of management works for offering the required subjects, exams, and curriculum to be successful at homeschooling. Furthermore, the absence of social interactions and the formation of friendships among peers were frequently discussed as the foremost drawbacks of homeschooling and online school. Several mothers specifically showed concern about the lack of social interaction among friends in online education and how it would impact their children's social and emotional development in the long term.

It should be noted that mothers who were discussing homeschooling or online schools did not comprise the majority, as it is not a common and easy option to opt into. In addition, the number of mothers who ultimately switched to homeschooling their children or sending them to an online school might not be large. Nevertheless, some mothers' enthusiastic search for alternative education formats reflected their aspirations and willingness to perform intensive mothering as education manager mothers. In the pre-pandemic era, most tasks that mothers carried out were limited to scheduling and coordinating private after-school programs that occurred outside of the home. However, during the pandemic era, the scope of manager mothering was extended far more than before, compelling mothers to think about becoming active performers of education within households.

Discussion

Drawing on the content analysis of 478 posts on the MissyUSA website, this research explored the shifting mothering practices carried out by Korean immigrant mothers for the management of the normal operation of public and private online education during the pandemic lockdown. This study analyzed the conceptual meaning of the ways in which intensive manager mothering occurred during the pandemic, focusing on how first-generation Korean immigrant mothers navigated the ideals of education manager mothering, a romanticized norm of mothering for Koreans. Specifically, it explored the challenges mothers face in coordinating their middle and high school children's education at home and their active responses in the context of collapsing external paid education institutions.

The findings of this study are threefold. First, Korean immigrant mothers face numerous challenges in coordinating middle and high school online classes at home. Second, mothers have been looking for online tutors in various subjects (e.g., science, math, physics, and writing) at home, as various online tutoring options have appeared to replace private academies. As first-generation immigrants from Korea, the members of MissyUSA showed much interest in sending their children to privately-owned after-school programs and private tutoring, as Korean mothers do in Seoul (see Park, 2007). Third, in addition to discussing the dissolution of education institutions outside of the household, Korean immigrant mothers also talked about various alternative educational programs within the household. For example, homeschooling and online schools have emerged as new substitute methods in response to the shutdown of public and private schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, the findings of this study suggest that the pandemic has led to an expansion of the scope of manager mothering, leading mothers to be more attentive to and involved in their children's educational activities, which was once considered the job of others. This is a stark difference compared to the pre-pandemic era, when the mother's role was often limited to scheduling and coordinating education in the private sector. Now, they have a new role that includes active coordination of public middle and high schools in an online setting, private online tutoring, and the performance of education within the household.

The mothers' narratives were in line with intensive mothering that “requires the day-to-day labor of nurturing the child, listening to the child, attempting to decipher the child's needs and desires, struggling to meet the child's wishes, and placing the child's well-being ahead of their [mothers'] own convenience” (Hays, 1996, 8). For Korean immigrant mothers, the expectations of practicing education manager mothers are considered to meet those of the idealized motherhood against the backdrop of severe educational fever and parental and familial competition for children's educational success. During the pandemic, this norm of education manager mothers was not eradicated or thwarted, but rather extended and strengthened. The territorial boundaries of formal institutions associated with offering public and private education have been replaced by the household through the medium of online platforms; therefore, mothers have the added burden of handling the smooth operation of online learning. Several new tasks have clearly appeared, including eliminating noise; turning computers and digital gadgets on/off; checking and following up on online classroom activities, quizzes, and tests; and searching for information on tutors, homeschooling, and online schools. Furthermore, the emergence of homeschooling and online schools as viable options undoubtedly epitomizes the active development of education manager motherhood during the pandemic. Overall, public and private education, which traditionally took place outside the home, has moved into the household through virtual space and has consequently magnified the scope of mothers' management tasks.

Mothers' managing work goes beyond children's education but includes household chores, family errands, and caring for elders. Among married couples who work full-time, women provide close to 70% of childcare during standard working hours; during the pandemic, this burden has been exacerbated not only due to school shutdowns but also because help from cleaning services and babysitters have been curtailed (Cohen and Hsu 2020). This means that COVID-19 has slowed down not only the paid economy due to the lockdown of workplaces, but also impeded the “care economy,” the reproduction of everyday life through cooking, raising children, and so forth, reducing women's remunerated working hours and increasing stress (Power, 2020). Both childcare and elderly care have been delivered by private citizens, mostly women (Lewis, 2020). However, it is notable that other countries, such as Japan, have experimented successfully with alternative systems for valuing care work, as shown in the case of caring for the elderly through welfare systems (Power, 2020). Along with the new significance of the care economy, a scholarly attempt to expand the scope and dimensions of the tasks of manager mothers can be useful in understanding women's work.

The results of this study show that mothers have used the MissyUSA site as a forum to gather useful information for the performance of successful manager mothering during the pandemic. All these narratives indicate that the managing work of Korean immigrant mothers has not declined but, rather, has become more pronounced during the pandemic. In the pre-pandemic era, mothers could gather information through networks of Korean immigrant mothers connected through Koreatowns, Korean ethnic organizations, and Korean religious organizations. However, the shutdown of such facilities and ethnic spaces has led to the beginning of the virtual era, in which mothers cannot help but rely more on ethnic online communities, such as the MissyUSA site. Although this study draws on Korean immigrant women living in the U.S., their pursuit of children's successful college admission, despite its specificity related to the U.S. college admission system, may similarly appear among other immigrants across the globe. The shutdown of public and private education institutions and ethnic enclaves during the pandemic has been universal, so Korean immigrant mothers' reliance on the ethnic online community and their increasing burdens can offer conceptual insights to other groups of immigrants in the world. This phenomenon suggests the new empirical and conceptual question of whether the conventionally meaningful role of ethnic online communities has become more prominent or has even replaced traditional ethnic organizations for the adaptation, integration, and assimilation of ethnic and racial immigrants in the U.S.

There are some limitations to this study that should be addressed in future work. First, given the anonymous nature of the online postings, we were not able to discern the individual characteristics of the mothers we examined in the study. For example, we could not distinguish the extent of the mothers' language barriers, acculturation level, desire for their children's upward mobility, or human capital. In addition, it was impossible to differentiate their labor force participation status, as the burdens of working mothers and stay-at-home mothers might not be uniform, and hence, their coping strategies might differ accordingly. Second, we were unable to include the role of fathers in the discussion. In particular, because a large proportion of fathers have also been working at home during the pandemic, we consider that fathers' direct or indirect involvement with their children's education to have increased significantly. In fact, we were able to witness the involvement of fathers through the mothers' discourse (e.g., “My husband also wants to do this or that…”). However, it was difficult to formulate meaningful interpretations from a few anecdotal notes. An in-depth interview study with both mothers and fathers would be beneficial to complement our findings and provide meaningful comparisons.

Declaration of competing interest

There are no conflicts of interest for this research.