Mothers’ Lived Experience of Family Conflicts During the Covid-19 Pandemic

The emergence of the covid-19 resulted in extensive changes in different aspects of family life, led to family conflicts, and significantly influenced interpersonal relationships between family members, including couples and parents-children. On the one hand, family members had the opportunity to spend more time together, and on the other hand, they faced challenges and tensions. Therefore, the present study aimed to understand and describe mothers’ experience of family conflicts during the Covid-19 pandemic. This qualitative study adopted a phenomenological approach to study the topic in depth. The participants comprised 15 mothers in nuclear families, selected by purposive sampling. The data were collected through in-depth unstructured interviews and analyzed sing Colaizzi’s seven-step method. After analyzing the data and categorizing the primary codes, two main themes—couple tensions and parent-child tensions—and six sub-themes—more presence at home, emergence of health sensitivities, conflict in relationships, dependence on the media, uncovering behavioral prohibitions, and involvement with virtual education—were extracted. The results revealed that the Covid-19 crisis affected the well-being of marital and parent-child relationships and increased various conflicts among family members. In addition, with the increase in the presence of all members at home at the beginning of the Pandemic, conflicts were intensified in families and all kinds of family violence spread among members. Therefore, considering the inevitable consequences of Covid-19 on interpersonal relationships and increase in family conflicts, it is recommended to design and plan intervention-support strategies and better understand the needs of family members to raise their awareness and improve marital and parent-child relations.