Calendar

Jessica Calarco 
Associate Professor, Sociology, UW-Madison

Abstract: What explains the moral calm around children and Covid-19—the fact that, even during periods of peak transmission, the majority of US parents perceived little need to protect their children from getting sick and little obligation to protect others from harm that exposure to sick children might cause? We find that moral calms like this one emerge when threats that disproportionately affect members of systematically marginalized groups are filtered through an economic lens. Applied to unequal threats, economic reasoning—which emphasizes individualistic cost-benefit decision-making—turns privilege into a moral hazard, leading more privileged people to believe that fear is not “worth it,” because, for them and the institutions that maintain their privilege, the costs of caution may exceed the costs of under-mitigated risks. Moral calms then perpetuate themselves by leading people who abandon caution to avoid upsetting information. 


In the case of children and Covid-19, for example, our content analyses of 1,000 major newspaper articles reveal that early pandemic messages encouraged parents to weigh the individual costs and benefits of a return to in-person school and childcare while also stressing that, for individual families (particularly young, "healthy," white families) and for the US economy, the benefits of a return to in-person school and childcare would exceed the potential costs. Going a step further, our in-depth interviews with 100 mothers of young children reveal that these messages resonated with many families (particularly young, "healthy," white families) and persuaded them that it was necessary and safe to send their children back to in-person school and childcare, regardless of the potential risks. Mothers who accepted the early reassuring messages about children and Covid-19 also tended to reduce their news consumption over time and particularly during times of peak transmission, to prevent themselves from questioning their decisions to resume children's pre-pandemic routines.