Krisenthemen in Familien zu Beginn der COVID-19-Pandemie: „Homeoffice mit Kindern ist wie Zähneputzen mit Nutella“

During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in Germany, families with children, in particular, were faced with a huge challenge. Over the course of time the first lockdown seemed striking, as the differentiated family life was practically exclusively concentrated on the domestic environment and educational and care facilities were closed. The curtailing of the public infrastructure is defined here as the core crisis phenomenon for families. The focus of this article is on the evaluation of 5075 comments from the online questionnaire on the study “KiCo—Children, parents and their experiences during the corona pandemic”, in which over 25,000 parents with children under 15 years old participated in April and May 2020. The comments are mostly from mothers aged 30–50 years old, the majority of whom were working from home at the time of the survey and had 1–2 children. Based on the comments, it could be reconstructed how the crisis experience was dealt with and how the narrative of the crisis was referred to in the first 2 months of the pandemic in Germany. The following categories could be identified: the duration of the crisis (time), crisis as a chance for change in society, the crisis of democracy, crisis as a chance for the family and the sufferers of the crisis.