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Tips for first-time parents in academia?

It's been a while since I've posted personally asking for tips or advice. In part, this is because I've had no time! Last year, just before the start of the academic year, my spouse and I welcomed our first child into the world. It's been an incredible experience, indeed transformative in all of the ways that L.A. Paul's work explores–and in the best ways imaginable (I love being a father!). But, of course, it's also been profoundly challenging, in ways both expected and unexpected.

Anyway, I had sort of meant to post something last year asking for tips, but was never able to get around to it–and in any case my own experience is that there are kind of just several things one has to do the first year: survive, keep the baby happy and alive, and be as good, fair, and helpful of a partner as possible to your partner if you have one (especially when they are the birth parent). Now that summer has rolled around and things have settled down a bit, however, I'd really like to ask readers for tips/advice relating to parenthood in academia beyond the first year.

Honestly, I'm not even sure what the right questions to ask are. What I do know is that becoming a parent has (as it were) "changed everything"–so I'm curious to hear from other parents, particularly those in academic jobs, how it's changed their lives and priorities, how they balance everything, what it takes to be a good parent and partner (including being a good father and husband, given gender dynamics), etc. I could go on, and on (I also have questions related to being an older parent, as my spouse and I waited many years to have a child). But really I expect other people who've been parents in academia know far better than I do which questions and challenges I'm likely to face going forward, so I'd love to hear from anyone who thinks they may have helpful tips or perspective to share.

We did have a thread on tips for parents on the tenure-track a while back (a lot of which emphasized the importance of daycare, which we've been fortunate to find), but I'd really be grateful to hear more from those in the know!

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17 responses to “Tips for first-time parents in academia?”

  1. anon

    I’m a graduate student with three kids, so I don’t have an academic job. Nonetheless, if I can give you one piece of advice, it’s to make sure you and your partner are on the same page about the distribution of labor.
    The nature of our work is open-ended and can swallow up our time if we aren’t careful. When you factor in a child, the stakes for getting this wrong are even higher. So, try to be very clear about expectations for childcare, where your attention should be focused when you are off the academic clock (so to speak), and the like.

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  2. Michel

    Congratulations!
    I think a lot depends on your childcare situation. We have none, so we split days between us (and alternate the chunk of day). I do most of my work while the toddler naps (he’s three, still naps for 2-3 hours a day). That means that I work every day, though not necessarily much. I do a bit of research first (I aim for one small, easy task, e.g. write 150 words, read ten pages, etc.), then move to teaching-related tasks. I return to research if there’s time. I also do what work I can during my commute/office hours/etc. So, apart from the nap, I try not to take work home at all.
    FWIW, I still manage to publish quite a bit, and teach 8+ a year. (Granted, some of those are still online.) But I cut corners to spend more time with the toddler.

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  3. secondary career

    Big congrats! I’m a parent of two in a TT (had both during postdocs, very open to having more). I want to stress what anon says above about the distribution of labor, because one thing that’s really hit home for me is that work-life balance of your partner–if you have one–makes a huge difference to your experience. My spouse has a “normal” corporate job, with long hours, regular travel, etc. This means that I am the primary caregiver and pretty much fully responsible for the kids when we don’t have childcare. So my situation is very different from someone who has a stay-at-home partner, which will be different from someone with an academic partner, which will be different from someone with a non-academic-but-still-flexible-job partner. One way to frame this is to ask whether, in your household, yours is the primary career, secondary career, or equal to your partner’s. This doesn’t mean which career is more valuable or worthy in some moral sense. Rather, if your kid gets sick and has to come home early from school, is there an obvious answer to who usually goes and picks them up, or is it a coin flip? Once you determine this, it will be easier to figure out how to use this to your advantage without overly comparing your situation to others’.
    I wish I had really sat with this earlier because it can be hard not to feel resentful if you, like me, are a secondary-career academic parent who primarily interacts with academic parents (of all genders) in primary-career or equal-career situations. It’s helped me reflect on the positives of my situation, like the greater financial security and childcare that a non-academic partner affords me (which people who are primary-career academics might in turn feel resentful about!). All of this to say, parenting in academia is not a monolith, and I think your partner’s situation is going to make more of a difference than even whether you are the birthing parent (which I was). I feel like I really had to work through all of this before I could really enjoy both academia and parenthood, as I very much do now.
    One more thought, especially if you are that secondary-career person: figure out your childcare situation BEFORE you give birth. It will be so, so much harder to do that once you’re also caring for the baby.

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  4. grymes

    I just want to echo “secondary career”’s wise advice. I was the primary-career parent while my spouse was in grad school training for their non-academic career, and am now very much the secondary-career parent. That transition was hard, but it became a lot easier once we started to talk explicitly about it (though the “primary/secondary career” language is new to me).

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  5. No Compromise

    Been there, and luckily it worked out. From my experience, the most important thing is to protect and prioritize your relationship with your partner, including making absolutely sure that neither of you slips into a role (secondary this, or primary that) there is any chance of regretting, even subconsciously, even 10 years later. One way to ensure this is not to have anybody at any point be secondary in either career or parenting. That can be tough – but definitely possible. Don’t believe anyone who says it isn’t.

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  6. ac parent

    Congratulations!
    The best advice I have received was to think of care work as a break from academic work and vice versa. But also to remember to get breaks from both since they are exhausting in their own unique ways.
    On a practical level, I would advice to plan for everyone getting sick a lot. I have buffer sessions in my syllables to account for sick days. I list them as “final discussion”, “discussion of term papers” etc. I also write in the syllabus that sessions might go online at last minute notice and put in the zoom link.

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  7. academic migrant

    I had to tone down a lot of what made my phd fun, i.e. dinner, drinks, travel to conferences, etc. (Had the kids at the end of the phd and when I didn’t have a stable academic job, but don’t ask why.) These activities will burden one’s partner. I also had to get significantly better at time management, as kids don’t care too much about one’s deadlines.

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  8. Elizabeth

    Don’t assume, like I did, that you can do any academic work while your baby is awake. I had this idea that I would put him in a playpen with toys and write. Then my baby came out clingy and impossible to put down.
    Michel above says his family has no childcare. I would strongly urge you not to do this if at all possible. I had a 14m old during COVID when daycares shut down and it was very very difficult to do anything beyond the absolute essentials. Sounds like Michel may be better than I was, but you never know until you have the baby adn I wouldn’t want to be in a spot without childcare.

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  9. grymes

    Just to briefly reply to “No Compromise”: I’m sure it’s possible for some co-parents to balance career-duties and parenting-duties and housework-duties (etc.) more or less perfectly between partners, and I’m sure that that’s the best arrangement for some people. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise (and I’m sure “secondary career” didn’t either). But I’m also sure that (due to a whole complex array of variables) both me and my partner are happier with our arrangement–in which I am clearly the secondary-career person–than we would be if we tried for an even split. A thoughtful compromise has worked out great for us! (For what it’s worth, I’m male and my spouse is female.)
    In any case, we agree that what’s important is making sure you and your partner work together to find an explicit arrangement that nobody will regret.

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  10. G

    Each parent is a unique person and has a unique relationship with their kid(s). So, everything said here is just personal opinions.
    It is easy to guess who have kid(s) and who do not based on their social media posts. Why? Those who often travel to conferences, attend workshops, have academic vacations, hang out with friends – I can almost be sure that they do not have kids.
    Having a kid is more than a full time job because a kid requires people’s attention 24/7. Even when they are asleep, you need to be ready to wake up and do things. Of course, that they require attention does not mean that they require your attention, and that’s why people who have money can hire baby-sitters, send kids to daycare and nursery school at a very young age, and send kids to all kinds of summer camps.
    So, you need to make a decision. Do you want to keep more of your own time and let others pay attention to your kids, or do you want to do it yourself? The former needs money, and the latter eats your own time. Some of my friends chose the former. Basically, their kids have been away during the day since they were very young, as early as a few months old. Nursery schools next, and then K-12. Consequently, their working time is not too disturbed, and they maintain good records of productivity. Having a kid makes a difference only to their life after work.
    My partner and I chose to spend more time with our kid, partly because we did not have money. So, my day was filled with childcare and required work such as teaching, advising, etc. I have not had any substantive research done for 3-4 years (until my kid started pre-K in a public school), and conference trips were impossible unless our family went together (there was no way for my partner to handle everything by themselves).
    I have nothing to complaint. I feel lucky that I am working at a teaching-oriented school with reasonable tenure standards. Personally, I do not like the kind of parenting that entails sending kids to other people’s hands at their very young ages in order to have more time for work. But that’s my own thought and there is no right/wrong here.

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  11. Jules

    This isn’t so much about the parenting side as about the academic side, but I think that if one is a parent in a secure academic position, there are strong reasons to be quite assertive about the adjustments that are needed (e.g. having teaching and meetings and research events scheduled within childcare hours (if you have childcare!), normalising the usual disruptions that having children brings, pushing back against tight deadlines that assume one can work weekends, evenings and holidays etc.) I think changing the norms from a secure position can make academia a more friendly place to be a parent, an easier place to be a parent for those in less secure positions, and support gender equity.
    On the parent side, I echo the things said above about dialling down on the conference and workshop trips I do now. I do less, but the ones I do I really relish! And look forward to getting back to my kids after, of course. I think in general I take on less now, knowing that I just won’t get as much done. As the kids have got older (still small-ish but at school now) I find the combination of long term poor sleep and the various kid things to juggle means I can’t task switch very easily either, I’m just too cognitively overloaded. But I procrastinate less, because time is so precious 🙂
    By the way I really like the gender inclusive language (‘birthing parent’) you use in the post!

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  12. No Compromise

    Grymes,
    Sorry if I came off too…uncompromising (it is my name, after all). What I meant was that you shouldn’t move from sameness to complementary, but different, roles IF there’s a risk of resenting it later. But different couples are different, and some are perfectly capable of being happy, or at least not regretful, with an arrangement of primaries and secondaries.
    Why, then, bother to emphasize this instead of just saying “Do what’s right for you”? Because, at least in my experience, the loud, chaotic, sleepless, messy, tightrope walking newborn parenting time, though wonderful, poses a high risk of bad thinking and especially bad communicating. The temptation to give in to a planned division of labor that feels good enough at the moment will be really high. So there’s a very real risk of mistake about oneself or one’s partner and the willingness to be secondary or primary. And getting this wrong can be hard to reverse and painful in the long run.
    Or so it seems to me.

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  13. 2 kids

    Congratulations on the new baby! I have a toddler and a preschooler now, both of which I had while on the tenure track. The biggest adjustment when having kids as an academic, I think, is the fact that pre-kids we are used to doing these big pushes: spending way too much time grading for a few weeks in the middle or end of term, or spending way too much time writing for a few weeks to meet a deadline. But what young children need from their parents is consistent, reliable, fully present interaction. So I’ve broken the habit of working through the evenings and weekends when things get busy. To make this possible, I would suggest: being especially careful about scheduling assignments for your courses to avoid too much grading all at once, committing to telling all referee requests or R&Rs that come in during a term that you’ll need a deadline several weeks after the term ends, and more broadly not committing to writing deadlines that will require doing a lot of writing during a term. I also used to, pre-kids, limit the time I spent on course prep by just giving myself the 2 hours before the course began to prep, but I’ve had to stop that strategy because young kids get sent home sick so often. So I plan my schedule so that all teaching prep is completed one day before the class itself happens, which then allows me to pivot to watching a kid during all non-teaching hours of any given day, if needed. And I second the suggestion above to always plan some easily cancellable days in all syllabi. I always have the last meeting or two as “TBD” on the syllabus, and I also have a plan about which other reading would be easiest to cut while still teaching an adequate course. Oh, and I try to take on service assignments that can at least be partially done outside of the semester (like organizing colloquia), to take some additional pressure off semesters. Good luck! It was a tricky transition (partly due to pandemic things too) but life is really good now.

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  14. 2 kids

    Oh, and one more thing: like an earlier poster, I have benefited from the strategy of treating academic work as a break from care work and vice versa. But if using that strategy means you don’t have any actual breaks or personal time (which was my situation at the time), then it is best used as just a coping mechanism for tough times. It will lead to burnout on both kinds of work if you rely on it for more than a year or two. You and your partner each still need personal time and real breaks, which might not be possible much for a couple of years but then can hopefully be built in again, as it has been for me.

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  15. grymes

    No Compromise: all good; I totally agree with everything you say in your second post.

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  16. Charlotte Duffee

    I had the same questions and so now ask them publicly to scholars who I interview on my Substack for parent-scholars: https://anscombesjuggle.substack.com/
    There’s a new episode coming out in August with Jason Brennan, who is excellent on these questions. I encourage you to read everything of his. For starters:
    https://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2019/09/achieving-a-good-work-life-balance.html
    https://dailynous.com/2016/11/10/productive-publishing-guest-post-jason-brennan/

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  17. AP

    Congrats!! A colleague told me that as you find a routine things will start to change. I found this to be especially true with my now 2.5 year old. My kid’s napping, feeding, and playing/learning schedule has changed a lot within the last couple years. I also found it helpful to take my kid with me on runs or do exercise at home with them (i.e., I try include them in any task I can like cooking, cleaning, etc). Busytoddler.com has some great activities for the little one’s in the ‘taby’ phase. familymath.stanford.edu/ has some cool math kits and generally good advice for family “math moments.” Kidseatincolor.com is decent for picky eaters.

    Reply

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