Comments on ABCs and PhDs: Meeting expectations?

• Posted by Anne on March 4, 2009 at 7:00am EST

• Not only should you not feel bad about the choice you made, you should remember that it's not necessarily forever. As your children age, you may find it's possible to step back into a work environment, whether full- or part-time, should you choose to. Even if it's not academia, it may be something that uses your skills and expertise. I know someone who left a challenging post-doc position in biology to follow her husband and raise children full-time. Today, her children in college, she is a top executive at a science-textbook company. So you not only have the joy of being with your children now, you have the pleasure of knowing you can change that if you want to someday.

• Posted by ngodsgrace on March 4, 2009 at 8:45am EST

• Enjoy these moments because you will never get them back again with your children. My children are older now and I am just starting my doctoral studies and I am really glad I waited. Although I have worked for years and gone to graduate school for my masters, it was important to maintain time for my children to see things and be a part of their growing up phase. I did miss some of that when my daughter was coming up, and part of me regrets it, because there are special moments in her life that she or my sister or my mom or my husband remembers, that I was too busy with graduate school or working long hours to remember. I made the decision to change that and I am so glad I did. My son is now 16 and enjoys all the moments we share, his musical performances I attend cheering on the sidelines and video-taping, as well as just being available to listen to him. It is priceless!

  You are doing the right thing and I promise you, you will remember this and it will have so much value for you when your children get older and say, "remember when I did this and that?" You will be able to hold your head up proudly and say, "Ah yes!"

  You are doing a great job momma!!

• Not either or
• Posted by Suzanne on March 4, 2009 at 9:15am EST

• Your decision does not require justification. You changed careers, that's it, and people do it all the time. However, you should understand that people who invested time and energy into you when you were following one track will be disappointed or confused by your decision to abandon it. It is human nature. I am sure they don't mean to make you feel bad. But in their own way they made an investment in you. You do not owe them anything -- nor do they think you do, but their feelings are completely understandable.

• Posted by lcl on March 4, 2009 at 9:30am EST

• Somewhat jokingly you might say that observing your children "in the wild" isn't all that far off-base from a career in biology/natural history anyway.

  That said, as someone who has stayed on the "traditional career track" but is helping my spouse to get off it, it's definitely the case that we can find other things in our life that become more interesting than the career we spent years training for. For you, for now, your children are providing that spark. And while you never outright say it, there certainly is a gendered element to the issue of leaving one's career to 'be a homemaker.'

  Barbara Kingsolver makes an interesting observation in the same vein in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. While she was not the first to raise the point she raises, she has now perhaps said it best.

• Posted by Juli on March 4, 2009 at 10:15am EST

• The important part is that you made the choice to do what you wanted to do. No one should judge the decision as long as it was yours. If this what works best for you and your family, you should absolutely not feel like you let anyone down!

• Posted by Plates in the air on March 4, 2009 at 12:45pm EST

• I’ve read with interest for nearly a year the postings on Mama PhD. I am a single mother of a teenage daughter. I am also a professor of biology and curator at a centrally located land grant university. I initially was drawn to the blogs of the coterie of ‘biologist moms,’ Liz Stockwell, Dana Campbell, and Susan Bassow but quickly lost interest in their repeated blogging about why they chose to leave academia and biological research to become stay-at-home moms. Instead, I found myself identifying more with Anjalee Deshpande Nadkarni, theatre professor, Libby Gruner, English professor, and more recently, Rosemarie Emanuele, mathematics professor. These three female faculty members write about experiences much more like my own than do my colleagues in the biological sciences.
  Although I’ve been tempted to comment before, it was today’s post by Liz Stockwell that finally pushes me to write. When I first started reading Mama PhD, I had hoped to learn how these scientists really had balanced the demands of publishing, finding that elusive federal grant, field work, teaching schedules, graduate student mentoring, parent teacher conferences, shuttling among riding lessons, Odyssey of the Mind meetings, and doctor’s appointments, chaperoning spring semiformal, and just getting supper on the table and the laundry done. Instead I learned that they all had opted out. None of them were even trying to keep all these plates in the air at the same time.
  As I looked through the list of participants in Mama PhD, I realized that, not only were there no biologists who held academic appointments on the list, there were no chemists, physicists, environmental scientists, agricultural scientists, or engineers on the list either. This observation led me to wonder if the three scientists on the panel had all left their professions to become stay-at-home moms because of their lack of ability to balance or if it was more indicative of the state of the natural and physical sciences in academia.
  Liz, Dana, and Susan—please know that I have been jealous of your opportunities to leisurely explore tidal pools with your children or be the science mom in their elementary classroom. And I have been jealous of your luxury of depending on someone else’s job to pay the mortgage, doctor, and utility bills. But I also have come to believe that your decisions to leave academia or not seek academic appointments as your husbands’ built their own careers is more indicative of academic failing than any collective failing on your parts.
  Within my own department, I see male faculty members who are single, married to professional women but without children, married to women who work only part time or who stay at home, and a minority who are married to women who work full time and raise families. The considerably fewer female faculty members either have no children or, like me, are single parents really struggling to keep those plates in the air. Success (read tenure, promotion, and reasonable raises) as an academic scientist still is predicated on the assumption that the scientist will be able to devote almost all of his/her mental focus and time (including at least some nights and weekends) to the profession while someone else (let’s just say it—the wife) takes care of most of the personal/familial aspects of life. I don’t think that the majority of young male or female scientists want it to be this way, but when people like Liz, Dana, and Susan do leave the discipline they help maintain the status quo. Recent concepts such as slowing the tenure clock, while sounding good, haven’t been successful or broadly applied, and they are irrelevant in helping balance multiple spheres of life beyond tenure. If we cannot find ways to make the scientific academic disciplines more amiable to people who want to lead fully integrated family lives, we will continue to loose talented scientists like Liz, Dana, and Susan and more and more of their equally talented male colleagues, too.
  Repeatedly, I’ve read the ABCs and PhDs: Biologists at Home blogs hoping to see any one of them say, “I miss it, I really miss it. I didn’t really want to leave it, I want to keep doing research and publishing, but the way things are now it’s next to impossible, and I want the system to change.” Even if they don’t, and even as I read all the comments affirming Liz’s decision to leave the system, I’ll keep aiming for those changes that really do support balance.

• Nothing more important than your children
• Posted by James Morgan on March 4, 2009 at 12:45pm EST

• No reason to feel bad about prioritizing in your life. There is nothing more important than your children - some people are simply a bit "slow" about understanding this.

• Plates in the air
• Posted by Suzanne , Director of Publications at Clarkson University on March 5, 2009 at 8:45am EST

• I think the commentor under Plates in the Air says beautifully what I have felt in reading these blogs. What is exactly the reason for this blog if not to discuss juggling and managing family and academic career? The struggles faced by you all are the same for women in any professional position. I work full time at a university overseeing a department of seven people. I am working on my graduate degree and I have four children ages 16-4. I am currently coaching an Odyssey of the Mind team (my 12-year old son's team - competition is Saturday- wish us luck, we need it!). My 16-year old is learning to drive. My 8-year-old and 4-year old still need lots of mom time. I have an aging poodle who is no longer housebroken and an aging mother who requires assistance and time. (I am married to a history professor.) There are days when I cannot manage it and think WHAT WAS I THINKING? One thing I have noticed that disturbes me is that in our academic community a number of women who have PhDs and are very, very talented stay home with their kids and only occassionally do a little adjunct work. Recently two of these couples we know have decided to get divorced and these women are in dire straits! Two separate households living on a humanties professor's salary? They aren't going to get a tenure-track job, that ship has sailed. They can't even leave the area. They are making less than $10,000 a year.

  Shouldn't women protect themselves? For those of you who left the work world, are you worried about what happens if your spouse dies or you end up divorced? What will you do? Do you have a Plan B?

• Children are the most important plates in the air!
• Posted by Anonymous Mama PhD on March 5, 2009 at 12:15pm EST

• I agree whole-heartedly with James Morgan that there is nothing more important than your children.   What would the commenter, Suzanne, do if her 16-year-old gets arrested for drunk driving, her 12-year-old is caught smoking pot, her younger children struggle with reading.  These would be wake-up calls that the children need more attention and time.  Yes, women should protect themselves (it is called life insurance in the case of a spouse's death), but children totally depend on their parents for care, support, love, and time!  Children look to their parents as role models -- I'd rather model a balanced life to my children, rather than model a total focus on an all-consuming, high-paying job (or for that matter, an all-consuming, low-paying, academic job.)

  Plates in the Air suggests:," ...when people like Liz, Dana, and Susan do leave the discipline they help maintain the status quo."    Liz, Dana, and Susan did not leave academic jobs to promote a "backwards" women-belong-at-home type of mentality; but rather they chose to prioritize their children and family over their personal pursuit of their own academic positions while their children are young.  They are not meant to represent the whole population of female biologists or scientists, but rather represent an option for academic mamas.  They chose to place some plates on the ground, to ensure the children's  plates remain in the air.  Sometimes it takes a scary "wake-up" call (like your child struggling or making poor choices) to shift priorities from a focus on career to a focus on family.  Life is short.  Enjoy life and stress less.

• Not criticizing stay at home moms!
• Posted by Suzanne , Director of Publications at Clarkson University on March 5, 2009 at 1:30pm EST

• I was not cricizing stay-at-home mothers -- I am asking if there is any concern about what people will do if their husband who supports the family dies or leaves. I see it as a terrible problem in this acadmic community where I live: single moms with little bread-earning power who have a great deal of education but who have been so long out of the market that they are not particularly employable. Just this fall my friend Katrina -- who adjuncts for about $9,000 a year and has three kids. Her associate professor husband got a job in England in October and told her he was going - alone. She and the kids were not coming. This means poverty for her and her children. Two households on an english professor's salary? They were already strapped. She now has to go back to school to get a teaching certificate so she can teach in public school. She never saw it coming. No one does. But women and children are the two groups most impoverished groups in America. Shouldn't we look out for ourselves?

  For Anonymous Mom: My mom was a stay at home mom and my siblings and I all did drugs, got drunk and even wrecked a couple of cars -- so, should I add, did everyone I know. This was 70s/early 80s upper-middle suburban America. All stay-at-home moms. I am not aware of any statistical relationship between working moms and substance abuse. My kids have lots of problems -- I handle them the same as a stay-at-home mom: research the problem, contact a professional and work on it with the child and other members of the family as needed.

• I agree with Anonymous Mama PhD ;)
• Posted by James Morgan , Professor, CIS on March 11, 2009 at 5:00pm EDT

• I agree with Anonymous Mama PhD agreeing with me. ;)

  As a brother, I have four sisters - all reasonably successful career women - all now in their late 40's and 50's - and all but one childless and all miserable about their life situation - and all with low self esteem in this area. Further, their circle of professional peers tends towards the same description. The only good news about this is that they can't do enough for their neices and nephews - which is little compensation for the angst and despair that is a daily part of their lives - for the rest of their lives. A public observation was made that: "You will never find yourself in life regreting the dept. meeting missed, the papers not graded, the grant not landed, sales quota not fulfilled, etc. You will regret the missed opportunities to be with your children."

  Danille Crittenden's work "What Out Mothers Never Told Us" captures very neatly the angst of "Is work really more important and fulfilling than raising my children?" Our children, and the time we choose to spend with them, are the most important things we will do.