June 16

Mothering at Mid-Career: Parenting in the News

By Libby Gruner

This past week there’ve been several articles about balancing work and family that interested me. Scott Jaschik reported on the Irvine study that analyzed academic women’s “quiet desperation” in Inside Higher Ed last Thursday. The same day, a pseudonymous writer in the Chronicle of Higher Ed wrote about being unable to talk about her children in a job interview. Then on Sunday Lisa Belkin’s cover story on shared parenting appeared in the New York Times Magazine. The three pieces focus on different elements of the work-family balance dilemma. Jaschik’s piece reports on an academic study that corroborates, yet again, anecdotal evidence that women academics feel disproportionately burdened by service work, underappreciated for their contributions, and unable to develop workable solutions to their work-family balance problems. The piece by “Na’ema Suleiman” in the Chronicle corroborates the study with further anecdotes and analysis, while Belkin’s piece suggests that equal parenting is still largely a myth, though one that some couples are pursuing more succesfully than others. Taken together, they paint a pretty bleak picture for academics and other professionals (none of the pieces focuses on working-class families, an omission Belkin notes in a follow-up blog). But buried within them is one important truth: as Jaschik notes, structural changes, not individual ones, are the only way to address the imbalances academic (and other) women note. Belkin’s piece corroborates this insight by detailing the difficulties some parents (especially fathers) had securing family-friendly work schedules: the ones who were best able to share their parenting equally were the ones who were able to find work that accommodated their needs. While the article focused on the solutions that the parents had come up with (charts, checklists, schedules, and the like), they were truly secondary to the work schedules that the parents, with the help of their employers, had come up with.

This is a place, of course, where the academy can truly shine. As Rebecca Steinitz’s piece in Mama, PhD, “A Great Place to Have a Baby,” notes, the academy has great potential as a family-friendly workplace. We can often schedule our on-site hours to coincide with children’s school hours, for example; on-site daycare centers can offer employment to students in education or psychology programs as well as caring for faculty and staff children; an occasional child-care crisis can usually be accommodated with a rescheduled class or meeting (or a good supply of paper and pencils and some room in a corner of a classroom). That so far the academy has not yet answered the challenge leaves many women—and men, I’m sure — feeling alienated, frustrated, and stymied, as well as making it harder for the many academic parents to achieve the kind of equal care for their children that they may desire. In my own family, we’ve come close: while I doubt that we’ve ever achieved a 50-50 day or even week, over time we’ve shared parenting and housekeeping in an ever-shifting rotation that — usually — works for us all. One way that’s happened, I have to admit, is that I came into my career as one of the “perennially chatty people” referenced in “Suleiman"’s piece: I freely disclosed my parenting status on my campus visit (one of my recommenders had, I later learned, mentioned it in my recommendation letter as well); I requested — and received — schedules that allowed me to do school or day-care drop-offs and pick-ups as necessary (and within reason, since my husband was able, for many years, to cover the majority of them); I have pictures of my kids—and pieces of their artwork — on the walls of my office. I even shifted the focus of my academic work to fall more in line with my parenting. But we can’t all do that, and the informal accommodations I have been able to negotiate won’t work for everyone, whether because they are temperamentally more taciturn, or their departments are less welcoming, or their own parenting status is less conventional (gay parents and single parents, especially single parents by choice, may have a particularly difficult time of it).

As usual, I don’t have solutions, just questions: how can we make our positions more family-friendly? What would family-friendly mean to you? Why haven’t we made this a priority yet? The parents in Belkin’s piece are creative, thoughtful people — much like the academics I know. Why aren’t we leading the way?

Comments

a small help

I just wanted to mention a policy I am happy to take credit for getting put in place at my institution: we call it the Five Course Option. This allows full time faculty members to reduce their teaching load from 6 to 5 courses at a salary cost of 10%. Being able to do this for the past several years has saved my sanity and that of my family. Of course it is far from a magic bullet because of the cost, especially given that full salary is, well, many of us know about salaries at private higher ed institutions...

Anne Houde, Professor, at 7:45 am EDT on June 17, 2008

Thank You

I don’t have any answers or even suggestions, but I want to thank you for this column/blog. I’m just starting my career in academia and kids aren’t even up for discussion yet, but it’s nice to know there are others out there working to help us all find a balance.

a, at 9:30 am EDT on June 17, 2008

trying to practice and teach?

Like others reading and writing here, I am trying to figure it out as I live it — dual academic career couple with two children, trying to be equal partners. It can be extra effort, sometimes so that falling into traditional gender roles looks easier — the path of least resistance, where we do not have to be creative and talk and make a conscious decision. On the other hand, is that not what it means to be a whole person? Anyway, I wanted to comment on shifting the focus of one’s academic work to fall in line with one’s parenting — and I recognize the myriad ways in which this might not be workable for everyone. However, I taught an undergraduate course on the anthropology of reproduction b/c that is one of my areas of research. It was a great experience for me, and I think for the students — they had so many questions about all the different dimensions of reproduction as an experience (biological, cultural, social, political, etc.) that I feel like I never had answered until I became a parent myself. I got the impression that my students just did not know it was imaginable or allowable anywhere in the world to expect to have a paid family leave. So, it made to start to think that it is important for the students that I am visible as a professor who is a parent, and that I should be teaching material that encourages students to consider what are the possibilities in their own lives. While this does not answer the question of how to make our lives more livable right now, “teaching family-friendly” seems to me part of what we need to do, too.

Sallie, at 2:05 pm EDT on June 17, 2008

Teaching and Modeling “Family Friendly”

I agree with the comment posted regarding teaching “family friendly” in our classrooms. I am a PhD working in a staff position in a counseling center but also serve as adjunct faculty in my psychology department. I taught a grad level seminar recently and my most appreciated comment on the evaluation forms was a comment by a female grad student. The student remarked that one of the most helpful aspects of my course was seeing an example of a female psychologist working full time in a clinical/administrative position, teaching a bit, and yet very focused on being a mother to my 2 small children. The student noted that it was her first example of seeing someone in her intended profession “having the balance” she didn’t think was possible. I was so proud of that comment, more so than any other comment on the evaluations. I think not only what we teach, but what we model day to day, is quite important for change in our institutions over the long run.

Josette, Assistant Director, CAPS at University of Arkansas, at 10:45 am EDT on June 18, 2008

Optimistic

As a mother who began the career journey with an infant in tow (and subsequently let go of said career and the financial perks that went with it because the toll was too much for myself and my family), I am always incredibly impressed by, and feel vast empathy for, parents who are in the throes of the work/life balancing act.

I’m hopeful that in the next decade (it’s already 2008 and things still aren’t perfect, so I can’t be TOO optimistic) employers, corporations, and institutions of higher learning will have figured out how to decrease the misery level by improving the work/life balance for their employees, faculty, staff, etc. I’m taking it as a good sign that the academics are mobilizing in an intelligent, creative, and thoughtful manner.

Alexa, at 6:55 pm EDT on June 18, 2008