There’s never a convenient time to have children: Academia and Family, can they be balanced?

A friend once told us “There’s a never a good time to have children, they’ll always cock up your life”. Inspired by a seminar at work about balancing academia and family life, I wanted to think about my own experience.

Timing

Academia is inherently unstable as a job, especially at the early stages of the career when you are most likely to have children. It doesn’t get much better the higher up the ivory tower you climb, the good old days of tenured professors sitting in their rooms drinking sherry are sadly long gone, but it is certainly at the most acute at the post doc level. Short term contracts, highly competitive fields and shrinking research budgets all contribute to this lack of job security. The received wisdom given these circumstances is to wait until both partners are in ‘permanent’ positions. In our case, we decided on balance that we would regret not having children more than not winning the Nobel Prize (though I still have my eye on it). Even within the normal bounds of academic instability, our situation at the time we chose to have children was not ideal. I had less than a year on my contract and my wife less than 2. However, in a roundabout way, having children has actually led to greater job security for both of us. Yes, we are no longer able to work the mythical 60 hour week, but it turns out this doesn’t matter as much as pushy supervisors might claim. If you do 60 hour weeks, you probably get more done, but probably not as much as twice as much and arguably (though this may just be self-delusion) in the creative process of science, and science is creative, less is more. Clearing the mind, changing space, doing something else, all enable inspirations. The rare flashes of genius I have don’t usually occur while staring at the screen for hours on end, rather they occur in the bath, whilst at gigs, after a 5 minute power nap at my desk or while running. A 60 hour week is only more effective if you actually spend the 60 hours doing work, having children has a focussing effect on the mind – if you know you have 10 vital things to do before 5 pm you are much more likely to do them than if you have 5 things to do but have until 10pm – I may no longer be as up to date with what the latest vacuous celebrity clothes horse du jour is doing or what animal I would be on buzzfeed, but I probably get more done these days.

Most of all I would like to thank my family

So how did my children help me get ahead in science? Beyond focussing the mind, my son directly contributed to me getting my lectureship. I work on severe respiratory infections in children and when he was 6 months old, my son decided that the way to celebrate our first holiday would be to get a severe respiratory infection. Now it would be nice to claim that this inspired me, seeing the impact on the infant and the emotional stress to the parents. The truth, however, is a bit more prosaic. As normal when going on holiday I had brought with me some token work to pretend I am going to get some done, in this case, a talk for my lectureship interview. Normally, this would sit quietly in my bag, in the boot of the car for the whole time, untouched. This time because we were stuck in a hospital room for 5 days (and once the very worst had passed – I am not a total monster), I ended up practicing and re-practicing my presentation in front of my wife. This was a tough crowd as my wife is the person I find it hardest to take work criticism from (I avoid drilling down too far into what that says about my fragile ego). But at the end of the hospital-room presentation boot camp I delivered my most polished talk, I actually knew what slides were coming next and for once didn’t have a slight feeling of surprise as to the order the talk was in. I don’t know how much this contributed to me getting the job, but it probably didn’t hurt matters.

Everyone has bad days

The other issue around timing is that children or not, life will occasionally give you a bum deal and certainly when these times occur on the back of the chronic sleep deprivation that is a cornerstone of parenting they can feel insurmountable. But not talking about them and stoically suffering on is not the solution. We had our year with 2 job changes, 2 house moves, cancer, new school, new nanny and 3 months of a recurring sleep disrupting staph infection during the worst winter for 15 years. I put this in not as a one-downmanship/ Monty Python you were lucky I had to sleep on street and eat nowt but coal tale, but rather to show that everyone has bad times and everyone comes through the other side more or less unscathed. I accept this is a bit preachy – but I am lifting this from a ‘motivational’ talk I had to give at work: do you feel motivated?

We want to be together

There are a huge number of considerations the parent staying at home has to weigh up. It is a sad but true to say that as a society we are not at the stage where the father has to make the decision whether to stay home. The single piece of dialogue directed at me in the course of an hour during a library stay and play when my son was young was: “Ooh , hairy knees we don’t often see those, thus reaffirming this gender bias and confirming my lack of desire to be a stay at home dad. The decision for my wife to continue working was down to her but fully supported by me, fortunately it was also my preference. My personal experience therefore comes from how to best manage parenthood as an equal partnership. We think we have some tips that have helped:       

1. Compartmentalise. Guilt is a wasted emotion. To quote a senior professor – you’ll end up feeling guilty when you’re at home for not doing enough work and feeling guilty at work for not being at home enough. However, this guilt gets you nowhere. I am lucky, most of the time I am totally absorbed in the present so when I shut the door the children cease to exist to me until the walk home from the station.
2. Who is doing the most important/ client facing work right now? Children get sick. Often. At these times one of you has to drop everything and go and get them. We have borrowed a friend’s model of whoever is earning the most money/ business that minute gets to stay at work. (Though you can game this a bit by keeping your phone off – don’t tell my wife!). 
3. Be a kept man. Having 2 full salaries is amazing, even with the massive childcare bills. The peace of mind that if it all goes tits up the other person can pay the mortgage takes a lot of the stress of the job away allowing more creative thinking. Furthermore, we have noticed that after taking a dip during the early years, my wife’s salary is now (very nearly) exceeding mine.
4. Outsource. The majority of child raising is boring and repetitive. I thoroughly recommend working hard to pay for someone else to do this. No one will ever remember how well you did or didn’t do the washing up or how clean the toilet was. 168 hours is a life changing book and we invest some of the time we get back from not cleaning in being better parents, scientists and people, admittedly some of it goes into binge watching the wire. We also get to congratulate ourselves for contributing to the economy, reinvesting our earnings in someone else’s salary (and tax)!

Vague take home message

Children are a fun, dynamic force for change in your life, each year will be nothing like the last and the future is unpredictable. Yes, you occasionally have to sit through class 3S performing a cover of cotton eyed Joe and sit there watching the clock as you have a grants meeting in 60 minutes time for which you have done no preparation. But I think I am (probably) a better, happier, more empathetic boss for having children and a wife who works full time.