Last night, we were woken twice by a five year who had to use the potty. Both boys were up at 6:00. Steve fed them breakfast and made Jonah’s sandwich. At 7:15, Steve ran to catch the bus. I dressed the kids, finished packing the lunch, and wrote a note to Jonah’s teacher to find out why Jack’s desk was moved far from Jonah. At 8:30, we ran down the block and Jonah boarded the bus. I packed up a diaper bag and head to DMV to register the car. Ian was bribed with donuts as he sat in the stroller. Then over to my parents, where I tried to install Norton anti-virus on dad’s computer. Back home to put Ian down for his nap. Shower. E-mail. Organize papers for tonight’s lecture at Hunter. Baby wakes up. Feed him lunch. Change my outfits two or three times. Pants or skirt? Then my mom arrived at 2:40 and I ran to catch my bus to the city. (Yes, we only run for buses in this house.)
What was the lecture on? Ann Crittenden discussed her latest book, If You’Ve Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything: Leadership Begins at Home, for a small group of faculty around a seminar table. (See this Times article on her.) Crittenden says that mothers/parents/ok, really mostly mothers gain all sorts of skills by parenting that can be translated into management later on. All that multi-tasking and prioritizing that I did before the lecture are the very skills that top managers use.
After her short discription of the book, the discussion was thrown out into the audience. There was some discussion about security moms. And then I raised my hand. All red in the face, I said that instead of just looking at all the barriers mothers face in other places, perhaps we should first examine our own profession. Academia is one of the worst places for mothers. I told them my story. And said that other mothers and academic mothers were discussing these issues on line and we were very angry.
Ann and the other academics were very interested in these on line discussions. They all wanted more information. Everyone handed me a business card. Instead of just giving them links to my posts and to other posts at the Invisible Adjunct. I thought that I would organize a one-time-only one week conversation about these issues on the blog next week and notify these writers and scholars about our discussion. Details will follow.
UPDATE: I’m closing comments on this post, because I want everyone to hold their thoughts until next week.
Apt. 11d 
Hi Laura – I know you said details would follow, but thought I would mention that there’s been some discussion about related academic mom/singles issues at Dr. Crazy, Cheeky Prof (and the 2 subsequent posts), Advice at Your Own Risk, and the cul de sac. There is some complaining about kids in general here (to which I contributed) which I hope no one finds offensive, but it was really striking to me how strongly some people felt that academic parents were getting special privileges by virtue of being parents. I do think that academia is hostile enough to women who want to be parents that it’s incumbent on feminists to make sure that it’s “family friendly,” and yet while most of these authors would consider themselves feminist, they were unsympathetic to the parent thing. (I should point out, too, that I’ve never been asked to put myself out for the benefit of someone’s parenting, so that may color my perspective.)
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Thanks, New Kid, for the links. I’ll check them out and ask the bloggers to participate in the conversation next week. But don’t say anything good right now. Save it for next week.
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Hello Laura,
I am a assoc. prof. with three children, a 6 yr old, and two 2 yr olds. I managed this in part by choosing to work in a lower-ranked school with limited requirements for research, and while I don’t have the best students, and I don’t get to teach upper-division courses because we don’t have a major program in philosophy, my subject, it has worked out well for me. I managed to stay on the East Coast, and my job is at a state-owned institution, so I receive reasonable pay compared to some lower-ranked institutions, and I am getting to do what I set out to do.
Much of the time before tenure, though, I in effect “pretended” I didn’t have children by taking on as many responsibilities as I could. Occasionally, someone would indicate their expectation that I wouldn’t be able to do this or that because I had kids; a Vice Chair of a committee of which I was Chair said that she would surely be doing much of the work because I had 2 babies. Actually, I never missed a meeting and she missed several. Obviously, I felt I had something to prove; or that I couldn’t let anything slide at all. Contrary to some of the writers in the links listed above (from New Kid on the Hallway) I find it difficult to believe that any untenured mothers would feel otherwise, and I am sure they are doing more than what is necessary to prove that they are doing the same as everyone else. The insecurity of the untenured position is such that one simply must at least seem to be sacrificing oneself to the goal of tenure. Perhaps tenured parents act otherwise–but don’t tenured faculty often have a myriad of reasons for not attending meetings, including pure whim? Are parents the worst offenders here? (What about people doing research that simply can’t break away from it to do anything else, although the research never comes to fruition? Those faculty who simple disappear without any explanation at all? Those near retirement who have no future investment in the institution and put no effort into it? These are all types I have encountered–not the majority, but they are there).
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Sorry to go on and on, but a few more points re the posts linked to by New Kid on the Hallway:
1) Some childfree advocates seem to have broader goals than simply not having children themselves; they seem to feel “entitled” to live in a world in which children are invisible, nobody ever talks about them, and it is as if they do not exist–at least not in the public sphere. I fail to see how they are not victims of the entitlement trend as much as anyone is. One of the posters states that parents should not take their children on planes–what, nobody with children is allowed to attend a family funeral? Go on vacation? Some of the childfree proponents go beyond stating expectations for their own lives: they show their contempt for children with everything they say, the kind of contempt which if applied to most groups in society would be considered quite offensive.
2) The posters seem to assume that children today are being raised in some horrible fashion and that’s why they’re misbehaving in restaurants and the like. I too teach college students who can be quite rude sometimes, and I’m fairly sure that they are worse than the fairly distant past (although if I were less civil I might include the mean-spiritedness of much of the “childfree” movement and its proponents of adult entitlement to the bad child care practices of the last thirty-forty years), but I don’t think we should go too far with this. When I was a child, my parents were concerned that we were becoming too difficult so they bought a book which was popular at the time: Children, The Challenge (which I hear is being reissued). I decided to read it at the time to see what my parents were up to, and I liked it then and it became my book. I still have it. The first chapter, “Our Present Dilemma,” written in the early 60’s, raises all the same issues. “On every side and in every gathering, children make themselves intrusive and act obnoxiously”; “in restaurants, children often display deplorable manners.” Have things really become much worse with regard to young children and toddlers? I myself am not sure. There is a certain amount of misbehavior in this group that is only eliminable through time–getting older, learning with difficulty how to control oneself. I think many of the childfree are simply unaware that children are in process; they are learning how to behave, and on the way to learning how they will misbehave on occasion.
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Laura, this sounds like a great idea. If participation is open invitation, count me in. Either way, I’ll be interested to read what everyone contributes.
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