When care responsibilities become overwhelming, reassessing expectations and routines can help. As a graduate student parent explained to this naïve pregnant professor, you need more childcare than you think. And still, my biggest mistake was minimizing hours with my first born, as if all the time when baby was with someone else could be work time. Realistically, that time also includes eating, showering, napping, breast pumping, and expressing any thought to another adult complex enough to require more than one sentence.

When my leave concluded, I still could not focus on research. I found support at our university wide office for research, by using the Faculty Success Program and convening an intervention with women faculty from other schools who understood the challenges of care work. I could be more honest and vulnerable with mentors outside my iSchool who would not be tasked with evaluating my promotion.

After two years of inefficiency, my husband and I abandoned our plan for an in-home nanny and found a daycare with flexible hours. As an easily distracted neurodivergent person, I discovered that I could not focus with children in my house. Even when I commuted to work, I took too long to leave. Gone was my usual practice of writing at home whenever I felt most inspired. I learned to write when I was scheduled to write. To make this work, I developed the habit of writing every morning, away from home, at the time when my brain was sharp. Eventually I felt as uncomfortable about skipping my morning writing as I used to feel about my morning coffee. When the Covid shutdown lifted, our youngest went to a neighborhood nanny share (thank you working parents who offered their home!). My eldest, allergic to zoom, attended an in-person school.

When parents make these decisions about work routines and childcare they often doubt whether they are doing the right thing for themselves or their children. These doubts plague many women in academia for whom professional time norms conflict with social expectations of intense parenting. And while we all have different ideas of what good parenting looks like, there is general consensus that it is probably time consuming and requires overthinking things like what kind of baby bottles to purchase.

But when we treat work and family as mutually exclusive responsibilities, they always seem to be in conflict. In two-parent households, the parent earning a lower salary may have family members who regard their academic work as an eccentric hobby that fulfills a misplaced need for recognition, even though we provide meaningful service to students, to community, and to our families, who benefit from our knowledge and the money we earn. I heard this message whenever extended family asked why I did not live closer to my husband during graduate school, or when I would “focus on family.” Men employed away from home in seasonal fishing or international finance need not defend their work from such accusations because of the cultural value placed on fathers financially supporting family.

Work and family responsibilities are not in conflict. They are interconnected. I always knew that living near my spouse required preparing myself for various kinds of employment by teaching a range of courses and publishing research. This realization helped me to reframe my goals. Workplace accomplishments directly supported our shared goals of living together, traveling together, learning and sharing our lives together.

I published my book in January 2024 and my promotion was approved last week. The writing habits I developed to cope with family responsibilities ultimately enhanced my ability to work effectively. I also learned to pay attention to what I am doing in the moment, so that with few exceptions, I am not placing unrealistic demands on myself to miraculously accomplish work at times when my children expect my undivided attention. And despite my reservations about having children, I found that regular evenings building magnetile castles and nursing my daughter through croup replaced my previous bedtime rituals of doomscrolling and unnecessary ruminating. Although I feared having daughters would make tenure difficult, ultimately, I am not sure I could have succeeded without them.

My academic tenure included two children and a pandemic with rollbacks granted by my university. All faculty must advocate for better child and elder care policies, including automatic tenure extension unless employees opt out. After I suggested this at a university meeting, my university revised our policy, removing the power of school deans to turn down requests without the chancellor’s approval.

But good policies can be circumvented. It is crucial for employees to research policies necessary to their well-being by asking colleagues and seeking written documentation, in case managers or administrators resistant to these benefits fail to advocate for all employees. Finally, make decisions about your work environment and hours based on your actual needs, not on what some aspirational ideal person would need.