41–44 of 44 posts
Please do not wear a baby to work. The screaming banshee will prevent your coworkers from getting anything done. If you bring a bring a baby to the office I'm supposed to work in, I will kill you dead. Seriously.
Please do not wear a baby to work. The screaming banshee will prevent your coworkers from getting anything done. If you bring a bring a baby to the office I'm supposed to work in, I will kill you dead. Seriously.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your conclusion is very true. And academia has a way of putting the pressure on the young workforce (until tenure at 40ish) to work long hours for not much money. And while this is true, it is also worth pointing out that many parents don't want to pause their adult/career goals for 3-6 months because of a new baby. I recently had my first child and while she was little (now 10 months) she would sleep/sit on my lap w…
3–10 months is easy enough. But you’ll have to be some kind of superhero to keep doing 4–5 hours of focused work a day with a 2–3 year old climbing on you.
> Fast forward three years to the birth of my second child earlier this year, and I am a senior postdoc and the president of our local babywearing group. I started wearing number 2 to the lab two weeks after she was born, because I was planning to apply for faculty jobs, and I was worried that taking time off would weaken my applications. Nothing to do with baby wearing (which I am a huge proponent of) but this sound…
Author here! The subtext to this piece is that this is really about coping with the fact that grad students and postdocs in the US rarely get much parental leave. My institution offers two paid weeks off following childbirth. There’s FMLA but few grad student and postdocs can afford to take unpaid leave. Postdoc parents get very little support and everybody who does it has to find their own way to manage. On top of t…
I was lucky that when my first was born my institution began a policy of a semester of paid leave for the mother or partner. As others have pointed out though, it seems to have a drawback that partners are more likely to use it for extra research time, which tends to raise tenure standards for everyone, including mothers.
I think the problem is larger than a policy can address. We need a culture change.
And enjoy the baby wearing! Mine are too big now and I miss it dearly.