Anecdotal Evidence about Kids in Grad School

At the beginning of last semester, a new graduate student asked me about my experience of having kids while in graduate school. This is an issue that the Cocoon touched on before [here here and here, but I thought I would share with you all what I shared with her. My goal in this post is not to argue that it is best to have kids during graduate school, but rather to point out that having kids in graduate school has worked out very well for my family. I hope others can add their thoughts.

My wife and I knew that we would, in all likelihood, have at least one kid before I left grad school. We wanted to have kids while we were young, and (as such) waiting until I had my dream job did not seem realistic. We had our first kid at the end of the second year of my PhD and our second halfway through my fourth year. My kids are now two and a half and one.

I was worried that my department would not be understanding—that my committee would think I was not serious about working in philosophy. Nothing could have been further from the truth. My supervisor dropped a crib off at my apartment, which we are still using, and told me to reach out to him if we needed meals when the baby came. I had great conversations about the pros and cons of doing home versus hospital birth with both graduate students and professors. These conversations assuaged a lot of my worries about home birth, which was my wife’s preferred plan.

York University (where I am doing my PhD) allows graduate students a great deal of flexibility in how much time they take off. I chose to take 12 weeks of paid leave (our semester is only 14 weeks). I still worked on my dissertation and attended department talks, but I considered myself working ‘half-time.’ [If you are applying to graduate school, it may be worth finding out how parental leave works in your prospective department].

For the most part, I work at home, and so I am around the kids a lot. This is a big plus. When the kids are being crazy, I walk down the street to a coffee shop. My family eats dinner at 5:30 and the kids go to bed at 7. This time is sacred, but I can always do some work after the kids go to bed, if I need to. An old friend and I had kids around the same time. He worked irregular hours, and saw his kids for less than an hour most days. After talking to him last summer, I realized just what an opportunity I really had to spend so much time with my kids.

One worry folks often have about kids in graduate school is that once you have kids, you don’t have time to be social in the department. This is true to some extent, but (I think) overblown. I certainly stopped going out for drinks as much. However, I still attend (almost) all department talks, and organize drinks afterwards every now and again. My wife and I hosted several department parties even after we had kids.

Certainly I have less time to work now than I did before. However, I don’t this actually makes any difference to my productivity. I just have to be efficient. I don’t put in 80 hour weeks, but I’m not convinced that so doing would actually help. Haven't Cocooners have argued that academics should only work 40 hours ?

I’m not claiming than anything I have said here generalizes. Your department or situation might be completely different. Also, my wife is not in academia and was working part time for a non-for-profit when we had our first kid. This helped—a lot. Finally, I am a male, and I recognize that there is a serious asymmetry between men and women having kids and working. However, I have talked to women in my program who have kids, and they have great things to say about having kids in grad school too. My main point here is that I was worried that my profs would shun me as ‘not serious’ about academia after having kids, and I thought that I would lose all productivity. On the contrary, my department has been supportive, and having kids has helped me learn to be more efficient with my time.

Anyway, I leave you with my son's two favorite song:

 

 

Comments

[Marcus Arvan]

Thanks for sharing your experience, Josh. I don't know about kids, but I can say (also anecdotally) that having a *family* (a spouse or partner) can be beneficial. By and large, the people I knew in grad school who had families tended to finish far more quickly than those who didn't--and I've been *far* more productive since getting married than before.

My impression--both firsthand and otherwise--has been (as you say) that having a family requires one to become more efficient. But also, I would say, it can provide a great deal of motivation, as one' career success or failure suddenly has implications not just for one person (you), but also for others close to you. Moreover, I've found, having a spouse or partner can help tremendously with all kinds of professional matters: daily love and support truly go a long way.

[Anonymous professor]

I'm writing this anonymously, as professors, especially on the tenure track needs to appear collected and having it all together.
I have 2 children. There's a significant age gap - My oldest child was born when I just started graduate school, my second was born 18 months before I started to work as a tenure-track professor. For what it's worth, in my personal experience, the care for a young child (baby/toddler) is much easier to combine with grad school than with a tenure track appointment.
In grad school, I had similar experiences as the OP and I am a woman: my supervisor was very encouraging and gave a gift for the birth of the baby, my other colleagues were also supportive, albeit surprised I finished so quickly.
We wanted to have another child, but the timing seemed difficult. After I got my PhD, my partner had to finish his PhD and we both had to get publications out - journal articles, and I got my first book under contract. We had our second child while we were both postdocs, and then I got offered a tenure track appointment. It's still early days, but having a toddler and starting a new tenure track job is definitely exhausting!

[Joshua Mugg]

Anonymous professor and Marcus-

Thanks for sharing. My wife and I suspected that dealing with little ones would be easier in grad school than TT days, which was one reason we decided to have kids early. I have known a number of folks with kids who have finished earlier than those without, and I find this curious. I suspect this is (as Marcus suggests) because having a family forces one to stay on track and be more efficient.

[grad student]

Thanks for raising the issue.
I am a female student about to start my PhD and always thinking about my personal and professional future - sometimes I am worried, sometimes hopeful, others just panic. My long-time partner and I certainly want kids - possibly not too late, as he is 10 years older than I am.
The reasons in favour of having kids in grad school the OP and comments provided sound strong. Apart from the benefits of paid leave - which vary between countries and universities -, one critical issue is travelling. In my PhD program, we are required to spend at least one year abroad. ALthough these research periods may be split into shorter visits, the travelling requirement strikes me as a big problem for parents with a baby. Does anyone have relevant experiences to share?

[Joshua Mugg]

Grad student-

I’m not sure what ‘traveling’ entails. Are you expected to spend a year on the road? Or a year at a different institution, but with normal living arrangements? The former sounds a lot harder than the latter. Are there any grad students with kids in your department? Talking with other academic parents was really helpful for me.

I’ll share my experience traveling with kids. My wife and I travelled a lot before we had kids, and said we wouldn’t slow down once we had kids. I have done a lot of conferencing in grad school, and a fair bit of traveling with one little one. My wife, son, and I went spent 2 weeks in Bavaria when my son was 3 months old. We had a great experience. At that age, we could just put the kid in a carrier and he would fall asleep when he needed. To be sure, it was a different kind of trip than we would have had, had we not had our son. For example, we stayed in BnBs or hotels rather than hostels, and we didn’t go out at night. We took a similar trip the next summer (when my wife was pregnant and my son was just over a year). This was harder. My son needed to move around, but was not yet walking. Furthermore, he was not content to just hang out in the carrier any more. More difficult, he needed exactly 2 naps a day at fairly regular times. This made getting out a lot harder. We decided not to attempt eurotrips with little ones again after that trip.

I have a friend (in history, who is male) who is moving his family abroad for a few months. He and his wife have two kids under 3.

[postdoc parent]

@grad student: My partner and I are trying to figure out travelling with a baby, and currently plan to be travelling for several months of baby's first year. So far so good. We have found mixed success with airbnb rentals - where wifi, internet and even daytime heating seem to be extra !!! - but have had great success with sabbatical rentals designed for academic research or writing retreats. We have used one sabbatical rental in North America, and will be moving to a second one in Europe for the months of March and April. In all cases, the owners have been very accommodating of the fact that we are travelling with a baby, and have even supplied us with cribs and some baby toys or books. In the sabbatical rentals as opposed to the airbnbs, the owners seem much more understanding of the need to have high download and upload speeds, to work from home while the baby naps, etc. Along the way, there have also been a few hotel stops, and while these are expensive, they tend to have cribs available on demand, as well as suggestions of restaurants or cafes that will accommodate the baby, a car seat, etc.

@Joshua Mugg- In my experience, many graduate programs, postdocs, AND TT appointments can be differently accommodating of philosopher-fathers and philosopher-mothers. This seems especially to be the case when the second parent is not an academic, so that women who have children at any given stage of a philosophy career can always fall back on their husband's income/career, whereas philosopher-fathers are perceived to have *dependents*, and therefore are given quite a bit of support. I hope that my experience does not generalize, but I fear that it does.

[Grad student]

Joshua, thanks for sharing your experience.
I had in mind spending some months at a different institution - I am not at a US or UK university, so sorry if the problem is unique to me. The fact is my partner (not in academia) would not be able to leave his job for some months and follow me. Traveling for occasional conferences seems way easier - a single parent can look after a baby or toddler for a few days.
To be honest, I suspect that a graduate student may be partly exempted from the "period abroad" requirement if they had a baby. Yet this seems to me to raise some wider issues, given the significance of the "period abroad" at my university (and in my country in general): would you still be considered a committed researcher by your supervisor and peers? would you lose important contributions to your education if there aren't many people in your area at your department?, just to bring some examples we can discuss.
I would be happy to regard such concerns as minor - e.g. the first is remarkably biased and weak; as for the second, I believe you can finda ways to discuss and get feedback on your work without moving at other institutions. So, I'd have a kid all the same. But it seems worth discussing, if it's not an isolated problem.
And no, no graduates with kids here! There are two female researchers with kids, but they had them when they were adjuncts. I'm sure there also are some male academic parent with kids, but this seems to reflect so little on their academic life that I do not know if there are any.

[smef]

@Grad student: I studied in continental Europe, in places where NO graduate students would dream of having children (in fact, most of my female colleagues waited after their Habilitation to have children, or did not have any).
Nonetheless, I have frequently travelled with my toddlers, not just for conferences (since they were 6 months), but also for longer periods (since they were one and a half we spent months together in UK, the US and in Japan ---in UK and in Japan without my spouse, in US with him, but he was also working). They readily adapted to the local childcare (although they could not speak a word of English or Japanese) and greatly enjoyed the experience.