Parental Arrival
This post is about the feeling that it’s
somehow ‘unprofessional’ to mention you are a parent, and the associated struggles. I started writing this post
almost a year ago, and I’ve only just had time to finish writing it. That
perhaps says everything. Here’s what I have to say about that feeling, the
concept of ‘parental leave’. I would love to hear your thoughts.
___
It struck me I had shared news of our daughter’s
birth last year on many social media channels, but not LinkedIn. Now, if ten
years ago you’d told me that LinkedIn would be one of the most, if not the
most useful and persistently reliable, spam free social network, I’d have
laughed you out the room. But here it is still useful after nearly 20 years. A
rare thing that Microsoft bought and didn’t somehow immediately break or make
worse – despite appearing to try very hard.
I didn’t share the news of our daughter’s
birth on there as I think of it as a ‘professional space’, not a place for dog
pictures or photos of your children. Then it struck me, perhaps that was me
being part of the problem?
I think of Linkedin as a place to share
career updates – a kind of living CV. Linkedin is the kind of things you say in
a job interview or at a conference, Twitter what you say in the office, Facebook
what you’d say when meeting with your friends; and Instagram is a place to
create a visual montage of the life you want people to think you have.
It then occurred to me there’s really no
greater decision in the career of any prospective parent*(*that is anyone even
thinking about thinking about if they might want to somehow be called a
‘parent’ one day, by someone). The if, why, when, how and ‘how much’ questions
are profound, complex, highly personal - almost always entwined with the other
things (or lack of) in one’s life including partnerships, support networks, suitable
living conditions, careers and personal finances.
I’ve recently completed a PhD in public
health genomics, and I’m also at the start of the journey of learning how to be
Director of a charity I have founded, Science for All. I decided to give myself
some ‘parental leave’ last year when our daughter was born – to support my
wife, our daughter and also my own mental health. I say ‘give myself leave’ as
I’m self-employed. If you’re employed, as a non-birth giving parent, you can
get 2 weeks paid leave in Australia. If self-employed (and you can successfully
navigate Australian Government admin - which I actually gave up trying to do),
it’s apparently possible to get a payment of about $1200 AUD for parental
leave. After those paid weeks however, not everyone can afford to make the
choice to continue to ‘take leave’ of paid work. I’ll not get into a discussion
here on equity and parental leave – but I will say that it’s a policy area that
would do well to be informed by evidence and not ideology. There’s plenty of
international best-practice and Australia, the UK and most certainly the USA
are not leaders.
And also – while I’m here let’s just look
at the phrase ‘parental leave’. It’s like ‘sick leave’ – it sort of implies that,
like a cold, it’s something you can take a few days off for, get over it, and
you’re back to normal. The concept of ‘sick leave’ is also linear and has no
provision for those with long-term chronic illnesses. And I’m not saying being
a parent is a chronic illness…(although, there are moments…) but all being
well, it’s a life-long change for any parent, and hopefully a positive one.
Last year, I scrounged enough savings to
take a few weeks off straight as linear leave, but now life (and ‘career’)
things are needing my attention, I’m taking non-linear parental leave for 2
days a week. Many things which require my attention are unpaid, voluntary,
passion projects, or currently unpaid things which might lead to paid things –
and a few some are paid.
For me the main change is that I’m going to
have to say no to more passion projects and volunteering – because it comes
down to choosing to spend that unpaid time on unpaid work, or spending that
time with my baby daughter and wife. And that’s sad for me, as the unpaid work
is often some of the most rewarding work I do. But I want to keep my non-linear
parental leave in my life – and I struggle to know how to tell people this.
My wife has now returned to full time
employment, and as I’ve made the career/life/parenting choice to experiment
with working three days a week (with our daughter in childcare for those three
days), and me being a Dad for the other two. This gives me 4 precious non-working
days in a row with my daughter, two of which I can share with my wife. These
boundaries I’m creating mean that I’m moving away from the strange lock-down
time where I was trying to finish a PhD with a baby in the house – where it was
a confusing medley where sleep deprivation merged with work, punctuated by short
breaks to help with a newborn.
So the point of me writing this is to open
a discussion about why I feel a reservation in explaining this to professional
contacts and client? Because I also feel it would be disingenuous of me not to
share my life situation. To constantly post publicly about the things I’m proud
of achieving professionally and in my career and not share the struggles, the
financial hardship and the realities of trying to juggle that with being a new
parent does not to justice to all the other people also struggling with those
things, in particular those not able to afford more time with their children.
Not sharing these professional struggles is
the LinkedIn equivalent of the posting all the amazing sunset selfies from
beautiful locations, but not feeling like you can post a photo of yourself in your
dressing gown from the sofa saying ‘I’m lonely, this is hard’. So that’s what
I’m doing here.
So what does my out of office say for the
days with my daughter? ‘I’m elbow deep in baby shite – if it’s urgent, that’s
your bad planning and not my problem today’? Of course not. But truthfully, I
have no idea how to even write it without worrying it might potentially lose me
work with people thinking I don’t have the time, or come across as
unprofessional. When you mention having a kid in meetings, you hear a lot of ‘I
know what it’s like’ from other parents, but you also quietly suspect,
sometimes, it’s also tinged with a ‘so suck it up and get on with it, we’ve all
been there’.
So this is me coming out as a parent; a
part-time Dad; as a recovering PhD researcher attempting to transition back into
part-time self-employment (and learning how to politely say no to people who
want me to work for free); a volunteer Director of a charity; a person with
over a decade of experience helping humans get involved in improving health
research, who is trying to transition into helping non-human life too (moving
to include environmental research in my skillset); a musician and composer; an aspiring
writer and comedian; a wannabe gardener and usedtobe scuba diver; a person who
desperately hopes there will still be some time for all those things alongside
all the other time-pressures and commitments of life.
I don’t quite know how I’ll manage yet, but
I’m trying – and I felt that sharing on here might be a good starting point. I welcome
some advice from others, and hope to perhaps start some interesting
conversations.
Thanks for reading,
Jack
P.s you can find this post on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/parental-arrival-jack-nunn/
