Parental Arrival

 

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.

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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/