Print This PostWe have two sons, aged 7 and 4. They are the most wonderful people, and my life is richer because of them. The reason I start this post on how parenthood affects work with such a statement is that I am certain some of what follows will come across as quite negative. But, having had all my experiences as a father, my only regret comes from the desire to spend as much of my life as I can with my children: I wish we had decided to have them sooner.
Having children is a sacrifice when working within UK academia. This is not a secret. A friend of mine was upset after attending a session for female academics in which the professor’s advice for researchers with children was to get an au-pair. That same professor’s reaction, after learning about my second child, was to say, “I don’t even know how this is possible.”
Most will understand the problem. As is increasingly true across professions, when office hours end at a research institution, there is nothing that keeps us from continuing working. Research is greedy since there is always the next question, the next level of scrutiny, and importantly, our environment appears to reward maximum work hours because of the international competition for publication and projects and a mainstream academic culture that does little to promote work-life balance. It is very common to work in the evenings, in the weekend and (perplexingly) during strikes.
Having children means that the pressure is high to get the most out of 9-to-5 (or something equivalent). My problem when adapting to becoming a parent was that before that, there was very little pressure to stick to a strict work schedule. The freedom to self-organize work hours makes academia very attractive until one has a family, and so the learning curve was rather steep. If you consider having children, and this description resonates with you, my advice is to practice more efficient time management early.
The other challenge comes from the loss of brain space for work. In academia there must be time for thoughts to roam freely, and I love it when they do, while travelling, in the supermarket, under the shower. But children occupy a lot of thought, so thinking too must become more structured.
For context I need to state that I may have a more severe case of parenthood because our oldest has special needs. We want society to understand what it means to care for a person with dementia. I want everyone to understand what it means to have an autistic child. I became an expert in autism to the point that I printed out a research report to hand over to the school’s special educational needs coordinator. We watch and discuss our son’s energy levels, mood, stimulation and social interactions in a way parents of neurotypicals find difficult to understand.
As for the UK, neither my wife nor I are British. To me the UK, and London in particular, displays these confusing push-pull forces which, on one hand, attract with its world-leading research institutions, its diverse culture and the wonderful gift of allowing our children to grow up bilingually, while, on the other hand, repel with a high cost of living, outrageous cost of childcare, comparably poor parental leave policies and a deteriorating health care system.
The current political and economic climate is one where support is taken, not given, but I continue to hope that we can improve as a society.Manag
I dedicate this post to my children and friends Yannis and Yuri, who I love more than myself.
Dr Vitor Zimmerer
Authors
Dr Vitor Zimmerer is a Lecturer is the Department of Language and Cognition, University College London. Vitor studied linguistics at Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf, and has a PhD in Human Communication Sciences from the University of Sheffield. He is very interested in the effects of neurological damage and atypical development on language and study a range of populations including dementia and aphasia, also how language can be used as a marker of cognitive change.
Adam Smith
Dr Yvonne Couch
Dr Jodi Watt
Emily Spencer