Comments on: Flexibility for Faculty Fathers

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 19:59:46 +0000

I’ll echo the points above, though from a grad student/post-doc dad’s perspective. The flexible schedule is a major bonus at times. Personally, it’s allowed me to spend a significant amount of time with my kids as they were infants, and to provide a lot of extra assistance to my partner, while she was on mat leave (I’ll leave the details Canada’s maternity, and paternity, leave policies vs. other countries for another post!). A lot of dads I know in other professions are certainly much more time-constrained. That said, the flexibility can eat away at the time you reserve for other commitments. Especially if you’re someone who requires lengthy periods of silence/relative peace in which to get reading or writing done. Planning to be a dad and a grad student/new prof requires just that, planning. It requires being hyper-organized/productive with your time while still being flexible to ever-changing kid schedules (i.e. sometimes 2 hour naps only last 45 minutes, who knew?). It’s something I’m still getting used to 4 years into this whole parenting thing.

And I’ll agree with @alexj…when the kids are young enough, they’re all the check I need to stay off technology. If I try and clear emails with them around, it’s not long before they are either a) screaming or b) crawling over my computer. Neither seems to help with the emails.

Thanks for the post.

By: Eleanor Seitz

Eleanor Seitz — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 03:55:12 +0000

Dear Jason, terrific post. I am very grateful for your post because a) it continues this very important and relevant dialogue on it means to engage with our children in this profession and b) because I am happy to get the male faculty perspective on parenting in academe. You hit the nail on the head when you mention that the dual role of parent and scholar possess a “self-inflcited pressure to do more, do it perfectly, and say ‘yes’to new opportunities.” For me, this comes from a fear that if I fall short or say no, it will be attributed to my position as a parent. This over whemled (at least for me) state of constant commitment often leads me to distraction by email, writing, or reading when I am with my daughter, and this has resulted in several shocking discoveries when I emerge from the computer to find a child covered in mud or painting our wall with yogurt. But my own style of parenting is to go with it, and I think that any success I have at balancing a career and parenthood is rooted in a need not to take myself or any ideas of perfect house cleaning or scheduling too seriously. This is, of course, in addition to being lucky enough to have, at least on the micro-level, a flexible schedule. I also love that you bring up the specific nature of our role as media studies scholars with our children, because it is an intersection I consider often. My position as a TV studies scholar demands that I do a lot of research through watching TV, and I feel conflicted because my husband and I have agreed to be very careful and restrictive with our daughter’s TV consumption. This is not to say she does not watch any TV or movies, but we keep it low. Not forever, but she is young, and I want her to experience some things firsthand before she makes sense of them through TV. And of course, studying media from a cultural studies perspective has made me very sensitive to the role media play in shaping opinions and identity. I also know the pleasure that media engagement brings, and so I am ambivalent on this. I could keep writing, this is a topic close to my heart, but I will stop before I get into the gender dynamics of being the female breadwinner/career academic in a family with small children and all the personal baggage that might conjure up in this public forum. Thank you again.

By: Sarah Jedd

Sarah Jedd — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 17:52:47 +0000

This is such a fantastic post. I really like the macro/micro flexibility discussion– a helpful way to explain the trade-offs we make. My husband is a professor at the community college level, and we both find ourselves working at home during the week to split the care of our young sons. With this amazing flexibility, though, comes an erasing of the boundary between work and home. He coaches flag football with his iPhone in hand, and I edit chapters while nursing a baby. Our offices are strewn with preschool art, and neither of us can attend a meeting, teach a class, or take a call during the witching hour. Because I study and teach about rhetorics of mothering, my students often have conversations about parenting, and I am encouraged to find that this kind of parent-sharing was what they grew up with, too, and what they seem to take for granted in their own future lives. Parenting is changing, and we are raising children on the cusp of that change. Thanks for bringing visibility to such an important topic.

By: Jason Mittell

Jason Mittell — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 07:49:47 +0000

Alex,

Thanks for the comment. In my first draft, I had more about my own gender roles as a father and how it related to my professional identity & our family’s dynamics. But I found it hard to explore without talking directly about my wife’s role & career in ways neither of us would feel comfortable laying out for a general readership. In short, it’s caused both of us a lot of anxiety to reconcile our feminist beliefs with our practices where I’m the “primary professional” and she’s sacrificed career options to focus on parenting (& living where my job took us). Perhaps someday we can find an effective way to publicly write about these issues, which I agree are hugely important and very complicated.

By: alexj

alexj — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 16:39:01 +0000

Jason: Thanks for this. I’ve passed it on to a group of Moms where I work. We’re hoping to discuss these things amongst oursevles. Which does raise the gender question up front. Thanks for speaking so conscientiously about being a Professor/Dad. As you begin to conclude, you suggest that “parenting foregrounds issues of gender” (for our kids), but of course also for us parents (in hetero and homo contexts, I’d suggest). As much as our generation actually sees a new kind of feminist fathering, and parent-sharing, there are so many ways, of course distinct in each couple and family, but also probably legible across families, where gender (roles) continue to structure our parenting, and its relationship to our work. It becomes a necessary feminist project to name these, and understand them as political and institutional.

As for your question about pervasive connectivity, I actually have made it a pretty strong habit to not do work when I am with my kids (including email). The kids end up providing the check all us humans need: to stop and focus back on the world. As my kids get older, this is harder to do, as they are often connected (and emailing, facebooking, etc) while I try to stay true to my anti-technological mantra.

One other note, as a divorced Mom, I get something that many parents in couples do not: days off.