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Comment by k2enemy | Hacker News Reader

> Fast forward three years to the birth of my second child earlier this year, and I am a senior postdoc and the president of our local babywearing group. I started wearing number 2 to the lab two weeks after she was born, because I was planning to apply for faculty jobs, and I was worried that taking time off would weaken my applications.

Nothing to do with baby wearing (which I am a huge proponent of) but this sounds miserable. Still a postdoc after three years and going in to the lab two weeks after giving birth? We are producing way too many grad students.

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Your conclusion is very true. And academia has a way of putting the pressure on the young workforce (until tenure at 40ish) to work long hours for not much money.

And while this is true, it is also worth pointing out that many parents don't want to pause their adult/career goals for 3-6 months because of a new baby. I recently had my first child and while she was little (now 10 months) she would sleep/sit on my lap while I wrote code/ran numerical experiments. I had paternity leave, but I needed to keep working on something because I have an active mind. Now I only worked 4ish hours a day instead of my usual 8-10 (and on side projects instead of work), but I wanted to continue working. My wife who does graphic/web design consulting continued after the birth because it feels good to do adult things. And she didn't stop just because the baby was born she just dropped to 5ish hours a week which has slowly crept back up.

3–10 months is easy enough. But you’ll have to be some kind of superhero to keep doing 4–5 hours of focused work a day with a 2–3 year old climbing on you.

I know, she's a 10 months and I can't do my day job (working remotely) with her in the room any more. She especially likes to hit the power button on the computer and pull the power cords out of the outlets.

Author here! The subtext to this piece is that this is really about coping with the fact that grad students and postdocs in the US rarely get much parental leave. My institution offers two paid weeks off following childbirth. There’s FMLA but few grad student and postdocs can afford to take unpaid leave. Postdoc parents get very little support and everybody who does it has to find their own way to manage. On top of that is the fact that gaps in your training, if you manage to get leave, hurt your chances of getting a job because it is so uncommon to actually get time off.

I chose to do this because I did not find it to be miserable, although it definitely wouldn’t work for everybody.

In my field (biology), it is typical to postdoc for 3-6 years so I’m actually on the early side. That postdocs take so long is definitely something that needs to be addressed, though.

Thank you for the reply! I'm sorry for the poor leave conditions at your institution. It would be great if you got more (paid) time off and were able to participate in work in a voluntary fashion rather than out of necessity.

I was lucky that when my first was born my institution began a policy of a semester of paid leave for the mother or partner. As others have pointed out though, it seems to have a drawback that partners are more likely to use it for extra research time, which tends to raise tenure standards for everyone, including mothers.

I think the problem is larger than a policy can address. We need a culture change.

And enjoy the baby wearing! Mine are too big now and I miss it dearly.

> Still a postdoc after three years and going in to the lab two weeks after giving birth? We are producing way too many grad students.

No, you're lacking adequate protection for fresh parents, mothers and fathers alike.

At the moment career market forces have the upper hand - they can select for those who are willing to go back to the lab two weeks postpartum. If it were mandatory that all new parents had six months postpartum time off, the situation would be different.

> No, you're lacking adequate protection for fresh parents, mothers and fathers alike.

Clearly. And universities are not pressured to extend those protections to postdocs because of the oversupply Ph.Ds.

Probably not given the dynamics already at play. Paternity leave policies for young economics academics gave men an upper hand, because they were able to use their leave to continue working, but still benefit from the paused tenure clock. (I still support universal parental leave policies.)

https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/pa...

In academia, it would mean that having child would be career end. Only childless would be able to compete.

I agree it would be different. My friends in Europe get leave and it works for them. It was funny to write this for a British journal because their perspective on caregiving is so different. Pumping is pretty much unheard of in Europe.

One reason I was going to work was because I love my research, but if I could have taken six months off, paid, without worrying about career progression, then I probably would have spent a whole lot more of that babywearing time reading novels or going for walks outside.

Maybe she is delaying applying for a position because she has to literally wear a baby all day? It's difficult to have a job and an infant, so why try and get an even more demanding job when you are in that stage of your life.

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