Is anyone else an academic who has not produced enough research while having kids and is now in the s***?

[Kathyis6incheshigh]

There are lots of academics on MN, just wondering if there is anyone else in my position.

Am pg with 3rd dc in 5 years. Have had hyperemesis and other problems in all 3 pgs, which on top of 2 maternity leaves means heaps of time off work. In the meantime I have completely lost research momentum and produced sod all apart from a few book reviews. I was not submitted for RAE (though fortunately my dept did very well without me so none of my colleagues are holding it against me personally.)
Every time I come back it takes me all my time to get back up to speed with teaching and admin, get on top of all the changes in my field etc, and I only ever seem to make baby steps towards producing anything before I am sick or pregnant again.
Just had uncomfortable meeting with (supportive) HoD at which she broke news to me that I am about to get a scary letter from Personnel and a process is going to start which will probably include ritual disembowelling/change to a teaching only contract if I don't get something submitted before baby is due. Which would be fine as long as the foetus behaves and sickness holds off - am only just back at work after 2 months off with HG.

Serves me right for having children, doesn't it?

DH is certainly not attending the conferences he used to for this reason - he never really liked them though (because he does maths his are always in really grim places in Eastern Europe in crumbling university accommodation with awful food). He reckons most promotion committees will take into account invitations even if they are turned down, as they still indicate esteeem - however this is only any good if you are at the stage in your career where you get invited rather than where you contribute.

I have not been to any international ones since dcs but this has more been because of the interruptions caused by pregnancy and maternity leaves than because of childcare - I am lucky to have a mum who will come up and help out if one of us needs to go away.

I have a friend who does a very similar subject to her dh and they have in the past gone together with the children and taken it in turns to attend sessions! I think once they took her mum as well for the sessions they both wanted to go to!

oh my most embarrassing moment in my whole career - I was invited to a very prestigious conference abroad (though at short notice, I guess to stand in for someone else!) and I couldn't go because I couldn't find my passport (spent literally two days turning the house upside-down looking for it) and couldn't get another one in time because I couldn't get to the passport office to queue up because of children who weren't well
The whole thing was utterly embarrassing and a consequence of a life that was in chaos with non-sleeping toddlers who kept being ill and not enough domestic help. It was what made us realise we were NOT on top of things and we had to get more domestic help.

I had had the passport only a couple of months before and had a distinct memory of putting the passport Somewhere Safe when a child tried to chew it .

Conferences are really tricky. I've been told I should be giving papers at three a year ... ha, blooming, ha.

DP is giving a fifty minute paper this weekend, much kudos and will look great on his cv but it is three long days of travelling, networking, etc.

Does anyone know anything about teaching only contracts?

I did some work yesterday.

ha, porn - I am actually finding it quite ... not relaxing, exactly, but rewarding to write a bit in the evenings after all day SAHMing. In a perverse way is good "me-time" to use big words and long sentences, even if I only do two or three of them at a time!

oops, thought I was at the end of the thread but apparently not quite, . congratulations on the work, MM

g'night

Kathy, how utterly galling about the passport. You must have been raging.

Conferences are a bit tricky aren't they? I am going to one in the States in the autumn - it will be longest I will have been away from DD and I am dreading it. I think my strategy, such as it is, is to go to the very occasional, but hopefully prestigious, one abroad - maybe once every couple of years. And try and give enough papers in the UK in between to look active.

I suspect in my field that when it comes to promotion, publications are where it's at.

Huge kudos to those doing research with no childcare. Like Kathy, I have found the Boice book very useful in helping me realise that you don't need a whole day to do some writing - but sitting down to write after a day's SAHMing is something else entirely!

My big goal for the summer is to get a first draft of my book manuscript finished. Am aiming for 1000 words of very rough material a day - after which I am allowed to check this thread, faff around with email and teaching prep etc. It's working ok at the moment, but blimey it is bloody hard to motivate yourself over such a long project!

PS FouFoucault - I like your idea of one month's unpaid leave a year. I think the problem with academia is that it is hard to have guilt-free leisure time to enjoy with DCs etc. Sounds like this might be a good solution.

Have recently negotiated a slightly irregular working pattern with my dept - don't want to go into too much detail here, but happy to expand when we have the private area - and I was surprised how amenable they were. So good luck!

see, HighOn, I'd faff around with MN, email etc while writing, as I find the stimulus really helps. The best night's writing I ever did was while simultaneously MNing and watching TV. Admittedly I was writing trashy novel rather than Deep Thoughts . Good luck with it

Hello FouFoucault. I have just worked out who you are

I think that sounds very plausible as a working arrangement: let me know how you get on

I was just wondering this the other day, while watching the news about BA etc offering term-time contracts to parents to save money etc. Or unpaid 'sabbaticals' on 25% salary.

And was wondering if working a version of term-time hours might be one day of academics doing part-time but in a less exploitative way than doing 4 days usually ends up doing.

So I could envisage taking extra unpaid leave to cover 10 weeks main school holidays (but not half terms). The key issues would be negotiating appropriate research and admin time. And being VERY disciplined about managing that time. Would that work?

PS Where I work there is a replacement Equalities Officer in HR and I am hoping to engage them in some discussion about academic parents and working practices soon... Including the question of how academics can work p/t without exploitation or just 'overdoing' it themselves...

Lupus - hi (I would have told you eventually who I was - given that I already know who you are!)
Would be interested to know how your discussions go with HR. I found parental leave great - I used my annual leave for odd days off here and there (sports days, 'household management' days etc) and then used parental leave as annual leave - much better than losing 1/5 of pay to work 4 days a week - and probably doing the same amount of work. But now DD is too old for me to have parental leave - hence the reason for thinking about it.
High on diesel - that's just it - guilt free time to spend with the kids.
A friend who works for another major company said they are being offered pretty much any flexible working arrangement they can come up with that saves money - including sabbaticals on 25% pay etc etc. You would think universities would be amenable to this too.

Sorry this is going a few posts back but to answer your questions I'm in Ireland now. It's funny because when I first arrived here, all whashed-out and pale and shaken by my experiences in the UK, everyone said to me that Ireland is going the same way as England and everyone was worried about their productivity etc.

There is nothing like same pressure here in Ireland as the UK. It might come, I don't know, and the signs are that the Irish govt is looking envisously at the HE system, so I don't wan't to sound too complacent. But my main point is still that I needed a bit of head-space, and I got it here (maybe due to the proximity of mountains, sea, river, short commute, fields, horses blah blah blah). I relaxed and I really started to write. It has been the most amazing transformation for me.

I will say it again: it is difficult to write unless you have some type of creative space in which to do it in.

Can I just have a bit of an aaargh and a waaaaaaaaaah?
Dp and I both have conferences this week - in different places, overlapping. My parents are helping out for some of the week - it's all got really complicated - I've organised eveyone with excel charts - and just realised I had no-one to collect DD from school on Friday and had to phone a friend and ask her to do it. She has agreed (bless her!) but I hate hate hate asking people like that. I've got a headache, haven't finished my conf paper and I've got a 3 hour meeting tomorrow and a million things on my to do list - and I just want the world to stop for a bit.
AAArgh and waaaaaaaaaah.
Feel better now. Thanks

Hmmm I understand the impending deadlines and tons of pressure argument (been there myself plenty of times and it can be 'motivating') but do you really think FouFoucault is in the best place right now for that kind of work?

Has anyone been reading the debate on the Times Higher website about Liverpool Hope's decision to ask all academic staff to be in the office 35 hours a week? It's interesting, particularly for those of us in the arts, humanities and social science areas (ie non lab stuff) because I think it gets to the crux of the matter. If you mainly are expected to teach and not do much else during the week, then by all means be there on campus every day in term time.

If, however, you are expected to do research and produce publications all year round, outside of a laboratory environment, in a research-oriented environment, I think the worst place to do it well is in the office. Constant distractions and interruptions just don't help the creative juices to flow.

Maybe I'm talking bollocks, I don't know. I did manage to write in the UK when I panicked and felt like my back was against the wall. I guess my perspective is that in the UK I felt as though as I was being exploited and pushed and wrung dry; here I feel as though I have much more freedom.

I sympathise hugely with everyone on this thread. I feel as though I spend lots of time mentoring younger women academics and I am trying to help them find a way through all of this. There is a lack of information, leadership and mentorship for women academics just starting out that is really detrimental.

I am not an academic but dh is. He is a professor with responsibility for research development at a school level. I have watched the effect of having just one child on his personal research and it is condisiderable.

Dh is very actively involved with ds and in home life etc. He is also very organised and incredibly efficient. He had a file of 'ideas' for research which he filed away industriously in the 9 months of my pregnancy instead of using them. He used every one of these ideas in the 3 years after ds's birth and came up with not one new one until the sleep deprivation receded when ds was 3.

No wonder so many academics have only one child or none.

Now ds is 4 dh is being creative again and the spark is back but he does at least one hour of writing every day as well as all the other stuff.

Whoever said that doing research, teaching, admin and family well is impossible, is right - one has to give at various times regardless of your gender.

For dh he didn't do family at all in his early career but he built up a massive bank of research articles, books and papers that gave him a cushion.

Then afer ds was born the personal research (though not the mentoring and grant proposals etc) definitely thinned out. When that picked up the new overall role he now has meant that teaching fell off his workload planning.

The only thing that stays is the admin! I do think this really is a big part of why it is more difficult to be an academic now. The admin load is at ridiculous levels for academics.

Even a shared aministrator for a number of academics would help but my dh's department which has 25 academic staff has one departmental secretary and one part time assitant and that is it.

PhDlife
Thank you for the chocolates (I am actually allergic to chocolate but will enjoy them virtually!)
Feeling a bit better now although have just yelled at DD for not putting her shoes on fast enough - I notice that I am much more shouty when I feel under pressure at work.
I have a looooooong train journey this morning so hoping to do all the background reading that may make the paper sound like it has been thought through rather than cobbled together. It is on the last morning of the conference so hopefully not too many people there.
I feel as if I could just sleep and sleep at the moment.
I think Lazycow raises a good point - that fathers are affected too - although I do still think that attitudes towards them are different. Lazycow - can I ask a personal question? - feel free to ignore - do you work too (apart from looking after your DS of course!) 'Cos I do think a lot depends on the whole family situation - the nature of each person's job etc.
Anyway - off to finish panicking/ packing.

Yes fathers are affected too but in my experience of academia, and elsewhere:

a) They are more likely to have the option of having children that little bit older when their career is a bit more settled.

b) They are FAR more likely to have a partner/wife who is working part time or full time at home or not prioritising her career at the same time.

Those things make a huge difference. It's not coincidence that the most positive person on this thread recently has a SAHP. My DP has one full day off a week (we share the rest equally, he's not an academic) and that day is my productive day, it makes an amazing difference not having to even think about the school run or childcare or swimming lessons or dinner at all, none of it. It's quite scary really, how different that day is to the other 4 days where we do share childcare and we do have good systems in place but still, the home and school life intrudes (especially this week, bloody sports day music concert school fete ear appointment optician swimming class dentist and loads of other things).

We're both academics; we're both fairly hands on with kids and domestically; we both are 'too good' at citizenship type things (ie can't say no).

Ergo, we are always struggling to prioritise research outputs and research time.

Perhaps we should take turns? A year on, a year off?

And we have three kids, all pretty demanding ones. The chaos just multiplies more than the sum of the parts.

But it gets easier. DH now has a deadline off, um, next week for some book chapters. It is the VERY LAST deadline before the publisher pulls the plug. So actually I have to be on 'kid duty' much more this week. But that's how it is for us and it shares out over a year...

Always feels very breakneck and last-minute though. I do miss having 'stand and stare' time. But I suppose I choose to MN watch TV sleep instead.

What I've realised, gradually, is that I want to be doing the "citizenship" stuff, and the "stand and stare" time - I don't want to be frazzled and stressy and always running to a deadline (like this week, I am working 15 hour days at the moment to finish a report by Friday, and in between I have loads of sports day and ear appointments, all neatly placed around 2pm to shatter my concentration. And I just cannot focus on devising an amazing and original conceptual framework to succinctly summarise all the relevant research in the field. I just can't think. But this is an unusually bad week).

And I like the citizenship stuff. I want to be involved in the local community and running the local woodcraft folk and so on. This thread has been helpful to me, it makes it clearer that actually, maybe it is time to ditch notions of a successful academic career and go and do something else. I was very keen on it, but for me, it takes more than I'm prepared to give.

I have come to much the same realisation myself. I was incredibly happy to waddle off to do research for a few days just before dd was born and it reminded me that being an academic does, in fact, make me happy. But that was easy when I was writing with no real pressure and had no other responsibilities. (apart from ds, of course.) It'd be a whole different story if I had a contract hanging over my head. Not sure how we'll work that out!