Jessica Leight

International Food Policy Research Institute

When I think back on the five years in which I welcomed three children (2018 to 2023), it’s hard to recollect just how much changed so quickly in that period, both personally and professionally. I had my first son while still on a tenure-track position at American University, but was interviewing for a non-academic research position (at the International Food Policy Research institute) when he was only five months old, and started there soon after. My husband then traveled to live separately for a period of about six months for work; we rolled into 2020 happily expecting a newly stable life together and a second child – and announced our pregnancy the week that COVID sent everyone home. Luckily my COVID-era baby was born in good health, and followed by my third (but only after a miscarriage) about two and a half years later.

Given that I was in academic positions for six years (first at Williams and then American University) before moving to IFPRI, I’ve experienced some of the advantages and disadvantages of juggling work and family in both contexts. In my academic positions, two challenges dominated: co-location (with my husband, who is not an academic), and then the academic calendar. First, we waited to start a family until we had what seemed like a more stable co-location plan. Second, it took a number of months for me to conceive and I was unlucky to time the arrival of my first baby right in the middle of the semester, meaning I used up my allocated leave the semester of the delivery, and returned to teaching when my son was 11 weeks (I was able to use grant funding to reduce my course requirement). Only a few months after that, my husband had to depart temporarily anyway for a new position, despite our original expectation that we had finally achieved co-location zen.

Once I became a researcher at IFPRI, this was a standard maternity leave on / maternity leave off model, and maternity leave was 10 weeks (I slightly extended with a week or two of vacation). Thus on net, I had similar, and short, maternity leaves for all three children. I did have the advantage of working from home for the later children (first because of COVID, and later because I had transitioned to become a telecommuter). It didn’t change my childcare arrangements – we still had full-time childcare from the point that I returned to work, at around two and half months – but it made breastfeeding much easier, because I could substitute half of my pumping sessions for feeding sessions and feed the baby while balancing the laptop on my nursing pillow. Ah. . .memories. There was also (for better or worse) no particularly obvious shift in professional expectations anchored to the birth of my later children; there is no tenure clock in non-academic positions (no hard stop), and so no extra year. While my colleagues were generally tremendously supportive, the flow of funding proposals, surveys, meetings, and papers was uninterrupted other than my short leave.

My patterns of work certainly evolved as my family grew, but to me, the biggest challenge was not necessarily the obvious one (i.e., time is short). I was fortunate to have generally healthy pregnancies and tremendous childcare support (both paid and unpaid), and I did (and do) a lot of multitasking. Constraints on travel were a significant challenge, particularly as a development economist – I wasn’t, and won’t be, the parent toting her baby or toddler to a field visit in Kenya for various reasons, and that has real costs. Perhaps the most significant challenge for m has simply carving out cognitive space for larger or more ambitious plans, rather than simply humming along and keeping the machine of emails, updated drafts, and referee reports moving. Parenting crowds your brain, and as I’m now learning, it only becomes more crowded as they grow. The best benefit that any parental support policy can provide is a bit of space to un-crowd it.

What did I take away from all of the years of shifting professional and personal arrangements? First, if you want kids, no reason to wait! Wait until you’re ready, of course, but don’t feel that you have to wait until some arbitrary professional goal is achieved or until your household is more “stable”. We waited and had near-constant instability during the first five years anyway. That was fine, but pregnancy is easier when you’re a bit younger (I definitely noticed the difference), and maybe, if we had started earlier, we would have squeezed in one more. Second, academic positions will probably offer longer leaves (if you can time the birth well vis-à-vis the semester and summer), but with more trade-offs in terms of tenure pressure. Non-academic positions may not offer such long chunks of leave (though larger for-profit companies e.g. in the tech sector do offer more), but have more flexible timelines overall and can be very supportive of familial goals.

Though I never had one more year, as such, I had five hectic years and am grateful for all of them.