Every few weeks, I receive a request via email or LinkedIn, or sometimes a referral that could broadly be classified as, “Help! How do you balance professional work and parenting work at the same time?” I typically use gender neutral language intentionally when discussing parenting, but truth be told, 100% of these requests have come from women.

They come from women in professional roles who, from the outside, appear to have it all: thriving career, kid(s), partner. But, then you get on the phone or Zoom, and the facade comes down and the truth comes out. They’re overwhelmed. It’s not working. The basics -- the sleeping, the eating, the seeing of the children awake and not just when they’re running raging fevers or otherwise banned from school or daycare are not happening. Sometimes, the career has also stalled out. Their male peers are getting promoted and they’re not. It feels like they’re up against a glass ceiling they always thought they’d smash, but it turns out it’s still there and they don’t know if they even want to smash it anymore, they’re so tired.

When I was writing my dissertation and could only afford part-time childcare, I thought that I could write while my daughter napped. Right on cue, she dropped her afternoon nap, so I wrote much of my dissertation with her on the floor of my office doing puzzles, crafts, singing, and otherwise being a standard toddler.

Dads are dealing with the demands of work and family too

After one such recent call, I brought it up with my partner (pronouns he/him), who is equally dedicated to the gender neutral approach to all things domestic, parenting included. I relayed the conversation, and that I keep getting calls like these. Then I asked, “Have you ever gotten one of these? And, have they ever come from another man?”

Couples who clean up the Raritan River together, stay together.

He, ever thoughtful and considerate, pondered this for a good long while. After a few false starts where he did not answer the questions, but said he thought a lot of men were also struggling with these issues, he admitted that no, no man has ever approached him like women approach me. Definitely no strangers. But, he quickly added, men are probably also struggling with how to be a good dad and continue to make strides professionally, while still, you know, sleeping, not eating utter crap, and maybe having some social life.

So, this month, the month of my first child’s birth and Mother’s Day, I decided to question this fundamental, existential collection of challenges around career and parenthood, how I have navigated them, and what wisdom I might have accumulated over these 12+ years of motherhood. It will be handy to have written down for the next request from a mom in the trenches (or labs, or cubicles, or conference rooms), and by publishing it out in the open it can also serve as a resource for some dads out there who, like my spouse, might be silently struggling with this juggling act, but have not yet taken the step of asking for help or guidance.

Real questions about balancing work and family I regularly receive as a business owner

Where to begin? The questions themselves seem like the best place to start.

Here’s a selection with some of the questions I’ve received over the years:

Is it possible to [quit/take a break/come back/change industries/have a kid] and still get promoted?
Are you still able to have an impact in your field?
Do you feel like you’re better able to control the balance of work and family as a consultant?
How did you do it?
Is it possible to find a role with less frequent travel?
How does a career with travel (or a long commute) work with childcare?
Will it get better?
I thought when they went to school it would get easier, but how do you manage the school calendar?
Does childcare ever work? Is it ever functional? Reliable? Accessible? What’s the best solution? Which industries/careers pay enough to afford that?
When do you sleep?

Those are all from women who already have at least one child, but occasionally I hear from a young woman pondering motherhood. Yesterday, the latter naively asked,

Have you ever encountered any obstacles or challenges in your path to becoming a scientist and business owner? If so, what were they and how did you overcome them?
What advice would you give to someone just starting a business?

There are probably dozens of variations of these I’ve gotten over the years, but I think this list covers the gist of the typical inquiries.

Questions about balancing work and parenthood are bigger than all of us and so are the solutions

The queries generally reflect problems that, as my good friend Hannah Koski used to remind me, are bigger than any one person, family, or set of company policies. Truly solving them is going to require restructuring how our society manages employment, childcare, and parenthood. But, the question remains, how to survive in the meantime?

My first disclaimer is, this is what worked for me. It may not work for you. But, my number one piece of advice is to be honest with yourself about what is and is not working for you and your family. Do not let anyone else define what success should look like for you. Sometimes, you’ll have to take a less conventional path that may feel scary or less prestigious or whatever, but if you think it can get you to a place of greater peace or better optimizing across your many competing priorities, by all means go for it!

So, what worked for me?

Finding people who had been where I was and asking them for advice. I did this starting when I was pregnant. I had a lot of questions ranging from the basics of finding the time off to give birth, still having a job to come back to, and paying the bills in the meantime.

Finances and childcare

Here I am, heavily pregnant in grad school and getting advice from other women, many of whom were already mothers, on how to navigate what was to come. Having a village of women to turn to has always been critical to me.

At the time, I was a graduate student. Fellow graduate students were brutally honest with me about the financial picture. Our pay, especially with a dependent, was low enough to qualify for WIC, which would be necessary to access food while staying housed. Others advised on the childcare situation. I learned the hard way that in many geographies, you apparently need to be on the waiting list for a slot before you conceive. For my first kid, I got on waiting lists when I was in my first trimester of pregnancy, but did not actually get a slot until she was 9 months old. Other solutions like patching together family care and working opposite shifts with your partner are things I tried, but would definitely file in the dustbin of NOT SUSTAINABLE.

For me, childcare has been an ongoing struggle for the entirety of parenthood that I am just now seeing the end of, and not because I cracked it, but rather because my kids are aging out of it. My older child is now old enough to babysit herself and the younger one is aging out of school-sponsored aftercare at the end of second grade this June. But, having 40+ hours of childcare each week is something I found to be critical for my professional capacity, let alone my sanity. In-home care that also included some help with laundry was the best solution I found for care for infancy to age 2.

For my second kid, finding an intrepid nanny who was willing to tag along on work trips so I could best balance my professional responsibilities and aspirations with parenthood was an unconventional approach that worked well for me and my kid. My spouse’s workplace once tried re-framing “work-life balance” as “work-life integration” which elicited some incredulous glares and and guffaws at the time, but in hindsight, for that phase of infant parenting and traditional professional employment, having more fluidity was really the only way I got through it.

That said, longer term, I am not sure that fluidity is healthy, and once my kids’ immune systems matured enough to make group child care less of a nightmare of illnesses, the schedule that they imposed offered some helpful guardrails for truly segmenting and balancing paid work and parenting/domestic work by hours of the day. Center-based care worked well for us, being much more reliable, and marginally more affordable, for ages 2-5.

dealing with the school calendar

There are no great solutions for the school years that we have found. The fact that the school calendar and schedule are so woefully mis-aligned with traditional working hours and even the most generous PTO packages has been a struggle across all the models of care we have tried.

Last year, we had 5 different after school babysitters before the last one informed us she’d taken an au pair position in Greece 6 weeks before school let out and I decided to just reschedule my work day and give up on after-school care. This year we tried the aftercare offered by the school, which, while reliable in terms of someone will be there everyday, it has not been the highest quality or most consistent environment. Homework often doesn’t happen and the environment is typically highly chaotic, resulting in an extremely strung-out child who needs to be fed, watered, and then talked back down into completing math and Fundations worksheets at 7:30 PM. Clearly, it’s really not ideal for anyone, but it does mean my child is somewhere safe with adult supervision until the end of the traditional workday. This is critical for one parent to be able to go on a business trip and the other to work until 5 PM, or, you know, base-level necessities for a 2-career household.

ManAging childcare yourself

Finally, advice from my advisor’s wife that I come back to regularly is to take turns with your spouse. She offered this in the context of some longer term career decisions, like letting one spouse choose where to do the postdoc, and the other one choose the geography of the next job. In reality, that advice did not work for us on that timeline. But, on a more micro scale, week-to-week, checking in about who needs to go extra hard at work and then making sure to switch off regularly has been critical.

What do I wish people would stop asking?

One question that comes along pretty regularly is about whether consulting makes any of this overarching impossibility of parenting and climbing the ladder of professional accomplishments simultaneously easier.

What bothers me about this question is the underlying assumption that running a business is easier than being an employee or that achieving work-life balance was my primary motivation in starting Grow Well. It’s the one that makes me wonder if people would ever dream of asking a man that made a similar move this question.

The answer and reality, like all realities, is complicated. But, my primary motivation in starting this business was and still is working toward the vision I defined for the company -- a food system that meets communities’ needs, respects critical planetary boundaries, and is resilient to climatic and market disruptions.

Consulting and running Grow Well is a full-time job for me. It has taken early mornings and late nights to get the business to where it is today. There has been a ton of hard work involved in growing the business, brand, the portfolio of work, clients, sub-contractors, and now another full-time employee. I occasionally look over at peers working for other organizations or the occasional job posting that LinkedIn feeds me and wonder whether it would be better to do the work I do at Grow Well for someone else. It certainly sometimes seems easier than figuring out all the accounting, marketing, payroll, benefits, business development, contracting, et cetera that are all part of working through this model of entrepreneurship instead of employment. Where I consistently land is that this is the best path for me because for me, it is most important to be able to have a workplace where I could live my values. More than the struggles with work-life balance or anything else, the cognitive dissonance or conflicts between workplace priorities and my values is a major reason why I decided to build my own workplace, and remain committed to it.

Grow Well values

We’re thorough. We deliver comprehensive work products that resonate -- anchored in the latest science and client realities.
We’re creative. We enjoy designing and developing novel tools and training materials to convert protocols, policies, and market trends into accessible insights for clients.
We’re on top of the latest science. We take the latest peer reviewed literature into account and use a data-based approach to problem solving.
We listen and meet clients where they are. Clients can count on us for thoughtful, systemic analyses of challenges and opportunities informed by stakeholders and policy.
We’re solutions-oriented. Our recommendations and deliverables are actionable, practical, and pragmatic.
We’re professional. We respond in a timely and respectful manner to client questions and provide regular updates on project progress in the format that’s most useful.

But, does being a mother inform my work?

Yes, many of those values have been shaped by my experience and learnings, professional, scientific, and parental. Motherhood is a constant juggling act of schedules, needs, and prioritization. It cultivates creativity, listening skills, and pragmatism in a way no university degree or job could ever hope to half simulate. Being open and eager to learn, grow, change my mind, recognize when something isn’t working and not let the perfect stand in the way of the better are all skills and lessons my kids teach and reteach me every day. Not to mention negotiation skills! Being responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars of food spend means I have been to professional procurement training and workshops on negotiation. I’ve read the iconic Getting to Yes. All pale in comparison to the negotiation skills honed in getting my three-year-old daughter into weather appropriate clothing out the door to daycare on time.

But, being a parent doesn’t just inform my work. It inspires it. Being a parent is a crash course in and constant reminder of our basic human needs for food, shelter, and community. Our society is failing to deliver on these needs for a shocking fraction of humans on this planet today. As climate change and political dysfunction further exacerbate the social and environmental challenges we are already struggling to overcome, it becomes even more important to empower organizations across the food system with the data, understanding, and tools they need to make better decisions and achieve better impacts. This work is critical to not just some vague future society, but to my own kids’ future. That knowledge keeps me inspired and committed to continuing to not just do this work, but to build the broader capacity, business, and team to do it through Grow Well.

So you want to be mompreneur (or dadpreneuer)?: My thoughts on parenthood and professional life this Mother’s Day