I agree with the comments Rae Nishi posted about the importance of
having an equal partner for child care. I cannot even imagine being a
parent without a partner (and my applause to those who do manage).
I have two children, 10 months and 3 years. The first was born a few
months before I defended and the second during my (current) postdoc. My
husband worked in the same lab as I did for our graduate work, and we
settled on splitting shifts with part time daycare for as long as we
could. Upon starting our postdocs (in different labs on different
campuses), we opted for full time daycare.
Our oldest daughter is in a daycare about 35 minutes from my campus, and
our youngest daughter is about 10 minutes away from there. We split
known sick days (If one kid wakes in the middle of the night with a
fever...) and holidays where we cannot find backup care. On days where
the dreaded phone call arrives (Pick up ____ , she has a fever, she
stuck a piece of candy in her nose etc....), I end up stopping
experiments, writing or whatever to pick the sick one up. We have one
car, and parking is extremely expensive and inconvenient at my husbands
campus.
Our one car limitation causes other difficulties- staying for the end of
seminars which are running over (even five minutes) or which start after
4 pm is pretty difficult- both girls need to be picked up by 6
($1/minute at one center). My husband is really great about taking off
an hour early to shuttle up to my campus and pick them up for seminars I
feel are must see science- however, coming from the same lab, our
interests overlap considerably, and sometimes we resort to scissors
paper stone type decisions.
I think that the most difficult thing about daycare is that, in large
part, the centers force science to work on a schedule which sometimes
works and sometimes doesn't. The second most difficult thing, as a grad
student or postdoc, is finding the cash to pay for decent care. It is
worth every penny.
-Paula Schlax
