MPa/PaD - or the Case for Professionalizing Parenthood

Any other parents out there with young children feel any stress? Ever feel like you're doing the hardest job you've ever had with no pay check, no promotions? If you've taken time off to parent, do you stress about your options upon re-entering the "work force"? (loss of position, loss of pay, loss of options?) Ever feel like you should be enjoying life more than you are?

A team of world-class mathematicians came up with the following equation:

Contentment with Life = 1/(Financial responsibilities x [# of Children/Ages] x Principal owed on mortgage) + (Career Ambition/Frustration) + (Spousal Delight/Frustration x Expectations/Reality of Parenting Roles) + (Joy in Time with Kids/Ambivalence+Confusion about Value of Parenting)

In my playground poll of our generation, our scores are pretty low right about now. This is not good for us or our kids and begs the question, why is it so? Some people call this period "the tunnel" - very young children, financial stress, marriages strained. We are the first generation of parents whose own parents divorced at a rate of 50%, most of them in the first 9 years of their marriages -- i.e. when they were "in the tunnel." We were going to study and avoid their mistakes. Wait longer to marry. Pick better partners. Share the loads of work/family more evenly. Etc. But as my older sister reports from the front lines of Parenting Adolescents, a lot of our marriages are cracking up too.

Not that the fate of a marriage is driven solely by the stress of parenting, but there is mounting evidence that it's a -- if not the -- major force. And not that the success of a marriage is the sole factor in determining a happy life, though there is mounting evidence that it does -- on average -- make people happier. My purpose is not to save marriages, or even assume partnership (married or not) as necessary for raising a family. I am just pointing to the strain on marriage as further evidence of how hard it is to parent young children.

An obvious solution: Stop procreating. There are many intelligent people who have chosen this path with great results. I couldn't have made that choice for myself, and I think even those happy child-free couples agree that we need some suckers to keep falling for the baby trap if we want Future Workers to support the Social Security System and perpetuate the race. So we've got to figure this thing out.

First, a quick survey of some of what's wrong with Parenthood in America according to Me:

* Right now, we treat parenthood as if it were an extra-curricular activity, something to take up after a full day of work like you might Squash or Photography lessons. Our maternity leave policies are barbaric, paternity leave worse to non-existent. We internalize this economic paradigm, as if somehow we should fit all the effort of building a family into the M-F 6-7:30pm and Sat/Sunday slots. This is absurd. Building a family well requires more time and energy than many of our day jobs.
* "Sharing the work/family" load equally between partners made a lot of sense in an undergraduate feminist studies seminar. In reality I think our generation inherited a half-finished revolution. Our parents' generation opened doors for women to work outside the home but didn't fight for the value of work that happens inside the home. Work traditionally done by women is routinely de-valued... Teaching, nursing, child care, stay-at-home parenting. Rather than fight for the value of this work, we've shifted the low wages down to nannies who are generally inadequately compensated and must lean on their (unpaid) family members to care for their own children.
* We jump into parenthood with no training, little support, and no manual other than what a Google search offers. Many find that parenthood isolates, which propels some people back to work for fear of "disappearing" into parenthood. More on that later.
* We penalize people who "take time off" (revealing language) of jobs to parent, even when they do so without compensation, by making it hard to re-enter the work force and by stifling career advancements when they return.
* We stigmatize people who take time off to parent and indulge in false dichotomies to handle the neurosis of it all. For e.g. a friend who works full-time recently let slip a comment about how she would be bored to death with "those stay-at-home moms with their tennis dates." Is that what women who are at home with kids do? Not in my experience. Dig deeper and most women who are at home are actually doing outside work while most women who work "full-time" are doing a lot of care-giving. I wager that the caricaturing of people "on the other side" is a defense mechanism. I want us all to get beyond it. I also know a number of stay-at-home Dads who fend off even greater caricatures.
* Ageism and the Time Crunch. Related to all of the above: Most career paths expect maximum performance in the exact same age range (30s-40s) as when we are trying to give birth and raise little people. This is insane. Most of us are going to live into our 80s. Why should we not consider our 50s-60s to be Peak Performance years, when kids are in their teens or beyond? We'll still have 2 more decades to ease out and hit the putting green. (See Laura Carstensen's A LONG BRIGHT FUTURE for a much more thorough argument on this point.)

Rewind to that newborn baby who captivated your whole attention, who re-defined the axis around which the world rotates. Imagine yourself in Baby's shoes (or booties). Your parents gaze at you with ultimate adoration. Every poop is perfect. Every coo is an aria. Every smile transforms the world. Then you begin to grow, to discover your powers just as you are supposed to, to climb stairs, to pull every book off the shelf, to pitch a fit at the post office. Gradually, your frazzled parent holds you at a greater and greater distance until s/he pleads, "You take him."

This progression makes me as sad for parent as it does for baby and reveals how outside forces crush the tender regeneration that family life can offer. Baby doesn't understand that you've had a long hard day. She can't understand our fear. Our kids' clumsy first steps toward the outside world are exactly the moments when we can both teach and learn from them -- but for most kids, we will already be gone during most of their waking hours. These will not be their first clumsy strikes outward, and how much better they -- and we as parents -- would fare come adolescence if we had taken the chances to learn now? To know each other better? To conquer that fear most of us first felt the moment we took Baby home from the hospital? ("You're just gonna let me drive out of here with him?") Why do we flee our children so soon?

My sister-in-law got to the point (or one of them anyway). We were discussing that panic shared by parents of small children when the weekend arrives -- 48 continuous hours with offspring. She said, "I felt incompetent. The babysitter knew how to get them down for naps, their rhythms, better than I did. By weekend's end I was exhausted. I felt relieved to go back to the office where I felt competent, successful."

Which leads me to the point: Parenting takes practice. It is learned, not innate. Many parents never get on top of it -- rather they endeavor to get through it. The more "accomplished" the parent, perhaps the deeper the humiliation! Moreover, the critters change at a blinding speed, so the requirements of parenting are constantly shifting. No wonder we feel awful much of the time. For many, jobs necessitate hired caregivers, but it goes beyond that. Who wouldn't want a "professional" to present a bathed smiling child at day's end, allowing us to return to jobs where we feel (and are treated) like professionals?

Except that many of us find ourselves plagued by a sense of loss, torn by seemingly irreconcilable impulses to be with the kids we worked hard to make and the jobs we can't afford/don't want to lose. Guilt and feelings of failure linger, which we (especially women?) add to our private list of self-criticisms, bringing our Contentment Scores even lower despite the sizable budgetary line dedicated to Child Care. How can we boost our scores?

Which brings me to my immodest proposal: Let's professionalize parenthood.

There is a Buddhist idea that a sapling needs a little fence until it grows strong enough to withstand blows from the outside world. I used this image to explain why I went to graduate school. I could battle it out on my own with no skills and various economic (and gender) forces arrayed against me. Or I could seek a few years of shelter to grow in strength and expertise among peers and mentors, earning a credential to show for it. Kids and parents need a little fence around their early years together.

Imagine graduate level credit given for time spent primarily parenting, available to mothers or fathers. (Let's offer an added certificate for the breastfeeding mother.)

For parents who choose to work home for 2 years, we'll offer a Master of Parenthood (MPa). For parents who choose to stay home for 4+ years, let's offer a Doctorate (PaD). We can imagine all kinds of flexible variations for part-time dedicated parenthood/work. No one has to do this, but for those who do, there is a vessel that they (and the outside world) recognize as having validity.

Graduate school offers an appropriate model because it assumes maturity and relevant background without assuming expertise. It is organized to move from greater structure (courses) to independence (original scholarship). It depends on mentorship under faculty solicited by the student, allowing for student choice and philosophical differences. It culminates in thoughtful original work evaluated by peers. It motivates funding streams. It takes seriously its subject matter. It creates a professional community. It gives students a label for what they do all day, and why it is important. It leaves students with a degree to show for it.

Help me flesh this out. What could coursework look like? We could make use of online options for seminars on topics like "Sleep," "Language Development," "Nutrition," or "Marriage and Family Dynamics." It would be student-driven and derive from day-to-day life with Tots. Parents could keep journals or blogs. PaD candidates could do longer-term projects, perhaps supporting the work of scholars in fields related to issues arising in their families, such as allergies, tantrums, illnesses, marriage roles, or autism. Advanced work could reach into academia in fields such as Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroanatomy. WIKI could come up with a WIKI-PARENT site to organize the ideas and insights of thoughtful parents, much like the CDC and SETI organize the inputs of ordinary people to search for meaningful patterns. Parents might work on it as a team, dedicating different stretches of time to parenting.

Who could the mentors be? Help me think about this. This could be a chance to recognize people specifically for their good parenting, a category that garners no formal recognition or particular respect, even if they were not literally parents themselves. A grandparent, a nanny, a neighbor, one's own parents, a sister or brother, a pastor, one's former high school teacher or coach. It would give people of other generations and stations a stake in supporting the new family.

The timetable of graduate study also lines up with dedicated parenthood. It is my unsubstantiated view that many new parents feel like Early Childhood Will Never End. My doctor friends describe the sleeplessness of residency in similar terms, but they knew exactly when it would end. But when you are in the tunnel of early parenthood, it can feel like you've lost your life and will never get it back. (We don't get the same "it" back, but we often can't yet see how the alternative can be better.) Lacking outside validation, compensation, or recognition, it's reasonable to question the worth of the effort. The graduate degree model both affirms the time-limited nature of the work and the importance. Knowing that this intensive early stage passes can also relieve pressure on couples, who often feel like weary roommates more than the amorous hopefuls who once made these little beings.

Imagine if volunteering at a child's pre-school, serving on a board of directors for athletics or the arts, or writing letters to elected officials on behalf of legislation affecting kids and families were part of an internship? The point is not "credit" but rather to value these activities.

There is abundant research underway about the intellectual, emotional and social development in children ages 0-4, and yet there is evidence that children are entering school with far less developed verbal skills than previous generations. Could it be because we are simply not talking with them enough? Explaining? Asking questions? Entering their worlds? It amazes me how often I see little kids alone in strollers with nannies or parents on cellphones. I want to be clear: I am very much in favor of both professional caregivers and cellphones! (In fact, I think nannies should be better paid and better recognized.) And sometimes a phone call must be made. But more often, the behavior is part of the same problem: A mindset that caring for small children is something to be gotten through rather than engaged. The most valuable thing we can offer our children is exactly what we place the lowest value on when we spend it with them: Time.

After 6 years with little ones, I'm finding one similarity between parenting and squash or photography after all: the better one gets at it, the more enjoyable it is. As the competence gap closes, parents can find new delight in their children - and each other - that makes weekends less arduous and more restful. A virtuous cycle kicks in. We no longer crawl toward Monday morning. I can't help but believe that kids can feel the difference.

Am I serious about graduate degrees for parenting? I am serious about changing the way we value the work all parents do. Help me think of even better ways to do that.