Balancing Pregnancy, Parenthood, and Graduate School

Balancing Pregnancy, Parenthood, and Graduate School

By: Kimberly McManaway, Regina Bateson, Marty Jordan, Karen Kedrowski, Kyle Harris

Abstract: 

While some scholarly articles and reports examine the needs of faculty parents (Bassett 2005; Colbeck and Drago 2005; APSA CSWP 2016; van Assendelft et al. 2019), graduate student parents remain largely ignored in academia. The number of graduate students with children is increasing (Mason 2009; Perry 2021), and the lack of support for such students may contribute to the “leaky pipeline” in academia (Windsor and Crawford 2020). This chapter aims to recognize the needs and existence of graduate 
student parents. The authors represent a diverse set of experiences and perspectives. Some of us were pregnant and/or had children while in graduate school, were expectant on the job market, or gave birth to children as non-tenured assistant professors. One of the authors underwent fertility treatments, two of the authors suffered multiple miscarriages and a third suffered one, and two of the authors had twins. We offer our viewpoints juggling the competing demands of our academic and domestic responsibilities. However, we acknowledge that our perspectives are finite; they do not fully encompass everyone’s intersectional identities and experiences as graduate student parents. Nevertheless, we hope the guidance here serves as one source of information for those on this journey.