Husband as default parent?

[Anonymous]

1) once he has tenure; he will have a lot of flexibility. We have friends where parent is academic and it is amazing.

2) life will conspire to make mom default. My DH is more social and trys to arrange play dates and camps, but everything has to be routed through me. It’s like some social rule where women can’t talk to men.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You say he has an academic job? Is he an assistant professor, who will be working toward tenure for the next six years? I am a tenured prof, so I am surrounded by other academics, and I don't know a single male academic who was the default parent while working toward tenure. In fact, the most successful mid-career scholars in my field are the men whose wives SAH or have less-intense careers. The thing about academia is that the work is infinite, and the standards are vague. You could always collect just one more set of data, publish just one more article, etc., and you never feel like it's enough until you've got tenure. And then you're working toward full. I know there are a lot of jobs that you can never "turn off" but academia is unusual simply because the work is self-driven and limitless.

So, I'd be thinking about how he's going to resist that pressure to publish more and more and more and focus on running the household while you pursue your career.

The research shows that the most likely person to get tenure is a married male, the most unlikely is a married female. (Unmarried men and unmarried women fall in between.) The typical explanation for these differences is that men are successful because women are running their personal lives, and women are unsuccessful professionally because they're having to run their family life too.

So, is your husband going to step outside of these well established patterns in academia and somehow be a default parent and a successful scholar? There are certainly examples of men who have done it, but it takes commitment on their part to buck the dominant trends.

Yes he is an assistant professor. I have a hard time with the idea of keeping a light career to support an academic career which frankly is not very lucrative. He claims he can easily work until 70 at top pay, but this does not help me sleep at night. What if he gets sick?

He plans to go for tenure at the end of next year if he gets an NSF grant, and has been encouraged to go early by the department. He is 36 and has many, many publications and citations. What he doesn’t have yet is a big grant.

Anyway, i can outearn him fairly soon if I am not mommy tracked, and this matters to me because I highly value financial security.

Oof. An academic who is trying to get NSF grants? That is not the kind of scholar who can usually achieve work-life balance. If he wants to convince you that he could be the default parent, I’d ask him to describe 2-3 scholars who he admires who prioritize their families. Ask him really concrete questions about how they structure their work lives to do things like drop offs and pick ups, how often they travel for conferences/lectures/research, etc., and then ask him how he would do the same things. He needs to think really concretely about how he would detach from his work enough to raise kids.

FTR, you’re totally right that academia is not remunerative enough to merit the hours many people put into it. But it’s a calling for some people. Anyone who made the financial sacrifices to go into academia probably isn’t going to immediately recognize the sense in scaling back his own career so that his spouse can boost the HHI.

Wow. All of this. I have nothing to add.

-former academic

NP here. I have an academic husband who does 2/3 of the work in he family. He has had tenure for a while though and while he runs a very high powered group (major grants, awards, press etc) he is super organized and driven and wants to make kids a priority. He is also established enough that stepping back doesn’t make him as nervous. That said I agre with above that he is probably the exception. I recommend counseling where you put all of this on the table. And are you willing to forgo kids if he won’t step up? What is your plan in that case?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
I have no idea and cannot comment on your marriage. Both DH and I have solid careers, making well over 500k combined. He is in sales and works from home and has the most glorious flexible work schedule. He does probably 70% of the domestic duties (shuttling kids around, making and taking kids to doctors appointments, doing laundry, getting the kids homework done). This is mainly because I'm physically in an office 3-4 days a week and when I'm having downtime at work taking to co-workers, he is putting in a load of laundry or running a kid to the orthodontist. I just do not have the hours in the day that he has to devote to domestic life. If he was not able to do these things and had my similar work schedule, we would simply have to outsource more or hire an AuPair and and someone to do the laundry

I suppose I just married a normal respectful human being who is fully aware that being a father take effort.

People who say stuff like this are not even trying to be helpful. For most of humanity, and certainly most of modern America, the stuff you describe your DH doing has not been the norm. And it's really hard to break out of "expected" patterns if you aren't 100% conscious at every moment. My DH did a ton of domestic stuff before his career took off (all meal prep, grocery shopping, joint laundry like towels etc). Now our nanny does this stuff, and I don't think he'd even be able to figure out how to do it. But if our nanny is sick, guess who does it? My DH isn't a misogynistic monster, but he's not fully conscious of the gender dynamics at play in our relationshp. It doesn't make him a man-child...but it makes him pretty typical.

Sounds like your DH is really progressive about ensuring equal division of labor...why not be happy about that instead of putting down people whose experience is different?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am a successful academic, a mom and the default parent. BUT, being the default parent has entailed considerable sacrifices during my academic career. I have male colleagues who are not the DP who are able to travel every summer on research trips, take sabbaticals abroad and attend multiple international conferences per year.

When my kids were little, I published like a fiend and did a great deal of academic reading and writing in bizarre venues (in the cafeteria at a local high school while my kids were in youth orchestra, in the stands at day long swim meets). I made it work. BUT I also had to play the mom card on occasion. For years I didn't teach evening graduate seminars because I needed to be home.

However, if your husband doesn't have tenure yet he needs to be on campus, doing all the crappy facetime things that we expect. He needs to attend other people's research presentations, volunteer to lead the club, etc.

We made it work in our family because we all sacrificed and pitched in to make sure mom got tenure. This meant a lot of frozen pizza and precooked chickens and crazy weekends where both parents drove kids to activities and did errands in between. It meant lower expectations for holiday decorating and meals and birthday parties and things. It also meant paying more for a house cleaner, online shopping, etc. because one person cannot do it all.

Even if you think you can convince your husband to kick back and put family first, the whole family needs to understand that until he gets tenure, you may be looking at a dirty house, etc. It also means teaching your kids to be independent as soon as humanly possible -- doing their own laundry by the age of 9, making their own lunches and not forgetting their crap and expecting someone to deliver it to school!

It will not be a walk in the park.

OP here. Thank you for your perspective.

I think I am really having a hard time imagining exactly what having a kid will be like. My husband will get tenure (or get kicked out) well before our first kid is in kindergarten. I am picturing day care drop offs and pick ups and sick days being the major obstacles to either of us having uninterrupted work. Based on how I am imagining kids, don't the activities and really time consuming things start when the kids are a bit older? I am not planning on having a 3 year old do a lot of activities. Am I missing something in my perspective (serious question)?

I don't have high expectations around how the house is run. We have a roomba (LIFE SAVING), and we keep the house clutter free. I expect post baby we'll hire a twice monthly cleaner to do bathrooms and dusting.

I don't care about holiday decorating. I don't care about elaborate cooking.

Here is what I would want from my husband if we were to have a kid:

*Do child's laundry and put it away (I do his and mine currently to ensure we have unwrinkled work clothing). I figure he can do cotton children's clothing without too much trouble. I also don't care if the kid looks like a fashion icon or even matches.
*Do morning routine with child so I can get to the office early (I get most work done in AM as I am a morning person) and my office in general is morning office (Lot's of people leave by 3:30 or 4 to pick up kids at daycare).
*Clean up dinner, load and unload dishwasher in evenings (I am picturing that I would do daycare pickup, dinner and bedtime routine with child)
*Be primary contact with child's doctor and be the one responsible for keeping on top of that, arranging dr.'s appointments around his teaching and seminar schedule
*Be primarily contact with daycare in case child is sick, needs to be picked up early, etc. UNLESS it conflicts with his teaching schedule (his teaching requirement is 2-1, so as light as it gets)

Am I missing anything major or am I being unrealistic?

I think your basic framework is reasonable, but you're missing a lot of the intangible and asynchronous tasks of the default parent. These are the things that default parents complain dominate their head space and non-default parents don't see what the big deal is. So who will:

--chaperone field trips (our daycare started them at age 3 with chaperones required for all field trips)
--attend day care shows and parties
--cover sick days
--cover snow days (and other weird weather closings)
--cover random unexpected daycare closings like for a national day of mourning (hello Wednesday!) or a live action shooter drill
--earn the 20 service points that our preschool requires, from such activities as demonstrating something to the class or baking a dish for teacher appreciation day
--coordinate teacher holiday gifts and teacher appreciation week gifts
--track when your kid(s) need new shoes and clothes and buy them
--coordinate christmas and birthday gifts
--plan the kid(s) birthday parties
--coordinate attendance at other kids' birthday parties (and buy gifts for those parties)
--organize play dates (I thought I could skip this one, but my kid was suffering socially as early as preK3!!!)
--take kid(s) to the dentist
--interface with grandparents, including sending pictures as necessary
--take kid(s) to specialists like developmental pediatrician, speech therapist, etc., as necessary
--sign up for and take kid(s) to swimming lessons (I know you said you could skip extracurriculars, and we largely do, but swimming is a life skill, and it's best learned early, so hard to skip)
--take kid(s) for haircuts
--clip fingernails, put lotion on kid(s)
--sort through the school photos, order the ones you want, and send back the others
--call the health insurance to argue about a claim
--read about how to deal with a specific parenting challenge

Anyway, that's just off the top of my head things my husband and I have done in the last month or have coming up. I do have three kids under five, and it's definitely multiplicative, so if you're only planning on one, you and your husband will have to do all this stuff, but not as often. (Also, with such young kids, my list doesn't reflect whatever we will have to do once they're in elementary school.)

Personally, I love having kids, and I do probably 80% of the stuff listed above while working full time, so I wouldn't let this list prohibit you from having kids. But I would use it and others you might find via google as fodder for thought (or discussion with your husband).

Oh dear god. Lists like this make me not want to have kids at all.

The first items are absurd. There has to be a daycare somewhere that actually watches children of parents who work?

[Anonymous]

^ That list is ridiculous. Lots of shit just made up to seem busy.

"Interface with grandparents"? Get over yourself.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:^ That list is ridiculous. Lots of shit just made up to seem busy.

"Interface with grandparents"? Get over yourself.

I don’t know. If I didn’t prod DH we would never send holiday cards or call his family.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:^ That list is ridiculous. Lots of shit just made up to seem busy.

"Interface with grandparents"? Get over yourself.

I don’t know. If I didn’t prod DH we would never send holiday cards or call his family.

Are holiday cards REALLY that important?

[Anonymous]

Every time we talk to my MIL on the phone, I get shit because I don't mail her photographs of the children. She doesn't have internet and doesn't participate in social media, etc. I have a full time job and don't think it should be my responsibility to upload the photos to snapfish and have them mailed to her on a regular basis. My husband doesn't do it either so basically she only gets a christmas card. In that scenario, I think it's up to my MIL either to learn a little something about social media, or my DH to send the photos. Not my concern.

But I'm still pretty sure she thinks I"m a shitty mother and person.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am a successful academic, a mom and the default parent. BUT, being the default parent has entailed considerable sacrifices during my academic career. I have male colleagues who are not the DP who are able to travel every summer on research trips, take sabbaticals abroad and attend multiple international conferences per year.

When my kids were little, I published like a fiend and did a great deal of academic reading and writing in bizarre venues (in the cafeteria at a local high school while my kids were in youth orchestra, in the stands at day long swim meets). I made it work. BUT I also had to play the mom card on occasion. For years I didn't teach evening graduate seminars because I needed to be home.

However, if your husband doesn't have tenure yet he needs to be on campus, doing all the crappy facetime things that we expect. He needs to attend other people's research presentations, volunteer to lead the club, etc.

We made it work in our family because we all sacrificed and pitched in to make sure mom got tenure. This meant a lot of frozen pizza and precooked chickens and crazy weekends where both parents drove kids to activities and did errands in between. It meant lower expectations for holiday decorating and meals and birthday parties and things. It also meant paying more for a house cleaner, online shopping, etc. because one person cannot do it all.

Even if you think you can convince your husband to kick back and put family first, the whole family needs to understand that until he gets tenure, you may be looking at a dirty house, etc. It also means teaching your kids to be independent as soon as humanly possible -- doing their own laundry by the age of 9, making their own lunches and not forgetting their crap and expecting someone to deliver it to school!

It will not be a walk in the park.

OP here. Thank you for your perspective.

I think I am really having a hard time imagining exactly what having a kid will be like. My husband will get tenure (or get kicked out) well before our first kid is in kindergarten. I am picturing day care drop offs and pick ups and sick days being the major obstacles to either of us having uninterrupted work. Based on how I am imagining kids, don't the activities and really time consuming things start when the kids are a bit older? I am not planning on having a 3 year old do a lot of activities. Am I missing something in my perspective (serious question)?

I don't have high expectations around how the house is run. We have a roomba (LIFE SAVING), and we keep the house clutter free. I expect post baby we'll hire a twice monthly cleaner to do bathrooms and dusting.

I don't care about holiday decorating. I don't care about elaborate cooking.

Here is what I would want from my husband if we were to have a kid:

*Do child's laundry and put it away (I do his and mine currently to ensure we have unwrinkled work clothing). I figure he can do cotton children's clothing without too much trouble. I also don't care if the kid looks like a fashion icon or even matches.
*Do morning routine with child so I can get to the office early (I get most work done in AM as I am a morning person) and my office in general is morning office (Lot's of people leave by 3:30 or 4 to pick up kids at daycare).
*Clean up dinner, load and unload dishwasher in evenings (I am picturing that I would do daycare pickup, dinner and bedtime routine with child)
*Be primary contact with child's doctor and be the one responsible for keeping on top of that, arranging dr.'s appointments around his teaching and seminar schedule
*Be primarily contact with daycare in case child is sick, needs to be picked up early, etc. UNLESS it conflicts with his teaching schedule (his teaching requirement is 2-1, so as light as it gets)

Am I missing anything major or am I being unrealistic?

I think your basic framework is reasonable, but you're missing a lot of the intangible and asynchronous tasks of the default parent. These are the things that default parents complain dominate their head space and non-default parents don't see what the big deal is. So who will:

--chaperone field trips (our daycare started them at age 3 with chaperones required for all field trips)
--attend day care shows and parties
--cover sick days
--cover snow days (and other weird weather closings)
--cover random unexpected daycare closings like for a national day of mourning (hello Wednesday!) or a live action shooter drill
--earn the 20 service points that our preschool requires, from such activities as demonstrating something to the class or baking a dish for teacher appreciation day
--coordinate teacher holiday gifts and teacher appreciation week gifts
--track when your kid(s) need new shoes and clothes and buy them
--coordinate christmas and birthday gifts
--plan the kid(s) birthday parties
--coordinate attendance at other kids' birthday parties (and buy gifts for those parties)
--organize play dates (I thought I could skip this one, but my kid was suffering socially as early as preK3!!!)
--take kid(s) to the dentist
--interface with grandparents, including sending pictures as necessary
--take kid(s) to specialists like developmental pediatrician, speech therapist, etc., as necessary
--sign up for and take kid(s) to swimming lessons (I know you said you could skip extracurriculars, and we largely do, but swimming is a life skill, and it's best learned early, so hard to skip)
--take kid(s) for haircuts
--clip fingernails, put lotion on kid(s)
--sort through the school photos, order the ones you want, and send back the others
--call the health insurance to argue about a claim
--read about how to deal with a specific parenting challenge

Anyway, that's just off the top of my head things my husband and I have done in the last month or have coming up. I do have three kids under five, and it's definitely multiplicative, so if you're only planning on one, you and your husband will have to do all this stuff, but not as often. (Also, with such young kids, my list doesn't reflect whatever we will have to do once they're in elementary school.)

Personally, I love having kids, and I do probably 80% of the stuff listed above while working full time, so I wouldn't let this list prohibit you from having kids. But I would use it and others you might find via google as fodder for thought (or discussion with your husband).

Another one: find and cultivate relationships with occasional babysitters, and then coordinate and schedule with them for date nights and other events. (I find that this is almost necessarily a mom job because dads coordinating with young women is just too complicated/uncomfortable. And all the babysitters we've found are young women. And, yes, I object to all the gendered assumptions here, but this is the world we live in.)

Be up with kid multiple times a night breastfeeding, or for whatever reason, for years on end if you have a bad sleeper...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am a successful academic, a mom and the default parent. BUT, being the default parent has entailed considerable sacrifices during my academic career. I have male colleagues who are not the DP who are able to travel every summer on research trips, take sabbaticals abroad and attend multiple international conferences per year.

[edited for brevity]

It will not be a walk in the park.

OP here. Thank you for your perspective.

I think I am really having a hard time imagining exactly what having a kid will be like. My husband will get tenure (or get kicked out) well before our first kid is in kindergarten. I am picturing day care drop offs and pick ups and sick days being the major obstacles to either of us having uninterrupted work. Based on how I am imagining kids, don't the activities and really time consuming things start when the kids are a bit older? I am not planning on having a 3 year old do a lot of activities. Am I missing something in my perspective (serious question)?

I don't have high expectations around how the house is run. We have a roomba (LIFE SAVING), and we keep the house clutter free. I expect post baby we'll hire a twice monthly cleaner to do bathrooms and dusting.

I don't care about holiday decorating. I don't care about elaborate cooking.

Here is what I would want from my husband if we were to have a kid:

*Do child's laundry and put it away (I do his and mine currently to ensure we have unwrinkled work clothing). I figure he can do cotton children's clothing without too much trouble. I also don't care if the kid looks like a fashion icon or even matches.
*Do morning routine with child so I can get to the office early (I get most work done in AM as I am a morning person) and my office in general is morning office (Lot's of people leave by 3:30 or 4 to pick up kids at daycare).
*Clean up dinner, load and unload dishwasher in evenings (I am picturing that I would do daycare pickup, dinner and bedtime routine with child)
*Be primary contact with child's doctor and be the one responsible for keeping on top of that, arranging dr.'s appointments around his teaching and seminar schedule
*Be primarily contact with daycare in case child is sick, needs to be picked up early, etc. UNLESS it conflicts with his teaching schedule (his teaching requirement is 2-1, so as light as it gets)

Am I missing anything major or am I being unrealistic?

I think your basic framework is reasonable, but you're missing a lot of the intangible and asynchronous tasks of the default parent. These are the things that default parents complain dominate their head space and non-default parents don't see what the big deal is. So who will:

--chaperone field trips (our daycare started them at age 3 with chaperones required for all field trips)
--attend day care shows and parties
--cover sick days
--cover snow days (and other weird weather closings)
--cover random unexpected daycare closings like for a national day of mourning (hello Wednesday!) or a live action shooter drill
--earn the 20 service points that our preschool requires, from such activities as demonstrating something to the class or baking a dish for teacher appreciation day
--coordinate teacher holiday gifts and teacher appreciation week gifts
--track when your kid(s) need new shoes and clothes and buy them
--coordinate christmas and birthday gifts
--plan the kid(s) birthday parties
--coordinate attendance at other kids' birthday parties (and buy gifts for those parties)
--organize play dates (I thought I could skip this one, but my kid was suffering socially as early as preK3!!!)
--take kid(s) to the dentist
--interface with grandparents, including sending pictures as necessary
--take kid(s) to specialists like developmental pediatrician, speech therapist, etc., as necessary
--sign up for and take kid(s) to swimming lessons (I know you said you could skip extracurriculars, and we largely do, but swimming is a life skill, and it's best learned early, so hard to skip)
--take kid(s) for haircuts
--clip fingernails, put lotion on kid(s)
--sort through the school photos, order the ones you want, and send back the others
--call the health insurance to argue about a claim
--read about how to deal with a specific parenting challenge

Anyway, that's just off the top of my head things my husband and I have done in the last month or have coming up. I do have three kids under five, and it's definitely multiplicative, so if you're only planning on one, you and your husband will have to do all this stuff, but not as often. (Also, with such young kids, my list doesn't reflect whatever we will have to do once they're in elementary school.)

Personally, I love having kids, and I do probably 80% of the stuff listed above while working full time, so I wouldn't let this list prohibit you from having kids. But I would use it and others you might find via google as fodder for thought (or discussion with your husband).

Oh dear god. Lists like this make me not want to have kids at all.

The first items are absurd. There has to be a daycare somewhere that actually watches children of parents who work?

Just wait until the kid(s) hits elementary school and there are days closed for teacher professional development and conferences seemingly every other week... but... do think about things like thank you notes and grocery shopping - the mundane stuff life is made up of. Honestly - if you love your husband, and love your kid, you'll get through it. Lowered expectations help a lot (there are days and weeks where it feels like victory that everyone got fed with something (not necessarily locavore organic balanced nutrition) and is alive at the end of the day. Take a deep breath, dive in and have some fun (otherwise, why bother!??)

[Anonymous]

I'm the originator of the default parent list a few posts ago, and I just thought I'd clarify a few things.

First, I never said that everything was **mandatory.** I even noted that some things like swimming lessons are optional. Birthday party attendance and hosting is obviously optional as well; I just personally can't imagine not letting my kid go to birthday parties.

Second, I sincerely hope that you never wake up to text messages from your mom asking for a picture of your toddler in the shirt she just sent, or an email from your mother-in-law complaining that the dropbox link you sent her "doesn't work," and she needs access to the photos so she can make a photo book. If you either don't get these messages or can ignore them, fantastic. They just happen to take a fair amount of bandwidth for me and my husband. (Fortunately, he deals with his mom's tech issues!!)

Third, there are definitely childcare options that don't require as much backup coverage as daycare does! Hiring a nanny probably gets more days covered overall. We've done both daycare and nanny, and I found that nanny had its own set of costs. You have to find, hire, and socialize this person. She might leave and only give you two weeks notice, and then you find yourself scrambling and probably covering some days in between nannies. And you have to be someone's "manager," which I found I just didn't have any patience for in my personal life. So, although daycare has a lot of closures, I like that they are mostly more predictable than a nanny's absences.

The daycare coverage issue is also mitigated if you have local grandparents or other family who can help in a pinch. That just doesn't happen to be our situation.

Anyway, you can argue with my list. Those are all things that have come up in my family recently, but some of them probably are not mandatory. And goodness knows we do a craptastic job with a lot of them--hair cuts and nail clipping in particular.

Except going to the dentist. I'm not arguing about that one, and I'm not waiting until my kid is FIVE to go to the dentist.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm the originator of the default parent list a few posts ago, and I just thought I'd clarify a few things.

First, I never said that everything was **mandatory.** I even noted that some things like swimming lessons are optional. Birthday party attendance and hosting is obviously optional as well; I just personally can't imagine not letting my kid go to birthday parties.

Second, I sincerely hope that you never wake up to text messages from your mom asking for a picture of your toddler in the shirt she just sent, or an email from your mother-in-law complaining that the dropbox link you sent her "doesn't work," and she needs access to the photos so she can make a photo book. If you either don't get these messages or can ignore them, fantastic. They just happen to take a fair amount of bandwidth for me and my husband. (Fortunately, he deals with his mom's tech issues!!)

Third, there are definitely childcare options that don't require as much backup coverage as daycare does! Hiring a nanny probably gets more days covered overall. We've done both daycare and nanny, and I found that nanny had its own set of costs. You have to find, hire, and socialize this person. She might leave and only give you two weeks notice, and then you find yourself scrambling and probably covering some days in between nannies. And you have to be someone's "manager," which I found I just didn't have any patience for in my personal life. So, although daycare has a lot of closures, I like that they are mostly more predictable than a nanny's absences.

The daycare coverage issue is also mitigated if you have local grandparents or other family who can help in a pinch. That just doesn't happen to be our situation.

Anyway, you can argue with my list. Those are all things that have come up in my family recently, but some of them probably are not mandatory. And goodness knows we do a craptastic job with a lot of them--hair cuts and nail clipping in particular.

Except going to the dentist. I'm not arguing about that one, and I'm not waiting until my kid is FIVE to go to the dentist.

The flabbergasting thing to me about what you wrote is how you considered what I would call optional (chaperoning a field trip for daycare!! LOL) mandatory, and what I would call mandatory (swim lessons if child is going to be near a pool) optional.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm the originator of the default parent list a few posts ago, and I just thought I'd clarify a few things.

First, I never said that everything was **mandatory.** I even noted that some things like swimming lessons are optional. Birthday party attendance and hosting is obviously optional as well; I just personally can't imagine not letting my kid go to birthday parties.

Second, I sincerely hope that you never wake up to text messages from your mom asking for a picture of your toddler in the shirt she just sent, or an email from your mother-in-law complaining that the dropbox link you sent her "doesn't work," and she needs access to the photos so she can make a photo book. If you either don't get these messages or can ignore them, fantastic. They just happen to take a fair amount of bandwidth for me and my husband. (Fortunately, he deals with his mom's tech issues!!)

Third, there are definitely childcare options that don't require as much backup coverage as daycare does! Hiring a nanny probably gets more days covered overall. We've done both daycare and nanny, and I found that nanny had its own set of costs. You have to find, hire, and socialize this person. She might leave and only give you two weeks notice, and then you find yourself scrambling and probably covering some days in between nannies. And you have to be someone's "manager," which I found I just didn't have any patience for in my personal life. So, although daycare has a lot of closures, I like that they are mostly more predictable than a nanny's absences.

The daycare coverage issue is also mitigated if you have local grandparents or other family who can help in a pinch. That just doesn't happen to be our situation.

Anyway, you can argue with my list. Those are all things that have come up in my family recently, but some of them probably are not mandatory. And goodness knows we do a craptastic job with a lot of them--hair cuts and nail clipping in particular.

Except going to the dentist. I'm not arguing about that one, and I'm not waiting until my kid is FIVE to go to the dentist.

The flabbergasting thing to me about what you wrote is how you considered what I would call optional (chaperoning a field trip for daycare!! LOL) mandatory, and what I would call mandatory (swim lessons if child is going to be near a pool) optional.

Oh, I should have explained better. In our case, chaperoning **was** mandatory when our kid was three. The whole class went on field trips, and three year olds each had to have their own chaperone. It was pretty absurd, and they subsequently scaled back the field trips pretty dramatically, so I think a lot of us must have complained.

And swim lessons are not optional in my family. I was just saying that others might consider them optional.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm the originator of the default parent list a few posts ago, and I just thought I'd clarify a few things.

First, I never said that everything was **mandatory.** I even noted that some things like swimming lessons are optional. Birthday party attendance and hosting is obviously optional as well; I just personally can't imagine not letting my kid go to birthday parties.

Second, I sincerely hope that you never wake up to text messages from your mom asking for a picture of your toddler in the shirt she just sent, or an email from your mother-in-law complaining that the dropbox link you sent her "doesn't work," and she needs access to the photos so she can make a photo book. If you either don't get these messages or can ignore them, fantastic. They just happen to take a fair amount of bandwidth for me and my husband. (Fortunately, he deals with his mom's tech issues!!)

Third, there are definitely childcare options that don't require as much backup coverage as daycare does! Hiring a nanny probably gets more days covered overall. We've done both daycare and nanny, and I found that nanny had its own set of costs. You have to find, hire, and socialize this person. She might leave and only give you two weeks notice, and then you find yourself scrambling and probably covering some days in between nannies. And you have to be someone's "manager," which I found I just didn't have any patience for in my personal life. So, although daycare has a lot of closures, I like that they are mostly more predictable than a nanny's absences.

The daycare coverage issue is also mitigated if you have local grandparents or other family who can help in a pinch. That just doesn't happen to be our situation.

Anyway, you can argue with my list. Those are all things that have come up in my family recently, but some of them probably are not mandatory. And goodness knows we do a craptastic job with a lot of them--hair cuts and nail clipping in particular.

Except going to the dentist. I'm not arguing about that one, and I'm not waiting until my kid is FIVE to go to the dentist.

The flabbergasting thing to me about what you wrote is how you considered what I would call optional (chaperoning a field trip for daycare!! LOL) mandatory, and what I would call mandatory (swim lessons if child is going to be near a pool) optional.

Oh, I should have explained better. In our case, chaperoning **was** mandatory when our kid was three. The whole class went on field trips, and three year olds each had to have their own chaperone. It was pretty absurd, and they subsequently scaled back the field trips pretty dramatically, so I think a lot of us must have complained.

And swim lessons are not optional in my family. I was just saying that others might consider them optional.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am a successful academic, a mom and the default parent. BUT, being the default parent has entailed considerable sacrifices during my academic career. I h

I think your basic framework is reasonable, but you're missing a lot of the intangible and asynchronous tasks of the default parent. These are the things that default parents complain dominate their head space and non-default parents don't see what the big deal is. So who will:

--chaperone field trips (our daycare started them at age 3 with chaperones required for all field trips)
--attend day care shows and parties
--cover sick days
--cover snow days (and other weird weather closings)
--cover random unexpected daycare closings like for a national day of mourning (hello Wednesday!) or a live action shooter drill
--earn the 20 service points that our preschool requires, from such activities as demonstrating something to the class or baking a dish for teacher appreciation day
--coordinate teacher holiday gifts and teacher appreciation week gifts
--track when your kid(s) need new shoes and clothes and buy them
--coordinate christmas and birthday gifts
--plan the kid(s) birthday parties
--coordinate attendance at other kids' birthday parties (and buy gifts for those parties)
--organize play dates (I thought I could skip this one, but my kid was suffering socially as early as preK3!!!)
--take kid(s) to the dentist
--interface with grandparents, including sending pictures as necessary
--take kid(s) to specialists like developmental pediatrician, speech therapist, etc., as necessary
--sign up for and take kid(s) to swimming lessons (I know you said you could skip extracurriculars, and we largely do, but swimming is a life skill, and it's best learned early, so hard to skip)
--take kid(s) for haircuts
--clip fingernails, put lotion on kid(s)
--sort through the school photos, order the ones you want, and send back the others
--call the health insurance to argue about a claim
--read about how to deal with a specific parenting challenge

Anyway, that's just off the top of my head things my husband and I have done in the last month or have coming up. I do have three kids under five, and it's definitely multiplicative, so if you're only planning on one, you and your husband will have to do all this stuff, but not as often. (Also, with such young kids, my list doesn't reflect whatever we will have to do once they're in elementary school.)

Personally, I love having kids, and I do probably 80% of the stuff listed above while working full time, so I wouldn't let this list prohibit you from having kids. But I would use it and others you might find via google as fodder for thought (or discussion with your husband).

Oh dear god. Lists like this make me not want to have kids at all.

The first items are absurd. There has to be a daycare somewhere that actually watches children of parents who work?

There isn't. At least none that will watch your kid when your kid is sick (which happens quite often when your kid is young). You could have a nanny, but nanny also needs time off (you can't expect her to work year round without a break) and will also get sick. Some kind of backup like always available local grandparents is great, but few of us have that.

That list sounds pretty reasonable to me (parent of an 8 and 4 yo). There are things you could skip, and there are some things I said I wouldn't do before I was a parent, and I changed my mind after. Because most of us want to be good parents, not just non-negligent ones, and when there is a need you see in your child (like you see your child being really shy and timid at preschool and the teacher suggests that maybe some playdates would help), it's hard not to act.