We always have envisioned sharing the parental responsibility equally. As we were confronted by the parental mental load, we applied some agile practices and principles to create a version of agile family organisation, which we refer as Agile4Parenting.
It is an evolving set of applied practices, which we are happy to share. In the previous posts I’ve discussed the roles & responsibilities and the artefacts. This post centers about the events and iterations.
Planing sessions
Some time ago we had very heated arguments about tasks noted on our shared family to-do list that stayed there for weeks with no progress. We figured out that we have a very different attitude towards those tasks. While one of us treated the to-do list as a backlog of items that need to be done at somepoint in the future, another one saw them as a commitment to finish those task in the most nearest future.
We realised that we need to discuss the timing and the priorities of those tasks, creating a common commitment.
That is where we looked at each other and realised, we need regular planning sessions.
We have been holding our weekly plannings on Sunday nights since over three years and that significantly reduced tension potential in our family.
A planning session includes looking over our calendars and making sure that the balancing act between two demanding jobs, childcare and private events is going to work during an upcoming week. After that we prioritise our common to-dos and commit on which tasks we want to get done during the week.
After we agree on our weekly schedule, we adapt the picture calendar for our older toddler. We discuss the week with the kid as a way to offer a possibility being a part of the planning process.
We value frequent, open and informal communication
The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
We found out that explicit, open and frequent communication is the vehicle that runs our family.
The worst thing one can do in sharing the responsibility is to assume someone has the same knowledge.
Although we use transparent and shared system of notes and to-dos, we believe that noted is not necessarily communicated.
Though we hold our weekly meetings we still talk a lot about planning, to-do’s, unexpected events, decisions etc. Making sure that everyone involved posses the information necessary to navigate our complex and sometimes stressful family live without being constantly overwhelmed.
Learn and iterate
We have tried to hold formal weekly retros, but the practice did not work well for us. There obviously was no way to involve a neutral moderator for the regular sessions.
So we pivoted to informal and more personal formats to reflect on our co-parenting. Not holding a formal event does not mean, however, that the agile learning loop of transparency, inspection and adaptation is not valued in our family.
Our lives are a constant change. As our kids grow, our needs as individuals and family change greatly and we need to keep learning and adapting.
And finally – A week is not a sprint
And last, but not least. When adapting some agile practices for usage at home, we need to remember to be kind and generous to each other. Or in words of agile manifesto, to keep individuals and interactions over processes and tools. As all in all it is about co-existing with people we love and want to see happy. So if something goes not as expected and someone is just more tired then usual, we do not hesitate to throw our to-do lists away and just cuddle.
Cuddling a crying toddler (or a parent) is sometimes the most important commitment in the world.
We entered parenting with a vision of sharing the parental responsibility equally. As we were confronted by the parental mental load we applied some agile practices and principles we knew from our professional live in order to create the practical tools to share parental work as a team.
We refer to the evolving system as Agile4Parenting. In my previous post I discussed the roles & responsibilities how we understand them in our family. This post explores the artefacts, such as backlog, and the Agile4Parenting practices around them.
Use a shared backlog
The trouble with sharing the parenthood load is that there are a lot of invisible, repetitive tasks involved. There is a daily routine to be build anew with every new kid. This routine tend to need adaptation as the kid grow.
The parents of young children tend to be confronted by new decisions constantly, whereas needing to maintain a routine of rather boring though necessary tasks and being constantly stressed by unexpected events and a lack of sleep.
It is a complex and stressful environment to navigate. Sharing this burden means many a thing needs to be negotiated, communicated and noted.
We started to note common tasks in a form of a shared backlog long before becoming parents. For example, we had a physical kanban-board to organise our wedding party. We used a digital backlog of to-dos while building our house.
It was quite obvious that the parenting responsibilities where added on the shared to-do list together with all the other tasks we shared, like cleaning the house or paying bills.
Everything can be put on the shared backlog by anyone. However, the task is only acted upon once it is communicated and prioritised. Though some to-dos can be dealt with by only one person in a family, putting them on a shared backlog emphasise the shared responsibility for the task and helps to create the transparency.
Write things down to create transperancy
Transparency is highly valued at the agile mindset, it is defined as one of three pillars of scrum and the basis for empiricism.
We try to create transparency by maintaining shared notes, to-dos, calendars and so on.
While holding responsibility for a job and parenting, our brains are often so full with tasks and thoughts that we are constantly on a border of being overwhelmed. We try to show mercy to our brains and note everything down.
If there is a to-do on a top of the mind and it is not dealt with right at the moment, it gets on a to-do list. After that it can be forgotten and allows more brain-space for other tasks.
Appointments, to-dos, notes, shopping lists, alarms, you name it. Without our smartphones and the internet we are lost.
Shared application to make knowledge accessible real-time
We created ashared informational infrastructur in order to minimize the necessity of asking e.g. on what is planed and where to find what.
We use technical solutions that allow us to share all kind of sources in real-time: calendars, documents, to-do-lists and notes, shopping lists, information on baby well-being, grocery shopping app, smart-home applications.
While there are surely a wide choice of technical solutions that can be used, we are happy to share our preferred providers.
We use a Google shared calendar to coordinate all the appointments and Google drive for shared documents.
Trello is our app to go for the shared backlog, to-do-lists and any kind of lists and notes, like a packing list for traveling with children.
We have recently changed to Bring it! for shopping lists. It works fairly well with Amazon Alexa and allows us to add missing items to the list while e.g. cooking. Unfortunately, there is no integration to our preferred shopping app Picnic. We dream of a feature to transform Bring it! shopping lists directly to an order.
We used Baby Daybook with both our babies to document baby-related activities like nursing, sleeping, meds, etc. and to share in real time. This spared us a daily briefing on babies well-being.
We share apps for our vacuuming robots, washing machine and other smart-home devices to see if a task has been started and finished.
We are so used to this infrastructure by now that it is hard to imagine how we could deal with all this information otherwise.
Tasks description: definition-of-done and acceptance criteria
We have agreed on a general definition on what a task includes in our home. This is close to a concept of the Definition-of-Done (DoD), used in agile development. Being responsible for an issue in our family includes the pre- and post-processing like creating appointments, planing, packing, cleaning up and paying the bills for the issue.
For example, the task like repairing a chair includes the process of cleaning up after it. So if there are still tools lying around on a kitchen table, the task is not done. Or if someone takes kids to the doctor, that person is responsible for packing the making an appointment, packing the snacks and making sure that the diaper back is re-filled after the appointment.
This DoD allows us to share the mental load and clarify the responsibilities without negotiating them every time anew.
Sometimes we still need aligning on what exactly a task that we are discussing includes and when it is actually considered as done. For example, we figured out that we had a very different understanding of what “cleaning a bathroom” task is about. For this we sometimes rely on the widely used practise of acceptance criteria, defining the concrete criteria that needs to be archived for a task to be considered as done.
Backlog prioritisation
The understanding of what tasks actually need to be thought of and done is different in different people. People offen have different thresholds on when they take care of a task, depending on their working style, individual likings and upbringing. For example, some families do laundry when the laundry basket is somewhat full. Other families do laundry three times a week. Yet other families do laundry when they lack clean clothes. If one person cannot stand full laundry basket and the other waits for their closet to lack fresh socks, the only way to share the task and to avoid conflict is to negotiate about the task and agree when and how it should be done.
By noting the tasks on the backlog we make them explicit. By negotiating the priority of a task regularly – weekly in our family – we make sure to create a common understanding on how urgent and important a task is.
Stop doing unnecessary work
Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
We find it helpful to constantly consider if a task needs to be on the backlog in the first place. Does completing a task brings us value or can it be just dropped? The family resources are limited and sometimes one just needs to prioritise.
For example, we started to order our groceries more often then not, making our time-consuming grocery shopping obsolete. Our garden can have used some more weeding this summer, but gardening, which we generally enjoy, feels more like a burden now.
Just asking ourselves, if some re-occurring tasks can be done less often, can leave some time for important activities such as playing with kids or resting. Agreeing on not doing a task is not laziness, it is an ability to prioritise and to avoid waste.
Automate
One of the efficient ways to stop doing things is automation.
If a task can be automated, automate it.
We are in a privileged position to allow ourselves to be helped out by vacuuming & mowing robots and some smarthome automation. We rely on automated synchronisation of different lists, apps and automatic reminders anywhere possible. Automation does not only help us to skip a task execution, but also lessens the mental load.
Stay tuned
In the next post I am going to discuss the Agile4Parenting practices concerning the events we use to plan and iterate in our agile parenting team. Stay tuned.
We entered parenting with a vision of an equally shared parental responsibility. As described in my previous post about sharing the parental mental load, we struggled with the realisation of this vision quite a bit. At the start we had no mental model on how we can equally share the parenting tasks or the responsibility over them.
Luckily we both had been working with agile development teams for awhile. So while searching for solutions we naturally fell back on the agile mindset. In this new situation, we tried to adapt the usual practices used at our daily work with agile teams to the problem at hand.
We are happy to share what we have learned so far, though we are far from wishing to appear as a perfect family who have figured it all out. We have not, our parenting collaboration is a work in progress.
Today we are sharing some best practices concerning the roles and responsibilities in our parenting team.
Parenting team
Our parenting team is a team of two. We define our roles as equal team members of a self organizing team. The team needs to take care of both planning and caring out the tasks. We want to avoid a “manager – reportee” distribution of parenting tasks, where one person holds all the parental mental load.
Being always on duty is exhausting. Prioritising the needs of two little humans over one’s own continuously is unnerving. For the sake of our sanity and as a loving act, we want to distribute this work of worry.
Our goal is to share the responsibility, however, not necessary sharing every task equally. We need to organise the workload and to include the possibilities to tend to everyones’ needs. There is no one-size-fits-all solution that benefits everyone equally, as every person has their very specific needs.
Our main KPI is the satisfaction of all family members, not the equal number of changed diapers or kindergarden drop-offs.
Respect the needs
Respect is one of the scrum values and generally the foundation of the agile mindset. Sharing the workload respectfully based on personal needs instead of traditions, gender privileges or power dynamics is a foundation of our agile shared parenting. We have learned that the important KPI of a good labor division is not the exact and fair devision of every task, but the subjective feeling of the individual family members that their needs are seen and met in the best possible way.
The personal needs cannot be negotiated. The needs are there if they are met or not. If a person, for example, needs to sleep in, this need is real. What can be discussed is how and on what schedule this need can be accommodated in a family routine.
Though the labor division at home can lead to heated arguments, we need to remember to stay patient and kind. We are trying to build a system of responsibilities in a complex environment and no one knows what is right or wrong for a family without trying it out. Allowing ourselves to experiment with the roles and remembering that love and respect are involved is how we deal with the ever changing family challenges.
Define who is NOT in charge
Though we are both equally responsible, we figured out that it is crucial to define who is and who is NOT in charge at specific moments. Simply doubling the number of people worrying about the same thing does not make one’s brain calmer. One needs to make sure that it is possible at times to give the responsibility to another person entirely in order to concentrate on a different task in hand, like professional work.
We rotate the responsibility for bringing & picking the kids up from the kindergarden on a schedule. The slots can be switched on a short notice to accommodate the appointments. We rotate the responsibility for the bedtime, so every parent has a possibility to have some free evenings. We also rotate the responsibility for the kids on weekend mornings, so one of us has a chance to sleep a little longer. The parent that is not currently in charge still can help out or spend the time with the family if they like it, but they do not have to. The kids know this and accept it.
Furthermore, we align longer times of absence such as business travels or weekends-off with friends beforehand. We try to provide each other the freedom without overwhelming another parent. It is important for us to be able to do things outside the home without resentment or parental guilt.
Involve children and other care-givers
Some tasks can be forwarded outside the core parental team to both children and other care-givers, like grandparents or babysitters.
Due to corona and moving to a different city, it was a struggle for us to build the social network that can support us as additional care-givers to our children. We learned to value this support network a lot. It is also very satisfying to see how our children make friends and create significant relationship with people outside of our home. Contrary to the popular narrative, that young children need the attention of their mother alone, we found out that other attachment figures are beneficial both for child’s development and for parental well-being. We learned that it is important to build trust and allow those additional care-givers to take over tasks and responsibilities.
On the other hand, an age appropriate involvement in both planning and executing the tasks helps kids to become independent and responsible adults while lessening the workload of the parents. As with any delegating it needs time investment, enabling and leadership. We feel it is totally worth the effort and use some of Montessori techniques and principles to enable our toddlers’ independency.
Stay tuned
In the next post we are going to discuss the best practices concerning the artefacts we use to collaborate in our agile parenting team. Stay tuned.
Today is the last day of our shared parental leave, which I have spent at a nice conference in Stockholm. I am writing the first draft of this post on my late (delayed) flight back home where I am excited to get all the sleepy cuddles from both my baby and my toddler.
I had a wonderful day full of conversations. Among others, I had a chance to chat about parenting with a colleague, who is a mother of a toddler. We shared our experiences of taking parental leaves and returning to work full-time while parenting young children. My colleague reminded me how much of a privilege it is to be able to share the parental leave between the parents.
During both of our shared leaves, I’ve got asked repeatedly if I am not taking a full-time parental leave, because I was not able to afford it.
“Is it all about the money?” they asked. And I found it hard to give a short answer. Here is the long one.
Women sustain their families
First of all, I feel the question is deeply inappropriate. I can hardly imagine a father being ever asked if he continues working after kids because of the money.
“Surprisingly” women do work in order to sustain their families.
Moreover, in general, I see nothing wrong in wishing to earn money. Money is the way our society expresses value and appreciation. I don’t think anyone should feel guilty for wanting their work to be appreciated and well-paid.
Working mothers benefit their children
Then multiply studies show that investing in one’s career as a mother has considerable long-term benefits for both mother and her children. The children of working mothers have shown to benefit in ways ranging from lower levels of anxiety and depression to a better income as adults, So in a way I can see how my decision to take no long leaves can be seen as a very long-term investment in my kids finances. However, one thing, that matters to me personally, is that being raised by a working mother has a significant effect in fighting gender inequality. That is what I wish for my children’s future even more than financial security.
Financial risks of traditional gender roles
Leaving a career increases a risk of old-age poverty, which influences disproportionally more women in this country.
Besides, almost 40% of marriages fail, which makes career breaks a really high risk investment for a mother. Almost every 5th family in this country is a one-parent-households, 88% of which are households with a single mother. These households have the highest poverty risk in Germany.
So in a long-term perspective deciding not to take a 14 months (or longer) break from my career can be seen as a way to mitigate financial risks.
Parental leave payments, privilege and gender pay gap
In a short-term sight, the parental leave payment in Germany is designed in a way that sharing a parental leave is a privilege for financially more fortunate families.
The full-time parental leave is paid with a max. of 65% of the monthly income a parent had during the year before the birth of the child, but limited to €1800 a month.
Now, if we consider a family with a significant pay gap between the parents, it is a rather easy math. One needs to be able to afford a year, when a significantly better paid partner reduces their income at least to 65% of what they are making.
The gender pay gap has been estimated in Germany to 18% this year. Only 10% of women between 30 and 50 years old reach the income of €2k a month (after taxes) in Germany, whereas 42% of their male peers do so.
So the parental leave benefits system in Germany is basically financially rewarding an arrangement, where a parent with the lower income, usually a mother, takes the most part of the leave. And the expectation that women take longer leaves reinforces the gender pay gap, creating another reason for mothers to cut down their participation in the workforce.
Now, the rules for the part-time parental leave allow to earn up to half of the usual salary, compensating with the parental leave payments for the other half. This compensation is no more than 65% of the missing half of the monthly salary or no more than €900. However, the whole income is limited to about €2,5k a month. And as both parents share the parental leave, both incomes are getting restricted.
In our case, we missed a significant part of our yearly income and lived partly out of our bank account (both year 2020 and 2022), which is surely a great privilege and can hardly be afforded by most families.
Pay-offs we are hoping for
We have seen the shared parental leave as an investment in our family and wanted to share the experience of parenting our babies.
I was more than once asked if I feel bad about robbing my children of their mother’s constant presence.
And the answer is no. I am allowing them a gift of a father. Our children can create a much closer bond with their father, which is probable to strengthen as they grow. The research shows, that fathers present during the first years, are more involved in children lives later. Our children have two caregivers they are equally attached to. Furthermore, they have an opportunity to develop a mind model of all adults being able to pursue a meaningful professional occupation.
“So, is it about the money?” they asked.
No, not really. We are paying in missed income to be able to continue our professional careers while allowing our children to create the special bonds with both their parents.
Ever since we had started to discuss having a baby, it was important for us to share the parenting responsibilities, so none of us would become a “default” parent. We pictured that we both would be able to acquire meaningful parenting experiences while maintaining our personal and professional identities. We did explicitly not want that one of us would “manage a small enterprise at home” on top of their professional career, while the other would “help out with the kids”.
What we did not fully realize back then was how much communication, routine decisions and planing the sharing of responsibility requires. One needs to know for instance when a child was last fed, if it slept well, who is going to buy food, if the next playdate is taken care of, if the diaper bag is packed on time for the doctors appointment and if a child’s shoes are getting too small again.
We figured out, that sharing the responsibilities requires tools and heuristics. And while we had no model on how to share the parenting equally, we were able to fall back upon our professional skills. Fortunately, our extended experiences of working in self-organizing agile teams, managing projects, using remote collaboration tools and our agile mindsets in general were a great help.
In an iterative way we figured out several principles and tools to enable sharing. We were able to transform our parenting relationship from the “manager – reportee” model to a self-organizing agile team.
The invisible labor
There is this tendency that when several people are equally responsible for something, no one in particular is responsible.
Often there is one person who takes over a particular responsibility repeatedly and feels like having a bigger burden. And as one person silently takes care of the issue repeatedly, this task tends to become invisible to other people.
Though we were committed to share the responsibilities, we had to learn what it actually involves on the day-to-day level. And we quickly realized that we miss role models of what it means to share parenting equally.
As new parents we unconsciously started to rely on traditional patterns of sharing the responsibility. It took us some deep frustration, loud discussions, lots of negotiations and a feminist book to realize that the invisible work of worry, known as mental load, was the issue.
The mental load
The burden of parenting consists not only of countless diapers and sleepless nights, but of never-ending cognitive labor. The mental load as a term gained popularity after this comic by the french artist Emma was published by the Guardian in 2017.
This invisible labor involved in managing a family typically falls on women’s shoulders. Numerous research has shown how this phenomenon correlates with the well-being and health issues of women and mothers.
Mental load is about being the one in charge. Without wanting it we found ourselves in a typical “you should have asked” situation. I was the one managing the better part of baby related tasks, delegating, scheduling, preparing and checking the progress.
It occupied so much of my brain space that I felt overwhelmed, dissatisfied and less creative in other areas of my life. Putting in the language of evidence-based management, my ability to innovate was low. While my partner was sure he was doing his fair share of childcare, which was true if counted in hours or diapers, he was able to happily throw any responsibility on child’s well-being out of his head once I was around. I was the one to organize and prepare everything even when I was away from the child.
It was not easy to actually communicate what was wrong, until we stumbled upon a book on mental load, which opened up a space for the conversation. We learnt that sharing the mental load is a necessary step to transform the parenting roles from a “manager- reportee” to a self-organizing agile team.
Juggling priorities between parenting and work
Additionally to parenting two children under 3 years old we have two intellectually demanding jobs. There are two loads of professional responsibilities to juggle with the family mental load.
Anyone familiar with agile principles would be horrified with the idea of a team dealing with 3 different backlogs and 3 calendars. It is obviously challenging to figure out the priorities and to keep clear minds.
Furthermore, currently we are sharing our parental leave while working 20h a week each. Interestingly, the load of two part-time jobs and parenting duties does not translate in having one full-time job and a stay-at-home parent. Every parent still has their own professional mental load. There are two sets of appointments, long hours and important deadlines needed to be accommodated in the family schedule and priorities.
Continuous improvement
Having quite a lot of tasks and events to plan weekly, we are trying our best to accommodate all the needs and to keep sane. Though we are mostly able to cope, there are still days when we feel that our heads are exploding. Sometimes there are too many unexpected things happening. And then for instance a request of our wonderful kindergarten to handcraft whatever until Monday next week can become the last straw for a mental meltdown.
We are happy to share our adapted agile practices in the next post, though we are far from wishing to appear as a perfect family who have figured it all out. True to the agile principle we see our experience as a work in progress and a subject of continuous improvement.
Have you ever heard the joke about mother’s1 milk being the free baby food? It is free indeed if one does not consider a mother’s effort worth paying.
Nursing a baby is rather time consuming. It is a duty that allows no breaks, no weekends and often no sleep.
Nursing is something that is impossible to share for most couples on biological reasons.
It is often used as an excuse why mothers must leave the workplace for a while. However, some mothers return to work before weaning.
So what are the challenges a working mother with a breast-fed baby meets in the workforce?
Why not to go straight for formula
There are scientifically proven health benefits of human milk for babies.2 The World Health Organisation currently recommends to nurse children exclusively for the first six months of life and to continue breastfeeding up to two years of age or beyond. That is longer than a maximum paid parental leave in Germany. Besides, there is high social pressure on new mothers in this country to nurse their children.3
While expecting my first baby I decided to try nursing. I did it partly because of the health benefits for the baby, partly out of pure curiosity to experience this basic biological function.
We planed with six months of full-time parental leave for me at the start. We changed to the part-time parental leave after five months without weaning. Our first-born refused to take any formula and was not very happy with pumped milk.
As she was one year old, I returned to working full-time. She continued to nurse while eating solid foods until she was 18 months old and we were expecting the next baby.
The second baby is currently six month old and is still exclusively breast-fed. She accepts formula as needed, which makes the life much easier.
With two young children, I have been planning my work around nursing for over two years now.
The labor of feeding a tiny human
During the first weeks with a newborn one can spend up to 14 hours a day nursing. It gets easier as the baby grows. It takes some ten to twelve feedings summing up to 1,5 hours a day for a six months old baby. When solid foods are introduced, the nursing is gradually reduced until one to three feedings usually at the evening or during the night.
Pumping is even more time consuming, as one needs to sum up the time for collecting the milk and the time for feeding the baby.
The work of producing human milk cannot be shared and is hard to postpone to fit ones schedule. Some babies are more demanding than others.
I found that being the only source of food for a tiny human created some significant challenges for my time management and general productivity.
Everyday logistic challenges
A nursing mother needs to be around the exclusively breast-fed baby to feed every three to four hours. If the baby accepts pumped milk, the supply needs to be produced beforehand. So every time the mother leaves the house alone, she need to make arrangements.
A mother might need a possibility to pump to relief physical discomfort created by milk excess, when she is separated from a baby for over three hours. If the milk is then supposed to be fed to the baby, it needs refrigeration.
Responsibility
A nursing mother has the great responsibility to be available. If she gets hurt or falls ill, the life, the health and the psychological security of the baby might be endangered.
The pressure of this responsibility gave me some very hard time while nursing the first baby that refused to take any formula. I was more careful than ever.
Travelling
One is obviously not able to travel separately from the baby.
I expected this to be a great professional issue pre-covid. The covid isolation was helpful to continue nursing our first-born, as I hardly had any chance to spend a night outside the house.
However, as the world recovers from the pandemic, it might become an impediment again.
Especially it might be difficult to explain, why travelling is still an issue as a baby becomes a toddler and a mother returns from her parental leave.
Sleep, a lack of
A baby tends to nurse several times a night, so a mother does not get much uninterrupted sleep.
We are on the lucky side with this one, as our kids are rather good sleepers.
However, there were two months of my life when I was back to work and our first-born did not allow me more than 1,5 hours of uninterrupted sleep between the feedings. Those were not the happiest or the most productive months of my life, to put it mildly.
Nursing as a working mom
So how do workplaces support nursing mothers with those challenges?
In Germany there is a law, protecting nursing mothers. It allows breaks of at least half an hour twice a day when working no longer than eight hours a day. This nursing time is counted as working hours and is not the normal lunch break. It is handled more or less like bathroom breaks that are necessary for everyone and are tolerated.
It is nice to know I might take up to an hour daily to nurse. However, I am currently working part-time, four hours a day. I would hardly be able to accomplish anything if I spend an hour for nursing.
While working from home, I try to accommodate a five to ten minutes nursing break between the meetings. On the days I spend four hours at the office, the baby gets its bottle.
We considered to work full eight hours days, every other day instead of four hours everyday, but the complex logistic of nursing at the office prevented us from doing so.
Now, the 30 minutes breaks might be helpful when the baby is nearby. This includes driving home or having the baby brought to the mother twice a day. The breaks can also be used for pumping, which includes the necessity of milk refrigeration.
We felt it imposes too much logistic stress on us and does not accommodate the psychological and physiological needs of our babies. Nursing only twice in eight hours appears to be not enough for both our children.
Besides, there needs to be a space to nurse in the office.
Nursing room
There is a legal requirement in this country that employers provide a private room to nurse, though the law does not mention that a room needs to have specific furnishing or a fridge. So I heard stories of people storing their pumped milk in the office kitchen fridge as the only way to keep it fresh to feed it to their baby a day later.
While expecting my first-born I’ve asked for a possibility of a nursing room. The employer was rather surprised, as I apparently was the first person in the companies history asking this question. There was no room planned.
The day I was back from my first parental leave, covid lockdown happen and working from home became our reality. So there was no real need to insist on having a nursing room. I am sure that otherwise we could have solved the issue, as my employer is super flexible.
On the rare occasions I actually needed to nurse at the office, I did it in my car in the garage.
Having an extra need
I think the real difficulty around organising the working reality around nursing is less about the logistics and more about the necessity to communicate the extra need.
One needs to ask for a break in a meeting, to ask for a place to nurse, to ask to plan a workshop without travelling. It does not sound difficult, but it is.
Women are largely socialised not to mention their specific physiological issues in public. No matter if we are suffering from period pain, pregnancy nausea or menopause issues, we are expected to do so in silence or to risk appearing unprofessional because of our “hormones”. Breastfeeding is one of those physiological processes, connected to our nakedness, hormones and bodily liquids. The challenge is to break these behavioural patterns and start asking.
It is not especially helpful to work in an industry like IT, where it is so common to be the only female in a meeting room. It is neither helpful that mothers are often perceived as less professional in our culture, so it is not easy to emphasise on this very motherly issue.
Sometimes I feel that I struggle to advocate for my needs and to ask. I dislike the feeling of asking for something extra. However, every time I ask I create a bit more awareness and a bit more diversity, that might make it easier for others to talk of their special needs.
How to be an ally
If you have a new parent who might be nursing on your team, there is a couple of things you could do to make their life easier and your workspace more inclusive.
Consider asking them proactively on how to help them to combine work with nursing a new human.
If they need a room for nursing or pumping, make sure there is a refrigerator, a comfortable seat and ideally a sink.
Please respect the blockers in their calendar, as they might be necessary to sustain a baby.
If you want to be extra nice, end an online meeting 10 minutes earlier, so there is time to check on the baby. A positive side effect might include thankful participants, who get extra time to grab a coffee before the next call.
Try to be especially careful with late meetings or social gatherings during the possible bedtime, as nursed children tend to depend on nursing at their bedtime.
Please consider that any travel might be an issue and give the nursing person a possibility to participate remotely.
Thank you for being a great ally!
1 By saying “mother” in this post I mean any parent able to lactate. Please feel seen and included.
2 We need to admit though, that nursing is just one of many factors influencing a child’s health. Children fed with formula have all the chances to become healthy and happy adults. Fed is definitely best.
3 For some mothers the pressure to breastfeed creates a very special hell with all kind of physical and mental struggles. But even the luckiest of us still have to plan with possible difficulties. There is no guarantee the process works just fine with any new baby even for experienced mothers.
So which one of you is working and which one stays home with the kids?
We are currently sharing the parental leave for our youngest 5-months-old.
What are the legal possibilities to share the parental leave?
It is legally possible in Germany to take a part-time parental leave. One can receive partial parental benefits while continuing working part-time, though no more than 30 hours a week.
The financial benefits are limited in a way that makes it pointless to earn more than roughly a half of the previous salary. The actual calculation is rather complicated.
Each parent can take parental leave and it can be shared freely. The benefits are limited to max. 14 month full-time leave or up to combined 28 month part-time leave.
Have you made a break for the baby?
We both stayed at home for the first 2 months after our youngest arrived. For me as the mother it was a legal requirement as well as the necessity. The kids’ father took the family time to support me in this physically challenging time.
How much do you work?
After the break we both returned to our jobs part-time working 20 hours a week. We do 4 hours shifts (mornings or afternoons) and take turns in caring for the baby.
Basically each of us can wear a business suit for a pitch in the morning and spend an afternoon hanging out with a stroller in a nearby park.
Are your jobs fully remote?
We are normally working from home 3-4 days a week and go to the physical offices 1-2 times a week.
How do you deal with meetings outside of the scheduled working hours?
There are occasional virtual meetings we need to do outside our planned working (baby-free) hours. It takes some extra planing and sometimes the baby just joins the meeting. It is mostly possible to keep a young baby happy while doing other stuff. Though we already have some experiences in emergency nappy changing while hanging in a Teams meeting,
Why do you work? Is it about money?
As the benefits are limited to a maximum amount one is allowed to earn, we could have been significantly better off financially if we decided to share the parenting in a more traditional manner. However, it does not fit us.
Is the baby bottle-fed?
The baby is mostly nursed, but it does not mind a bottle of formula if its primary source of food (the mother) decides to spend some time away from home. Though the feeding is something we are currently not able to share equally, we do not see it as an issue. We are trying to compensate the time needed to nurse by redistributing other chores.
Do you travel for work?
Travelling for work is hardly possible with this model. Especially for the nursing mother it is out of reach. We try to make some occasional leaves (e.g. conferences or workshops) possible. They require a longer planning and support, as parent staying at home needs to take days-off or shift the working hours.
Thankfully, limited traveling is hardly an issue for our jobs. The pandemic has changed the mindset regarding remote meetings and travel. The unnecessary travel has been strongly limited and many things are proven to be possible remote. Our employers are very flexible and understanding in this regard.
You probably have a nanny or two, don’t you?
We are unfortunately short of family & friend support, as we had moved to a new city just before the first kid was born and just a few months before the pandemic. The nearest family is 400 km away. We are currently trying the model of a babysitting granny-to-rent and hope this can unburden us a bit. Otherwise, we have been through the pandemic all on our own.
Hold on, you have two kids, don’t you?
Our toddler is normally at the daycare 8:00-16:00, if there are no COVID alarms or runny noses.
Have you tried other ways to share parental leave?
With our first baby we spent first two months of the parental leave together at home. During this time the baby showed attachment to the both caregivers almost in an equal way, with a slight preference for the mother as its food source.
The following 3 months I stayed home, while my partner got back to work full-time. Our original plan was to switch the roles when the baby was going to be 6-7 months old. However, during the 3 month the father was not around as much, we witnessed some alarming changes in the baby’s behaviour and family dynamics. The baby insisted to be cared for by the mother only and refused farther’s company. The mother felt rather overwhelmed of having to care for the baby day and night with no support, while missing a possibility to talk to an adult about something more intellectually demanding than nappies. The farther was deeply missing the lost connection with the baby.
At this point we realised that switching the roles was not the solution. We both wanted to be involved parents and we both wanted to be challenged intellectually. Then we heard about a couple sharing the parental leave part-time and started pondering the possibility. We convinced our employers, figured out how to share and took the leap into the unknown despite the discouraging voices telling us how it might never work out.
New parenting gives us new challenges and we are missing role models, behavioral patterns and out-of-the-box solutions, so there is merit in sharing the contemporary experiences.
The institutions are not created with working parents in mind and we need to create awareness of our needs to influence change.
The Goals of this Blog
We live in a situation of extraordinary fast technological and social change. Those becoming parents these days are confronted with very different challenges than those met by their parents and grandparents. Our careers, housing situation, understanding of gender roles (and what not else) look rather different from what was a norm at the 80s or 90s.
The social expectations on parents are often controversial and mutually exclusive. Social media are making our lives transparent and tend to create even more pressure to compare ourselves to some impossible and unrealistic standards.
We want to be involved parents, we try to give our children organic food, body contact and nonviolent communication.
The new challenges and our own wishes to parent differently as we were parented often are overwhelming. We are missing role models, behavioral patterns and out-of-the-box solutions. And this is true for parents of all genders, though the exact challenges might be rather different for mothers and fathers.
As we were considering how to share our first parental leave, the current model we are living was not even on the table, because we were unaware that it is possible. Although this is the model that works best for us.
So one of the main goals of sharing our experiences is to show one of the many possible ways to solve this challenge. We are hoping to inspire other people to search for models that are best fitting their families, their desires and their lives.
On the other hand, deciding to divide both care work and professional work in a non-traditional manner, poses unexpected difficulties. The whole system of career, childcare, parental leave etc. was not exactly designed with the idea of both parents being equally invested in their jobs as well as family. We often need to be creative to overcome the system, rather than being supported by it.
Though it might be rather unnerving, we found out that many institutions and rules are not created this way to deliberately exclude some groups, but rather happen to be created and are maintained by people who are clueless of the needs of e.g. working parents. Therefore, we need to get loud to create awareness and influence the change. And this is the second goal of this blog.
Non-Goals
This blog is explicitly not about showing someone a better way to parent, to judge other people’s choices or to create any pressure on other parents. This blog is also deliberately not about complaining or showing off.
Therefore I feel a need to add a disclaimer about parenting and being privileged. Having this in mind, I might still collect enough courage to write publicly of our private experiences. As “the personal is political”.
This is me and my youngest 18-weeks-old daughter waiting for a meeting.
Her father and I are both involved parents and we both love our jobs in IT. Our family model includes two jobs and two young children (the baby and the 2-year-old).
Currently we are sharing our parental leave while both of us working 20h a week.
We have realized that apparently in the year 2022 in (the western part of) Germany our family model seems to be much less common than we have imagined. So I am starting a blog to give some insights into the joys and the challenges of this model and to share our experiences.
