Take Your Child to Conference Day

April 22, 2016 3:08 PM

UC Berkeley psychology professor Tania Lombrozo tried an unusual tactic when organizing the Misconceptions of the Mind Conference: invite the babies as well as their parents. She wrote:

We didn't start too early (9 a.m.), and we didn't end too late (4:30 p.m.). We built in breaks for nursing or pumping. We chose a stroller-accessible location, and — with a little creativity and some temporary curtains — we were able to turn a glass-walled office into a comfortable lactation space. We showed lactating mothers where they could find the fridge in the kitchen to store pumped milk. We cleared some nearby office space so caregivers and children would have somewhere to play, and we populated it with puzzles and building blocks and crafts supplies. Our opening reception and the lunch break were open to children and their caregivers. While mothers attended the opening keynote address, their children could participate in a music class we offered down the hall. And we filmed all the presentations for those unable to attend; they are available to the public at MoMiCon.org.

Whether or not parents should take children to conferences has been a topic of debate for the past few years. Karen Kelsky wrote in 2014:

It’s simply impossible to have a professional conversation when your baby needs attention, which is pretty much all the time they aren’t asleep. It’s like taking the baby to work – you won’t get much done. There aren’t many conferences and you need to establish professional relationships. It is really okay to take a few days off from your child.

A 2014 article in Science also details the vital role networking plays at conferences, and points out that the professionals who have to handle child-wrangling or lack sufficient childcare do pay a career price for it. As a result:

The ACS, for example, offers all-day child care services (dubbed “Camp ACS”) for 2-to-16 year olds, available free of charge to all parent attendees. Other conference organizers, including the American College of Rheumatology, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), several special interest groups of the Association for Computing Machinery in the United States, and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) have provided similar child- care services at their meetings.

Meanwhile, on the liberal arts end, literature professor Rachel S. Harris wrote about her experiences trying to line up childcare at the Modern Language Association six months in advance:

After contacting the MLA in July I was informed that organized child care arrangements depend on the number of requests the conference receives. If there are not enough requests for the organization to arrange babysitting, then the hotel may be able to refer me to a company and some compensation will be provided -- though the details at present are unclear and no information would be available until September.

The problem isn't confined to academia. Last year, TEDWomen kicked out a woman and her five-week-old baby and the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this past January did not provide any spaces whatsoever for pumping or feeding mothers. (Another first-person account of trying to pump at CES.)

This is not a new issue: a 1993 op-ed in Computing Research News calls for better childcare accommodations at conferences and outlines the career disadvantages that cling to women who have the nerve to be both a parent and a professional.

posted by sobell (24 comments total)

"It is really okay to take a few days off from your child."

I single-parented a toddler and an infant through the last two years of my PhD, which included a several significant conferences as I wrapped up my research and tried to position myself on the job market. I arranged for the kids to stay with the grand-P's each time. I remember sitting on the elevator at one of those conferences with a member of my grad school cohort, and she asked me, "don't you miss your kids?" and I was like, are you fucking kidding me? I was having the best childfree time of my life.
posted by drlith at 3:25 PM on April 22, 2016 [19 favorites]

TEDWomen kicked out a woman and her five-week-old baby .
Small typo there, it was a five-month-old, rather than a five-week-old (not that the age of the infant nursling should matter, really).

My church has a cry room (ie, a soundproof room where I can watch and hear the sermon but the other parishioners cannot hear my fussy baby), why can't TED set up a similar area?

And the article about trying to pump at CES was spot on - it's ludicrous that accommodations are not made for pumping mothers. The conference isn't worth the price of the ticket if I have to miss a significant portion due to having to leave the facility to arrange meals for my child. It's not like I have an option to make alternate arrangements. It's a bodily function that, just like all bodily functions, needs to happen when it needs to happen. Why not make accommodations?
posted by vignettist at 3:41 PM on April 22, 2016 [6 favorites]

I don't have kids, but conferences in my field have actual childcare during the conference, during the day. It hadn't occurred to me until now that people might still have to bring people to care for their kids in the evening, though, if they want to go out for dinner with colleagues, depending on the dinner venue. Kids are a common enough sight at evening receptions, but I imagine it's easier to network without them, if you have someone to leave them with.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 3:43 PM on April 22, 2016

TEDWomen kicked out a woman and her five-week-old baby .

Small typo there, it was a five-month-old, rather than a five-week-old (not that the age of the infant nursling should matter, really).

D'oh! Sorry. I don't know why I thought it was weeks.
posted by sobell at 3:55 PM on April 22, 2016

I was feeling a bit of a "how would this sound if you flipped the genders? where are the articles about merging career and fatherhood?" @manwhohasitall rage at the idea that the feminist triumph is to have better childcare and pumping rooms at conferences, and not, you know, fathers who can fucking handle taking care of young children for a long weekend ("Now that the boys are old enough that leaving them home is no longer an overwhelming task for their father"). But I guess, ultimately, the feminist triumph is to have GOOD options available to women and not just "lesser of two evils" options.
posted by drlith at 4:13 PM on April 22, 2016 [5 favorites]

Plenty of fathers use the childcare at conferences. Any kids above nursing age are typically there because both their parents work in the field and are attending the conference.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 4:42 PM on April 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

I went to a conference in Melbourne, Australia in January called Above All Human. They offered free daycare to attendees and speakers. I was fortunately in a situation where I could leave my one-year-old home with my husband, but had it been a few weeks later it would have been a different story and that daycare option would have made the difference between me being able to speak at that event, and not.

Next issue is having to fly on short notice for interviews in other cities (or countries) when my husband is also on non-negotiable travel for work... why isn't there an easy way to find one-day daycare options in those scenarios?
posted by olinerd at 4:43 PM on April 22, 2016

Heh. I remember being chewed out by the dean of Yale College for bringing a three-month-old baby to a faculty meeting at which I expected to be asked questions about a new program. Said baby was asleep in a sling for the whole time, and caused no disturbance except (for half a minute at the beginning) by being cute. "This must never happen again," said the dean, and forwarded me a childcare-on-call phone number.

What never happened again was me attending a faculty meeting. (Reader, I had tenure.)
posted by homerica at 5:23 PM on April 22, 2016 [57 favorites]

Plenty of fathers use the childcare at conferences. Any kids above nursing age are typically there because both their parents work in the field and are attending the conference.
Yes, but are single dads taking their kids? Are there partnered dads taking kids to conferences while their wives stay at home? And "that one dad" who may have done so doesn't disprove the fact that when child-friendly arrangements are made at conferences, it's basically to accommodate moms who have chosen to be there. Not dads, who get to have careers AND families without struggling so hard to figure out how to balance them.
posted by drlith at 5:33 PM on April 22, 2016 [8 favorites]

Are there partnered dads taking kids to conferences while their wives stay at home?

I do. And would do so a lot more if the conferences in my field offered childcare.

That's not to detract from your point that the vast majority of people in need of childcare at conferences are women. Literally none of my male colleagues have complained about this problem and almost all of my female colleagues (those with kids) have done so.

But yeah there's a few of us. For my part the logic for taking the kids when I can (or more often, skipping conferences completely) is that I don't want the entire burden to fall on my partner. She has her own career to worry about, and it's unfair of me to put her at risk of getting mommy-tracked just for the sake of my conferences.
posted by langtonsant at 5:47 PM on April 22, 2016

Yes, but are single dads taking their kids? Are there partnered dads taking kids to conferences while their wives stay at home?

I don't actually know about single dads. I don't think there are partnered dads taking their kids while wives stay home, but I don't think there are partnered moms taking their kids to conferences while dad stays home, either. I haven't run any numberes and don't have access to data, but certainly all the people I've known with kids either leave their kids with a partner at home or both partners + kids come.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 5:48 PM on April 22, 2016

It is literally right in the quote that I provided from one of the linked articles, who said she used to take her kids to conferences because "it was hard for my husband to stay home alone with four little babies."That's about when the eyeball stabbing started for me.
posted by drlith at 5:59 PM on April 22, 2016 [11 favorites]

DrLith, sorry I was unclear. I was talking about the conferences I've been to with childcare and basing that on people I'm personally aware of, which is what I meant by "I have no data." I wouldn't dream of saying "This never happens" and I especially wouldn't say "this never happens in other fields" given how much culture can vary between fields.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 6:21 PM on April 22, 2016

I organized child care for a two-day hackathon a few years back, knowing I wanted my favorite women working in user research to be there and they had tiny kids. It wasn't too much of a pain in the ass (and mind you, this was with me coordinating the whole event myself). Details of other possibilities we explored, including hiring staff from existing 24-hour childcare operations and letting parents self-organize, are in that link.

In the process I discovered there are a number of companies set up to provide childcare at conferences, largely by way of reserving rooms for kids to play in at hotels. The company we went with was American Childcare, which had insurance and boasted staff with backgrounds in child development. They were just fine! (We ended up only really having one or two kids the entire time, and they came with attached secondary parents, so the childcare was redundant.) Googling "conference childcare" and "hotel childcare," I note now there are a number of other companies offering event-based childcare. The Ada Initiative has also provided a conference child care toolkit.

Information on how to provide child care at events is out there. Don't let anyone tell you it's too hard to do.
posted by gusandrews at 7:50 PM on April 22, 2016 [12 favorites]

Last year I went to a FREE CONFERENCE that offered FREE PROFESSIONAL CHILDCARE (paid by corporate sponsors). Think about it. If that's possible to arrange, anything's possible.
posted by miyabo at 8:25 PM on April 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

It is really okay to take a few days off from your child.

Sure. Unless:

* Your child is special needs or super-clingy or has emotional problems that mean that a few days off from them will result in months of angst and setbacks.

* You can't find or afford childcare for that time. Possibly because your partner has to work / you don't have a partner / your family aren't there or can't help.

* The most important conferences in your field are halfway around the world so it's not like a few days off, it's more like at least a week and a half, which is kind of actually a lot when you have a baby and a toddler.

... But, you know, I'm sure all those parents that want to go to conferences with their children are just doing so because they are helicopter parents with no perspective or an over-inflated sense of their own importance. Not because they've actually thought about the issues and realised that it would be the best solution.

Yes I know that article made these same points. But god comments like that piss me off, speaking as a female academic who has been forced to drastically cut back on the conferences I've been able to attend -- and dealt with the resulting career slowdown -- since having my kids.
posted by forza at 10:21 PM on April 22, 2016 [20 favorites]

In my field, conferences with childcare are a rarity. We went to one in Australia with my 4 yr old daughter, which had childcare advertised, and it was so expensive that basically no one used the service. The conference was a rather miserable experience, we couldn't really relax at any time with the constant shuttling between parents.
posted by dhruva at 8:53 AM on April 23, 2016

* You can't find or afford childcare for that time. Possibly because your partner has to work / you don't have a partner / your family aren't there or can't help.

My department has several junior faculty and graduate students with young kids. This is such an important point -- especially for the graduate students, who have more limited resources than a faculty member.

These are people who have to apply for grants in order to afford going to conferences in the first place. They're living away from their families because they moved for school.

Additional childcare costs for a week can be extremely expensive for someone living on a graduate stipend. Even assuming both parents work, it's common they're both low-paid, because they're both graduate students, or because of the limited ability of the partner to move for job-related reasons if they want to stay with their partner.

And at this early stage in their careers, it's vital that they go to conferences, network, get feedback on projects, etc.

Academia is already brutal on women who want children, and we need to make it less so. Women with children need to stop being considered a special case, and need to be treated as they belong just as much as everyone else, and that includes treating their needs as routine, rather than exceptional and burdensome. You cannot fix gender inequity without doing that.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:06 AM on April 23, 2016 [7 favorites]

I used to think, derisively, of accommodations for parents as the "astronomer-wrapped-around-a-womb" problem. As someone without kids, I was annoyed that it seemed like the only advances we could make for women in our field were for mothers, not for all women. Now I have more empathy for mothers (and parents in general) in academia, and also recognize that making it easier to be a mother and an academic was, to some degree, low-hanging fruit, more easily addressed by policy than more dicey issues of bias and harassment. This has also paved the way in getting my colleagues to think of women as human beings with needs that may differ from their own, and got people started about reasonable accommodations that allow a wider range of people to participate in our field.
posted by BrashTech at 11:01 AM on April 23, 2016 [2 favorites]

Having more women remain in my field is an indirect benefit to me personally, too. I'm never going to have children, but many women will--and I think I'm helped by working in a field where there are other women, and other women whose personal goals are not the same as mine.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 11:33 AM on April 23, 2016 [7 favorites]

You can generally tell the parents who got to leave their kids home by the way they dance on tables at 3am.

I kid, I have lots of friends who bring kids to conferences and overall conferences are crappy boring places, especially for kids. And the food is sugar and caffeine only. The parents miss a lot of networking and talks because of fussy kids too. No speaker likes a screaming child interrupting their 12 minutes of fame. The most popular solution for parents with the means is to bring another adult along to watch the kid part of the time, and go fun places. That seems to work well but costs $$ obviously. I can tell you from being an organizer that most parents won't use the daycare, no matter how well certified etc it is. They just won't do it.
posted by fshgrl at 12:56 PM on April 23, 2016

If you're breastfeeding, no you can't take a few days away from your child. If you do, you'll need to pump milk, both to maintain supply and because it's uncomfortable if the milk builds up. A decent pump costs money, and you'll need to take regular breaks in a place where you can pump (a clean, private location with an electrical outlet and a refrigerator to store the milk, at minimum).
posted by Anne Neville at 6:33 PM on April 23, 2016 [2 favorites]

Well most conferences are on or immediately adjacent to hotels so that is generally available to attendees. Infants seem to do much better than toddlers, less ability to be bored stiff, more time spent asleep.
posted by fshgrl at 6:50 PM on April 23, 2016

The most popular solution for parents with the means is to bring another adult along to watch the kid part of the time, and go fun places.

There's actually a nonprofit that arranges planned group activities for trailing spouses/families at tech conferences. I don't know anyone personally who has participated though. I don't think it's a terrible idea but I hope it's done in a way that affirms the individuality/agency of the trailing spouses and isn't just a way to keep them busy.
posted by miyabo at 9:57 AM on April 24, 2016