Introduction

Over the past ten years, the Teaching and Learning Center has employed more than a dozen graduate fellows who have started or grown their families while completing their degrees. Each generation of parent-fellows has brought pedagogical strategies and methods derived from their unique experiences, inspiring new possibilities for ontologies and epistemologies that center care, flexibility, adaptation, generosity, and compassion. This collection—written by current and former GC students, including one TLC alumnus—is born from that lineage, with contributions that explore the tensions and possibilities of praxes informed by the highs and lows of parenting and classroom instruction.

The TLC was the first place in higher education where I heard parenting discussed positively. Early into my first year at the TLC, I was in a meeting with two other fellows and during the ritualistic chit-chat that occurs as everyone logs on to Zoom and gets situated, they shared how parenting had impacted their ability to join the meeting. Without fully transitioning to discussing whatever we were there to plan, the conversation turned to the ways parenting had altered their journey to a PhD: how they found time to conduct research, how they reframed their expectations, how they set and traversed new boundaries while trying to figure out a new normal—things many working-parents with young children might experience. But then they shared something unique to our role as educators that I had not thought about before: parenting had transformed their perspectives and approaches to teaching and learning.

Unbeknownst to my colleagues, my husband and I were discussing whether to grow our family while I was in my PhD program. As a woman in academia, I had been bombarded with fear-based advice about the potential risks and costs of parenting while pursuing a career in higher education. Would I be able to publish and attend conferences? Would I take longer to finish, have to temporarily withdraw, or end up dropping out? If I did finish, would I be less competitive on the job market? I was surprised to discover recent research indicates that, in some cases, things might be changing for the better for parents.1 On the other hand, mothers in particular report a lack of official family leave policies and childcare benefits still impedes their time to degree, productivity, professional development opportunities, and confidence in their ability to stand out to potential employers. The same research notes this may contribute to mothers abandoning their ambitions before they even attempt to pursue tenure-track or research-intensive positions. The combination of the persisting narrative of scaring-women-childless and the lack of institutional or familial support may also mean some academics opt out of being parents because of the messaging they receive about its career-ending consequences. Their sacrifices and losses, too, are worth acknowledging.

In listening to my colleagues, I was forced to confront whether my fear of academic failure was more limiting than the potential pitfalls of parenting while pursuing a PhD. Their perspectives weren’t overly optimistic or laced with the toxic positivity that often plagues pro-parenting discussions. They didn’t tell me stories about how all the negative consequences weren’t true or that there was some silver lining or magical force that made it possible to do it all. Instead, they talked about how they made things work by reframing—not lowering—their expectations, and how, in doing so, new possibilities emerged. In being forced to let go of the standard definition and trajectory of academic success, they found grace for themselves as parents and professionals, which, in turn, transformed their abilities to offer those sentiments in their relationships with their children and students. The perspectives they shared quite literally changed my life and, a little over a year later, I gave birth to my daughter just after the conclusion of the Spring semester.

Many of my fears did indeed become my reality. It is taking me longer to complete my dissertation. Finding time to publish or attend conferences has ranged from difficult to impossible. The way a month can just disappear when you, your child, and your partner are passing a cold back and forth makes me question whether time is truly linear. Most challenging was that during pregnancy and for almost a year after giving birth, it felt like my brain didn’t work the same way. All this has been happening while I've received notification emails from the university about satisfactory progress holds and had a keen awareness of the limits on access to funding and health insurance for myself and my family. It makes sense why people choose not to do this. But just because there are logical or advantageous reasons to put off becoming a parent, that doesn’t mean it’s always the right choice.

Parenting, like other forms of radical love, can multiply our generosity about the importance of caregiving and reproductive labor in society. In All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks asserts, “Communities sustain life–not nuclear families,”2 later concluding that “enjoying the benefit of living and loving in community empowers us to meet strangers without fear and extend to them the gift of openness and recognition.”3 Just as my TLC colleagues had said, my relationship with my daughter opened up new dimensions of love, perseverance, and hope that changed all my relationships, but especially my teaching. Parenting and teaching have made me more patient, humble, and able to find joy and learning through intense, messy, and unglamorous experiences. While I have stronger boundaries about my time and labor as an adjunct since becoming a parent, I am simultaneously more flexible and accommodating. Becoming a parent also made me realize how much teaching had prepared me for parenthood. I am so thankful for the ways my students and colleagues helped me decenter myself in the classroom and stop projecting my own desires onto students’ educational experiences—a transformation in perspective I directly credit with enriching my time with my daughter.

To be clear, creating the community hooks described is no easy feat at home or in the classroom. There are many more days where both my child and students take what I offer them and throw it on the floor or in my face, potentially even laughing or melting down while they do it. In both scenarios, these different forms of reactivity and rejection are, for the most part, developmentally appropriate for the stages of life they are exploring. My child will grow out of throwing her applesauce with such force that it somehow splatters into three different rooms. Over time, students will learn the difference between viral social media rumors and findings in a peer reviewed journal. In both places, my role is to provide patience, understanding, and opportunities to discover and co-create the gifts of a living and loving community.

Editing this collection has simultaneously affirmed and expanded the connectedness of parenting and pedagogy in my life. To see these pieces develop from proposal to publication in less than an academic year has produced a similarly disorienting wonder as witnessing my daughter grow from infant to toddler, or students’ evolutions within the brief span of a semester. Though the overlaps and synergies between parenting and pedagogy are numerous, these reflections invite everyone to consider how showing up, slowing down, and letting go can create transformative and empowering learning communities.

Showing Up

James Tolleson’s piece explores how the intersection of two crises—higher education and parenting—requires a radical reflexiveness about the importance of care work. He shares that his daughter “has generated a new sense of being-in-the-moment and reinforced the preciousness of time spent mentoring and parenting,” a sentiment often obscured by the sometimes overwhelming fear of being a first-time parent or teacher. With his daughter, the praxis of showing up and slowing down to provide care made him realize, “I may be an expert on reading, but for her to enjoy books, she needs the freedom to turn it upside down.” With his students, care means investing in their development beyond their performance in his class. In both cases, showing up is about centering the needs and potential of the next generation.

Sam O’Hana Grainger explores how parenting theories about attachment, security, and being a “good enough” caretaker can inform the ways instructors support their students as they navigate the personal and structural insecurities of higher education. By creating a “circle of security” for students to risk, experience, and confront failure, while scaffolding in challenges to help them grow, instructors, like parents, can provide both care and preparation for the challenges of the world beyond our sacred safe spaces.

Slowing Down

TLC alum Anke Geertsma notes how parenting and higher education are being bombarded with promises of frictionless experiences. Parents are tempted with ease and relief through frustrating and draining developmental milestones, while instructors and students are the targets of generative AI companies offering “a second brain” to take over the cumbersome task of thinking critically. And yet, as Anke argues, friction is an essential component of childhood, the college experience, and, frankly, our shared humanity. She offers interventions that decenter efficiency and slow down the learning process to make space for messiness, set backs, exploration, and more, so that friction leads to meaningful and empowering growth and learning.

Drawing on her own experience as a graduate-student–parent, Victoria Murray uses the compassion and flexibility she received from professors as inspiration for recommendations that can transform classrooms to better support parenting and non-parenting students. Her reflections affirm that while parenting is a unique experience, it is not the only form of caregiving, reproductive labor, or relationships that matter to people pursuing higher education. Her interventions show how adjustments that honor the work of parenting can open up a multitude of affordances to make higher education more inclusive, accommodating, and supportive.

Luis Escamilla Frias shares how losing his father shortly after becoming a father himself accelerated his interrogation of the ways masculinity limits society and individual relationships by disconnecting people, especially men, from empathy, sensitivity, and sincerity. In rejecting masculinity’s hegemonic conceptions of rigor, discipline, and individuality—qualities that are seen as desirable and rewarded within academia, but devastating in men’s relationships as fathers and partners—Luis was able to practice what he always admired in his father’s embodiment of masculinity: the freedom to be vulnerable. Through an intimate and emotional reflection inspired by moments with his son, father, and mentors, as well as a podcast about sloths, Luis shares how slowing down can provide a more expeditious path to what truly matters.

Letting Go

Zachary Simonds reflects on how becoming a parent forced a critical reexamination of the conditions under which graduate students are expected to achieve excellence. Whereas one may be able to efficiently plan out grading and researching around a consistent coursework and teaching schedule, he found “my wonderfully headstrong daughter required exactly as much time as she needed and would not accept a second less.” Somewhat counter intuitively, Zachary found that by letting go of his—or his advisor’s—emphasis on rigor, he found flexibility, improvisation, and responsivity allowed him to better support students’ needs.

Destry Maria Sibley’s experience helping her daughter learn how to ride a bike illuminated how the art of pausing—as parents and instructors—creates the space for “unknowingness” to transform into curiosity, exploration, and other possibilities. In letting go—of a child’s wobbling bike, of the desire to fill the void of students’ silence—she argues we are able to honor “that these happenings are worthy too, worth the time and space and attention that we might give to them, whether or not they help … meet externally imposed metrics of success.” Most importantly, Destry’s reflections demonstrate that letting go is not just about the moments we witness our children and students transform, but also how those moments transform us as their parents and teachers.

Reflections on Parenting and Pedagogy

The reflections in this collection are inspired by the dual experiences of parenting and teaching, but the insights and values are not exclusive to parenting-educators. Showing up, slowing down, and letting go are strategies available to anyone. As a first time parent, some of the most useful advice I came across was that “ready” is not a feeling, but a decision. This is just as true in the classroom context, when new teachers are tasked with facilitating a course with little or no pedagogical preparation. In honoring the significance of our relationships, we see how so much more is possible when we extend time, grace, and understanding to others, as well as ourselves.

About the Editor

Kristine Riley (PhD Candidate, Sociology; Teaching and Learning Center Fellow)

Kristine Riley (she/her) is a PhD candidate in sociology and Teaching and Learning Center fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation project examines how carceral feminist theories of change that advocate for increasing women’s professional representation across different roles and institutions of the criminal legal system’s workforce preserve the organization of the United States as a prison nation. Her work at the TLC has focused on abolitionist pedagogy, generating dialogue in the classroom, and, now, the relationships between parenting and teaching.

What is the best piece of parenting advice you’ve received?

During the first days and weeks after you bring your baby home from the hospital, you can operate under “airport rules.” Need a coffee at 7pm? Go for it! Dinner leftovers for breakfast? Heck yeah! One of my fondest memories is of my husband and I having cheesecake with strawberries at 3:00 AM after it took us over an hour to get our daughter changed, fed, and back to sleep.

What is the worst piece of parenting advice you’ve received?

People told us to “enjoy the newborn phase,” which haunted me after giving birth. Between the physical recovery, intense hormonal changes, sleep deprivation, and fear in being first-time parents, the idea that I should be enjoying this period made me feel worse and like I wasn’t connecting with my daughter or husband in the ways I should be.

What is the best piece of teaching advice you’ve received?

Don’t be afraid to admit you don’t know something or need more time before you move forward. Whether you need to do additional research, look something up as a class, or pause facilitation and offer a freewrite activity to deescalate intense discussion, creating the time and space to prepare yourself can make all the difference.

What advice do you want to offer Graduate Center student-teachers who are thinking about parenthood?

Talk to other parents, your program, your union, and relevant administration to learn about the resources, protections, accommodations, and consequences relevant to parenting while pursuing a PhD. Check the information against official policy and save all the information in a folder—just in case.

What advice do you want to offer all Graduate Center student-teachers?

The TLC is here for you to share resources, strategize interventions, reflect on difficult moments, and support you in developing your teaching persona and pedagogical philosophy.

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