Cross-post: PhD Parents: The Pros and Cons of Having a Child During Your Doctorate

When is it a good time to have a child if you're studying for a PhD? Science writer Julian Nowogrodzki explores this question with several researchers who had children during the PhD process in this Nature article originally published January 25, 2025.

Neuroscientist Ewa Bomba-Warczak knew she wanted to have children, and in the fourth year of her doctoral studies she remembers asking her aunt, “When is a good time?” Her aunt countered with, “When is a bad time?” Others told Bomba-Warczak to wait until she passed her qualifying exams for the PhD or reached another milestone, but she realized there was always going to be a new bar to clear. She became pregnant soon after that conversation with her aunt and defended her thesis at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2016 when her daughter was four months old. “My mum was taking her around the hallways so she wouldn’t cry,” she recalls.

Many PhD students find themselves contemplating whether to have a child during their PhD or wait until afterwards. 

Read the entire article at nature.com.

Postdoc Parenting Work-Life Balance

There's a koan in academia for when is the best time to have a kid:

No time is the right time, all times are equally good (bad?)

My husband is also a postdoc. We have a 9 month old. This is a glass half full kind of post, about how we've taken advantage of the flexible hours, the autonomy, and a few supportive policies to pursue parenting and work on our own(-ish) terms. 

The short of it is that at least one of us was home with our daughter full time until she turned 4 months old and at least one of us continues to be home with her four days a week. Here's how we do it:

Academia and Family Structure

Today's guest blogger is Annika Peter. Annika studies dark matter and gravitational dynamics and is currently finishing up a postdoctoral position at UC Irvine. She is moving to a faculty position in the Departments of Physics and Astronomy at The Ohio State University.

A number of studies indicate that, at the faculty level, a large proportion of women physicists and astronomers are partnered with other academic scientists (especially other physicists!). The exact numbers are hard to come by---a lot of the time, all physical scientists are lumped together in studies, even though there are hints that there are major differences across fields (with Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research finding that physicists have the most “endogamous” marriage habits). I have found only one survey specific to physicists, and it is not especially recent (1998 to be specific). Moreover, I have not yet been able to find cohort studies that examine family structures at a variety of career stages, or studies of the reasons why both men and women leave the academic track. I am also interested to see if there is greater or lesser selection pressure on dual academic couples. In my experience, a high percentage of women in physics and astronomy are coupled with other academic scientists at just about all career stages, but I would like to see some cold, hard numbers on this.