Balancing Your Career with Your Family Life

From the American Association of University Professors

Frank Jr., Frank Sr., and Ashanti Pyrtle. Photo courtesy of Ashanti Pyrtle.

Learn about family leave policies, tenure policies, and more at the AAUP page on balancing family and academic work.
The November-December, 2004 issue of Academe Online: This special issue of Academe focuses on balancing faculty careers and family work. Articles explore work-family policies, personal choices, and the effects thereof.

It's All an Illusion, by Simone Schweber. In this uproariously funny look at her own efforts to balance work and family life, Simone offers two vignettes and the lessons she learned from them: "to set high standards for yourself and aim to meet them, but make sure you don't mind lowering them for the right reasons and the right occasions.... And conversely, never sacrifice what's essential to you even as the pulls of other values intrude."
Finding a Balance Between Family and Work, by Margaret Newhouse. Margaret describes some issues that commonly come up, in the struggle to balance family with work, and some techniques for dealing with those issues.
2001: a Work-Life Space Odyssey, by Naomi Miller. Naomi describes several parallel stressful situations between family life and academia, and recommends strategies for dealing with them in both arenas.

In Post-Seattle Reflections on a Different Kind of GSA, published in GSA Today (v. 14, p. 16, February 2004) Lisa Greer reflects on what it was like to take her six-month-old daughter to the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America.
Scientists as Parents, by Crispin Taylor, provides an overview of issues related to being a working scientist and a parent, but also includes a list of dozens of articles addressing specific issues.
Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to do About It, by Joan Williams, 2001.