Parenting Throughout Your Career Posted on October 19, 2007 Ruth M. O'Hara (bio) talks about parenting a teenager while maintaining a career.

One thing that I notice that it is very interesting, is that children developmentally change and often not in a linear way either. So, you can never predict with children exactly when the times of maximum attention will be required from you. And I think there’s a sort of na? view that I might have had and shared with my junior colleagues going to family life, that the early years – naturally enough when they are a baby, you need time at home, you need to be with them and that’s accepted. But what I think we forget is they’re not on autopilot once they hit about six. And particularly challenging can be the teenage years. And a colleague of mine presented recently at the Summer Research Institute, and we arrived to the meeting a little fatigued and she said, “You won’t believe it – I was up at four o’clock this morning because my four month old woke and wouldn’t go back [to sleep] and we thought he was just sleeping . ..”

And I said, “Well, I was up at four o’clock this morning ‘cause my 18 year old arrived in and wanted to talk about some social things that happened at a party, and he was upset.” You can never tell when the moment is that you’re going to be on demand as a parent. So, you have to become very flexible and recognize that there’s no way you could plan long term and say, well great, you know, if I’m coming up for tenure when my children are teenagers, that’s gonna be fine. Not necessarily, and many colleagues who have teenaged children often talk about the huge demands both emotionally and also in terms of chauffeuring them around and all sorts of pragmatics that actually have to been taken into consideration with planning your career.

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