Motherhood and academic career?? How can you make it work!!

I am a proud mother of an amazing 2.5 years old boy. I love him dearly, but you always try to manage your career (I am PhD candidate and freelance researcher) with the additional new responsibility of having a family. I attended the session today about surviving the bad side of academic motherhood mainly because I wanted to hear that women actually passed through that and were able to succeed! Its so motivating to see a community of women peacemakers able to make a change both in technology and in their children's lives.

 The cool thing is that there were some men in the audience :)!!making me happy that many realise its actually parenthood not just motherhood :)

Important advice through the session:
1-ask and negotiate ,never assume that asking for a leave for example would be refused.

2- parenting skills do help you in dealing with kids, and colleagues !

3-paradigm shift! Being a graduate student with kids is different than thinking as a stay at home mom who is a student.

4- know your rights
5- there are some support and funding if you stop your tenure track.

6- if you are a senior, press for childcare in various locations

7-stay away from demotivating communities and surround yourself with helpful people

8- use graphs to visualize that outside leaves you actually increase in your performance

Be supportive of other mothers :), and know that you are amazing string women :).