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Geographer Mette Bendixen, with her son Bille near Wyoming’s Grand Teton mountains, says her PhD was a flexible time to become a parent.
IS YOUR PHD A GOOD
TIME TO HAVE CHILDREN?
Early-career researchers describe how they juggled workloads,
emotions and finances after having children. By Julian Nowogrodzki
N
euroscientist 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.
“You don’t have to do it
exactly how other people
do it. You can find your own
combination of things.”
Many PhD students find themselves contemplating whether to have a child during
their PhD or wait until afterwards. The considerations vary between countries, institutions
and individual research groups, depending on
graduate-student pay, the cost of childcare,
parental leave policies, the length of a PhD,
support from colleagues and other factors.
Nature’s careers team asked several earlycareer-researcher parents how they planned
with their advisers and made finances work.
“You don’t have to do it exactly how other
Nature | Vol 637 | 16 January 2025 | 749
people do it,” says astronomer Meredith Rawls
at the University of Washington in Seattle, who
waited until starting her postdoc to have her
first child. “You can find your own creative
combination of things that works for you.”
Set clear expectations
Bomba-Warczak, now an assistant professor
at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, was the first female student in her PhD
laboratory to have a child during her studies,
she says. Being a scientist mum was not normalized in her PhD department at Wisconsin:
she didn’t even know which professors in the
department had children, because they never
talked about it.
Bomba-Warczak encountered a pervasive
assumption that because she had become
pregnant when she was a graduate student,
“that means I’m done. I’m going to leave science,” she says. One principal investigator (PI)
who wrote her a letter of recommendation for
a postdoc position blurted, “Oh no, what are
you going to do now?” when they first saw her
with her daughter.
She pushed back on this narrative by always
being vocal about her determination to continue in science. When she sat down with her
PhD adviser to discuss her pregnancy, she
said, “It’s going to take me longer, but I will
get there. My plans have not changed, don’t
give up, don’t step away from mentorship.” Her
adviser was extremely supportive.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison did
not guarantee paid parental leave for graduate
students until 2024. So in 2015, her department
didn’t know which laws applied to her situation, if any, she says. Bomba-Warczak and her
adviser mutually decided that she would take
eight weeks of paid leave. For the most part
she did not work, but when reviews for a paper
came back a couple of weeks into her maternity
leave, she responded to those e-mails to keep
the publication moving forwards.
By contrast, in Mette Bendixen’s PhD programme at the University of Copenhagen, it
was “way more common for women to have
a kid during their PhDs than to not”, she says.
PhD students at the institution get a year of
paid parental leave, and several women had
multiple children during their PhDs. Bendixen,
who is now at McGill University in Montreal,
Canada, had her son in 2014, two years into
her three-year PhD programme.
Bendixen’s geography research involves
fieldwork, so she tried to time her pregnancy
so that her maternity leave would end just
before the summer. But “it took a while for
me to get pregnant”, she says, so the baby
ended up being due in July and she missed a
season of fieldwork. “At the time, it seemed
very problematic,” she says, but becoming a
parent made her reconfigure her priorities.
When she came back from her parental leave,
the first thing she did was apply to work 32 hours
750 | Nature | Vol 637 | 16 January 2025
Meredith Rawls with her youngest child.
a week, a slightly part-time schedule compared
with her usual 37 hours, with full support from
her supervisor. Having a child “definitely made
me reconsider what’s important”, she says.
“Academia swallows up your whole life if you
let it.” Carving out even five hours a week was
a good work–life boundary to set for herself.
Bendixen felt that her PhD was a good time
to have a child. “A PhD is when you’re the most
flexible,” she says. “If you can get five or six
good, productive hours [in per day], that’s
fine. If the kid is sick, no one’s going to mind
if you work from home.”
Bomba-Warczak agrees. She had her second
child during her postdoc and experienced more
“You will have control of
your time again. You will
have time to meet your
goals. It’s OK to adjust.”
pressure and less flexibility over deadlines than
she did throughout her PhD. During a postdoc,
“you want to build your network, go to conferences. At times, I was travelling every week,” she
says. There are some postdoctoral fellowships,
for example through the US National Institutes
of Health, that are available only for a limited
time — for example, two different fellowships
are open to those who are within 18 months
or 4 years of receiving a PhD. And although
extensions to account for parental leave are
available, this increased the time pressure that
Bomba-Warczak felt during her postdoc.
Too much PhD pressure
Some early-career researchers, however,
found that the pressures of PhD student life
were not ideal for starting a family. Priscila
Cunha, an ecologist at the State University of
Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, found the time spent
doing her PhD, when she had her first child, to
be less flexible than that during her postdoc,
which she did after her second child was born.
Cunha’s first pregnancy was unplanned,
and she panicked when she found out, in part
because, just a week before, she had received
a scholarship to do part of her PhD abroad,
at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “I
thought, I’m not going to be able to go,” she
says. At first, she told only three people about
the pregnancy: her husband, her sister and her
adviser, who helped to calm her fears. “I knew
that my adviser would understand because
she was already a mother of two and was an
advocate for women in science,” she says. In
the end, Cunha was still able to study abroad
for four months.
After her son was born in 2019, her programme guaranteed four months of paid
maternity leave, but she worked whenever she
could to improve her chances of getting a good
postdoc position. By contrast, her husband
had only five days of leave after their son was
born, including the weekend.
The newborn phase was rough for Cunha
and her husband. Their son “would only fall
asleep in my lap or my husband’s lap, so for
months we were like zombies”, she says. The
baby struggled with breastfeeding and failed
to gain weight in his first month. The early
months of breastfeeding were almost as hard
for Cunha as completing a PhD, she says, but
she persisted. Because Cunha was still attending university classes when she was pregnant,
she “had very strict deadlines” for her courses,
she says. Fortunately, her mother and motherin-law watched her son often so she could work.
She graduated from her PhD and her daughter was born in 2022. That year, she applied for
postdoc positions and started one at the State
University of Rio de Janeiro. Cunha found her
postdoc, with its lack of coursework and freedom to focus on research, to be much more
flexible for raising a family.
The huge toll that PhD studies take on people’s mental health is well-documented, and
for some graduate students, parenting can
add to those struggles. Marine geologist and
data scientist James Bramante had two children
during his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. His son was
born four months into his PhD in 2015, and his
daughter in 2018, a year before he finished.
He was lucky that his three main advisers,
all relatively young fathers themselves, were
supportive. “When I told my primary adviser,”
Bramante says, “his face lit up and he was like
‘Jimmy, this is going to be the best time of
your life!’”
But Bramante “did nothing but PhD and
family for five straight years”, and the lack
of a social life was not good for his mental
health. Shortly before he graduated, he had
MIKE BIGELOW AND MEREDITH RAWLS
Work / Careers
a mental-health breakdown and experienced
“acute anxiety and awfulness” that lasted for
six months, which was triggered when he discovered mistakes in his work. He remembers
hosting his son’s birthday party at a local park
while experiencing debilitating depression
and anxiety, which were immediately visible
to his friends who showed up. He was able to
regain some balance by addressing the mistakes and stepping away from work for a bit
to support his wife.
In retrospect, Bramante wishes he had fully
taken time off from work during his unofficial
parental leave. At the time, MIT had not yet
instituted parental leave for non-birth-parent
graduate students (it now grants non-birth
parents up to 12 weeks of partially paid leave),
and there was a miscommunication between
Bramante and his adviser about work expectations. His adviser told him, “I don’t expect to
see you for a couple months after your child is
born,” he says. In retrospect, Bramante thinks
his adviser meant for him to take those months
completely off, but at the time, Bramante mistakenly took it as ‘Don’t come into the lab but
keep working on research from home’.
Bramante, who now works remotely from
Minneapolis for the instrumentation company
Inficon, which is based in Bad Ragaz, Switzerland, has also been struck by “how crazy the
difference is between academia and the private sector. You will get parental leave. It will
be respected. We just had four or five men and
women go on parental leave one after another,”
he says. The company rigorously plans ahead,
ensuring that major software releases or projects are either finished before parental leave
or paused until after it. He urges those who
manage PhD students to communicate clearly
and set cultural norms that students should
not work during parental leave.
The money question
Finances are a huge issue for many graduate students who are contemplating having children.
Bramante wishes he and his wife had done
more financial planning. His stipend barely
covered childcare expenses for one child, and
it was much less than the amount they needed
for two kids. “It was rough. We were burning
through savings,” he says.
Finances were not the only reason Rawls
waited until starting her postdoc to have children, but they were a big one. “There wasn’t
wiggle room for anything” during her PhD at
New Mexico State University in Las Cruces,
she says. One-third of her approximately
US$17,000 stipend went towards tuition
fees, which is unusual for US science PhD
programmes, because those fees are often
covered by a grant.
Rawls and her husband were living far apart
for parts of her PhD, they didn’t live near family
and it “didn’t feel like we had an established
community”. “I couldn’t describe that at the
time,” she says, but “I knew that there was a
deep community aspect to having kids”. These
pieces played into their decision to wait to
start a family until Rawls was settled into her
postdoc in Seattle, earning more money, and
they were closer to family.
Both Bomba-Warczak and Cunha took
some unpaid time off to care for their babies,
because it was cheaper than childcare, and
they also had some childcare help from family
members. Making a budget helps, but it’s wise
to be strategic about living and childcare costs
and proximity to family help when choosing
where to study and live. For example, Bramante learnt too late that living in a suburb
would have meant they had access to cheaper
childcare.
No magic answer
EUGENIA ZANDONÀ
There’s no doubt that becoming a parent while
earning a PhD entails sacrifices. “Have I given
up things? Absolutely,” says Bomba-Warczak.
“Fellowships, probably awards and publications, and I am perfectly fine with it.” But plenty
of people do it because the timing feels right,
whether because of age, energy levels or the
flexible PhD schedule — and the demanding
newborn days don’t last forever. “You will
have control of your time again. You will have
time to meet your goals. It’s OK to adjust,” says
Cunha. “Don’t feel bad for resting, since a wellrested mind is more productive.”
If you’re considering having a child during
your PhD, ask around to find out if the laboratory supports PhD-student parents, says Bramante. “And make full use of all leave granted
by your institution. Set the norm that you will
do absolutely no work during parental leave.”
But even the best advice and careful
planning only goes so far. “There’s no perfect
time, there’s no magic answer,” says Rawls. “It’s
a personal decision and, as much as you would
like to, it’s not something you can optimize.”
Ecologist Priscila Cunha did fieldwork for her PhD while pregnant with her first child in 2019.
Julian Nowogrodzki is a science writer and
editor in Boston, Massachusetts.
Nature | Vol 637 | 16 January 2025 | 751