{"id":8146,"date":"2013-07-19T10:56:31","date_gmt":"2013-07-19T14:56:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=8146"},"modified":"2013-07-19T10:56:31","modified_gmt":"2013-07-19T14:56:31","slug":"more-kids-and-conferences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2013\/07\/19\/more-kids-and-conferences\/","title":{"rendered":"More Kids and Conferences"},"content":{"rendered":"

The kids and conferences issue, discussed here a while ago<\/a> has continued to spark discussion, with a Tenure She Wrote piece on how to increase gender diversity among conference speakers<\/a> and a Physics Focus blog post on a mother who wound up taking her toddler to a meeting<\/a>. There are some good points in both, though the Tenure She Wrote poster seems to be in a field whose conferences run on a different model than that used for most meetings I go to.<\/p>\n

The Physics Focus post was particularly interesting to me, though, because I spent last weekend as the portable conference day-care while Kate went to Readercon<\/a>. She’s on their safety committee, and thus was obliged to be there, but our usual kid-watching options all fell through. We have friends in the Boston area, though, so I offered to come along and take the kids out with other people while she did con stuff. We had a nice trip to Crane Beach with a friend from Williams and his two kids on Saturday, and then a visit to the Museum of Science on Sunday with a friend from Usenet and his two kids (where the “featured image” photo of The Pip with a Triceratops<\/i> skeleton was taken).<\/p>\n

While this worked, it was definitely a sub-optimal arrangement for everyone. This was mostly the fault of the Boston Marriott Burlington who interpreted Kate’s request for two adjoining rooms on a low floor to be compatible with two rooms across the hall and three doors down from each other on the top floor. This meant that, rather than being able to put the kids to sleep in one room where they could be minded by one of us in an adjoining room, we were both tethered to a hotel room during night-time hours, me in one room with SteelyKid and Kate with The Pip in the other. The whole thing was thoroughly exhausting.<\/p>\n

Now, this is by no means a perfect parallel to the problematic situations described in those blog posts– going to Readercon is by no means professionally essential for either of us, and we have the resources (both financial (getting a second hotel room) and social (friends in the area)) to swing bringing the kids along. But in the unlikely event that hearing it from me will carry more weight than the links above, I will happily confirm that this sort of situation kind of sucks. If you think that concerns about child care don’t or shouldn’t represent a real impediment to attending conferences, you’re not just wrong, you’re spectacularly wrong.<\/p>\n

(Of course, the options for actually doing anything about this are kind of limited– on-site child-care is expensive and often unsatisfactory (as demonstrated by many of the comment-thread discussions of this); subsidizing child-care back at the home of the traveling parent is probably not all that much cheaper, and brings with it another host of problems; and paying for somebody to accompany the traveling parent to the meeting is way more expensive. The most feasible thing would be to allow some sort of at-home child-care subsidy from grants or institutional travel funds, but those are not that widely available. And while greater social acceptance and sensitivity toward child and family issues is in some sense the “right” solution to this, it’s a slow, uphill fight.)<\/p>\n

(As far as the kids go, SteelyKid was thrilled to be staying at a hotel– new places! people! ice machines! swimming pools!– and both kids were very happy with our excursions, hitting it off great with our friends’ kids. Given better logistics at the hotel, I would be open to doing it again next year, especially since The Pip will presumably be a little easier to manage by then (our plans were tightly constrained by his dietary restrictions and need for a mid-day nap, both of which will probably ease up over time). It’s not a trivial sacrifice, though, and would be much harder in a different or changing location.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The kids and conferences issue, discussed here a while ago has continued to spark discussion, with a Tenure She Wrote piece on how to increase gender diversity among conference speakers and a Physics Focus blog post on a mother who wound up taking her toddler to a meeting. There are some good points in both,… Continue reading More Kids and Conferences<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8147,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,78,36,2,7,11,75,3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academia","category-conferences","category-meetings","category-personal","category-physics","category-science","category-society","category-steelykid","category-the_pip","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}