On Sabbatical, Parenting

Project Parenting: Applying Project Management Principles to Child-Rearing

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DETAILED PROJECT PLAN: PROJECT PARENTING

PROJECT SPONSOR

Whether or not you planned on becoming a parent – and whether you like it or not – YOU are the sponsor of “Project Parenting”. Sometimes the project participants (also known as children) may be of the opinion that they are the sponsors. This may be expressed in the form of statements such as “You are not the boss of me!” Whilst you may sometimes wish that this were the case, you are the boss of these participants and you may not resign as the project sponsor.

PROJECT CHARTER

Scope

The scope of Project Parenting is vast and includes:

– meeting physical needs of the child(ren), i.e. food, shelter, clothing, education

Some project participants – particularly girls – may present you with out-of-scope clothing requirements. The only way that said participants will be persuaded of this is if you make reference to the project budget. You need to state unequivocally that a particular item(s) of clothing are not provided for in the budget. If the participant suspects that funds can be channeled from another budget (home maintenance, sibling clothing fund, education, groceries) they will stop at nothing until such funds have been re-allocated.

– meeting emotional needs of the child(ren)

Take solace in Philip Larkin’s poem with the lines “They f*ck you up, your Mum and Dad/ They don’t mean to but they do/ They fill you with the faults they had/ And add some extra, just for you”.

Do your best to raise an emotionally well-balanced child, but when you fail, you can always resort to laying on the guilt and exclaiming that “It’s so hard to be a mother/ father! You will see one day when you have your own children.”

Objectives

1. To raise a child who hopefully moves out of your house around the time they start having sex. Often times, the project budget will not allow for this since the scope of the project includes the provision of an education which may extend beyond schooling. However, tertiary education will hopefully assist you to achieve objective number 2 below:

2. To raise a child who becomes financially independent before you and your spouse are too old to enjoy your new-found financial freedom.

Participants

– Project Manager: you, the parent(s). This role can sometimes be outsourced to:

– nannies (as many as project budget allows)

– teachers

– grannies (and progressive grandfathers)

– Project Participants: your children plus any of their friends who may be tagging along at any given time.

PROJECT APPROACH

Sleep when you’re dead. (Lack of sleep is an opportunity cost of child-rearing often not quantified, nor included in the project budget.) Your approach to Project Parenting should be that the project is always “live”.

PROJECT LIFE CYCLE

The timelines for Project Parenting are indeterminable. However, take solace in the fact that once Objective Number 2 has been achieved, the intensity of the project may lessen for a period, until your project moves on to its next stage: Project Grandparenting. Project Grandparenting is not as time-consuming as Project Parenting and handovers to parents occur regularly and after short periods.

PROJECT GOVERNANCE

Project parenting includes governance structures such as: Mother-in-laws and Other Parents. Some mother-in-laws have a hands-on governance approach which may include feeding, bathing, nappy changing, school lifts and sleepovers. Others may take more of a steering approach where they dispense parenting advice and point out the flaws in your project management style. If your mother-in-law takes the latter approach, you may duly note this in the risk log but you may find it more effective to move countries.

PROJECT BUDGET

Rest assured that your project will always be over budget. Period.

RISK LOG

The risk log for Project Parenting is a large and ever-changing document. It should be up-dated regularly and then leather-bound and presented to the project participants on their 21st birthdays. Here are some more common risks and issues:

1. The iteration that “Everyone else’s parents allow them to… (insert potentially risky activity)”. This is an effective tool for participants to employ if they sense that you are concerned about appearing “uncool”. If not, you can employ the age old retort “If everyone else’s parents were to jump into the fire, should I do so too?” If, however, you are concerned about being branded Most Old-Fashioned Parent Ever (sadly, my parents never were), then you will need to put in a few calls to fellow parents to find out the lay of the land.

2. Tantrums. There are various ways of dealing with these risks which are totally unavoidable. All children come with equipped with an innate predisposition to totally freak out when their desires are not met. The modern methods of threats to deny access to expected sugary foods and/ or TV seem to have the most instantaneous effects. Sometimes, however, one actually has to deny, not only threaten, and this often leads to elevated freak outs. These must be endured by parents with the aid of loud music/ earphones, yoga/ meditation and/or wine.

BUSINESS CASE

Once upon a time, when man lived off the land and when manual labour was critical for procuring food for survival, the business case for procreation was clear: your children would hunt for you and thus provide for you in your old age. However, since the advent of the knowledge economy, project management experts have been trying to devise a return on investment formula for Project Parenting. Thus far, they have been unsuccessful. Project participants cost more to raise than ever before and will not necessarily be in a position to send you and your spouse on a Carribean cruise in your twilight years.

In light of this, human capital experts have put forward a less tangible business case for Project Parenting. These include the velvet feel of a baby’s skin, cradling a perfectly contented, sound asleep infant, having your toddler crawl into your bed and cuddle you… and other such parenting perks.

Postprandial infant nap on the chest. One of the perks of parenting
Postprandial infant nap on the chest. One of the perks of parenting

Parenting

5 Me-centric Mantras I Wish I’d Known As A New Mom

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Kind of how Kristen Armstrong (the ex Mrs Lance Armstrong) told Oprah she believed that marriage was the world’s “greatest conspiracy”, I think a much greater conspiracy exists in the West for new moms. Whilst it may be true that no-one can ever prepare you for motherhood, I felt as though people should have at least tried a little harder. These are some of the things I wish I’d known early on as a first-time mom.

1. “Banish guilt“. These were the words uttered to me by my ante-natal teacher when my daughter was about 10 days old. I had phoned her in desperation as I was battling to breastfeed and battling with my new reality in general. She sat cross-legged on the nursery floor and dispensed just the kind of advice I needed, which included telling my husband and I to go out for dinner that night, telling me to drink champagne to stimulate my milk flow (whether I believe this or not, it was what I needed to hear at that moment). She also told me to banish guilt – forever. Of course, this is much easier said than done when you’re a mother but sometimes it’s exactly what you need to tell yourself. I think of her words often. They make me realise that my feelings of guilt help no-one and that they are a waste of energy.

2. “Be kind to yourself”. These are the words of my high school friend, Callia. And I think they are so applicable to new moms – whether this means that you’ll get take-aways/ eat leftovers more often than normal or go out for a girls’ lunch sans enfant once in a while. Just remember that it’s okay to be kind to yourself – your baby will be fine. One of the things Callia did with both her children as part of her “be kind to yourself” campaign was getting her nanny to do a night nurse duty once a week so that she and her husband could go out for dinner without worrying about the baby waking up later. There are many ways to be kind to yourself and this goes hand in hand with banishing guilt.

3. Pick and choose which advice to follow based on what makes sense to you. The world of parenting is awash with advice – and much of it feels contradictory, even when it’s being dispensed by paediatricians, gynaes and midwives. For example, I was advised by a breastfeeding consultant to express every three hours around the clock to stimulate my milk. For me, at the time, it was the worst advice ever. I couldn’t sleep a wink, knowing that I’d better fall asleep pronto because, in two and a half hours, I’d have to jump up in the middle of the night, wash and sterilise the breast pump and start the pumping process again. Things were put into perspective for me when a less uptight friend with a baby three weeks older than mine, wrote me an email about her first few days of motherhood. “The paed told me to wake up and feed every two hours,” she wrote. “I ignored him! I was way too exhausted!”. And she had a very positive breastfeeding experience – probably partly because she was so relaxed and only paid attention to advice that made sense to her.*

4. “Most Fortune 500 CEO’s were breastfed as infants“. Seriously? No. I totally made that up. There’s a reason we don’t have a line item on our CV’s stating whether we were breastfed as babies – because it really doesn’t matter. If you want to breastfeed and you’re able to – awesome. If you want to and aren’t able to, then know that your child will be just fine. The implication by lactation specialists that brain development will not be optimal when a baby is not breastfed is infuriating. Brain development will not be optimal if the kid is starving or if the mother is stressed out of her mind. What helped me when I was battling to breastfeed my first child, was thinking of all the highly intelligent, accomplished adults I knew who were formula fed – my husband being one of them. My mom and mother-in-law were helpful in citing many other examples (mothers of their generation with children of my generation whom I knew) and this really put things in perspective for me. I also saw a recent comment by a Facebook friend who is in her late thirties and one of four children, “My mother can’t exactly remember which of us kids she breastfed and which of us she didn’t”. Case in point.

5. A little bit of make-up goes a LOOOONG way. It may sound incredible if you have not had a baby, but there will be days when getting out of your pyjamas seems like an insurmountable challenge. My advice is to enjoy the odd pyjama day or the odd day without make-up, but don’t make this your norm. A little bit of make-up really does go a long, long way to making you feel like your old self – before you walked around all day with baby puke on your left shoulder.

You will be glamorous again. And it will be much, much sooner than you think it could ever be right now… Of course, this advice is only the tip of the iceberg, but the baby is probably about to wake up for yet ANOTHER feed and your me-time is nearly up – for now.

* The world of contradictory advice on the rearing of infants was brilliantly and hilariously summed up by a frustrated American mom whose rant went viral. Well worth reading:

http://www.today.com/parents/exhausted-new-moms-hilarious-take-expert-sleep-advice-goes-viral-6C9559908