Dr Emma Bolger

I am pleased we are into the first proper week of January 2025, as all 3 children are now back at school or nursery. The long midwinter festive holidays in the UK are a challenge for neurodiverse children and their families. After being hyped up from every angle for over a month, the festive break is 2 weeks of front-loaded intense activity followed by an inevitable lengthy come-down and a long wait to return to “normality”. To add to the challenge, someone, if not everyone, in the household gets sick every year without fail either in the run-up or during the holidays, because it’s the middle of winter and germs are rife. We did what worked for us, and had a pleasant enough break, but I am going to try to be a bit more vocal this year about what accommodating neurodiversity means in real life. I am relieved the children are back to school and nursery but it certainly isn’t a case of “first day back and everything is normal again.” There is a transition out of the higgledy-piggledy ...

Last month, I took my ten month old baby with me to a conference away from home. It's not common to see a baby accompanying a delegate on the academic conference scene and I had quite a few questions and comments whilst at the conference and more since. For those curious as to how it came to happen, here's how (and why) I did it.  " Did you ask if you could bring her?" I had a baby less than a year ago, so she comes with me to a lot of work events. She's been seen regularly throughout this academic year, as I returned to work " early " when she was only 3 months old. For the conference "all" I need to do for explicit practicalities was ask the hosting venue for a travel cot and high chair. There were plenty of other logistical issues to navigate. First of all, I'm not going to suggest bringing your baby with you to a work event is easy or suitable for everyone and every working environment but it has often worked for me and it worke...

Over the past year, throughout the period of being pregnant with and then having my second child, I’ve discovered that very little career development support exists for new or expectant mothers. Perhaps because it is assumed that we don’t want or need it. I would argue that this period is, in fact, when career information advice and guidance interventions should be considered essential. For starters, the assumption is that we are happy in our work, and that we’ve chosen to have children when work is stable, or that we are riding the storm and plan to use maternity leave as an excuse to get out and never return. But women do want to work, indeed have to, around very small children. While financial considerations might be paramount, they should be equally weighted with mothers’ own emotional needs, which, if career is a lifelong process that incudes periods of education, work and caring, we forget are directly related to her career development. Straw poll time, I know, but I have two...

I am one month into being back at work, and the wee one has turned 4 months old. Given the amount of times friends and colleagues have asked me about my return to work, accompanied by a concerned look, it’s pretty clear that the general understanding of when you go back “early” is that it's not easy and it’s out of the ordinary. A quick definition of “early” is required here: there is a difference between early (in relation to the generally accepted duration of maternity leave) and too soon. I went back when I was ready. The challenge has been breastfeeding around my work. My workplace is ok: I have the option to work flexibly and there is a feeding / expressing room on campus should I need it. I’ve not needed it yet, because I have a private office space and I have a husband on shared parental leave bringing the wee one in to be fed during my breaks and at lunchtime when I am on campus. My daughter, one week after I returned to work, decided she didn’t want to take a bottle ...

I had a perfectly timed academic baby this year: she arrived the first weekend in June, just before the quieter period, where academics with greater teaching responsibilities in the first two trimesters of the academic year get on with ( amongst other tasks ) writing papers and undertaking research. You'd be surprised by how many of us “coincidentally” time things just right when growing a family to keep our academic careers on track, whilst acknowledging that any time out is a risk. I've missed out on a lot of excellent conferences in my field this summer-autumn, including turning down presentation spots that would've been REF-able and good to have on my CV. I'm back at work but attending events away from Scotland is becoming increasingly tricky. I'm not averse to taking one or both children with me, and their dad. Like many academics, a conference trip often becomes an opportunity for a “workcation” for me with the family in tow. Plenty of folk have met my ...

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a proper blog post, so here I am, attempting to get back into the swing of it. There’s a simple reason why I have the headspace and time to do so: I had a baby at the start of June. That’s probably not what you’d expect to come at the end of that sentence. Maternity leave is meant to be all about sleepless nights, being covered in milk/wee/poop, fighting extreme tiredness, trying to entertain a baby, right? Yes, there has been a lot of washing, nappy changing, wondering when I last ate or showered or managed to leave the house in less than an hour. But it’s also been a welcome break from the demands of my work, which had pretty much overtaken my life for the last 3+ years, in every moment when I wasn’t also co-parenting a lively toddler who turned into an even livelier pre-schooler. There is nothing like an enforced period of total confinement, of being “tied down” to a new baby who needs you 100% of the time, to force you to reset. Not ...

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post about the difficulties of library access for student-parents. So I am absolutely delighted to see this news story today about the new family study lounge at the University of Glasgow library. https://universityofglasgowlibrary.wordpress.com/2017/09/07/new-family-study-lounge-uofglibrary/  I didn't name and shame at the time but it was in fact at the University of Glasgow library where I had the demoralising experience that set me off looking into the issue.  I can only hope other universities take note and follow suit. What a fantastic addition to the service offered and much-needed acknowledgement of how many students have to balance their studies with having the responsibility for children. 

There are strong economic drivers for ‘better’ childcare. Childcare costs UK parents/guardians hard-earned cash for every hour used until free universal part-time places kick in for 3 and 4 year olds (earlier, at 2, for eligible parents) and a cost remains even then for full-time care if required. There are some parents who lose out financially by going back to work and having a child or children in childcare (and despite what the media would have us believe, many who persevere, for longer-term career development, despite this). Okay, okay, already, by this point in this blog post, some readers will be ready to make One Of The Comments. Hold on, you’ll get a chance! Would we be happier paying childcare costs if we had gold standard childcare? What would make us the ‘best’ in Europe? Well firstly, how to define ‘gold standard’? Words we use are: regulated, accessible, flexible. Childcare is expensive in the UK but quality is high compared to other nations in Europe. Universal...

This going back to work business is nothing like as easy as it sounds. After you have a child, you don’t just ‘go back to work’ on a set date, at a set time and return to business as usual. Play does not continue as before. At first the novelty of it all and/or the immediate crisis management overshadows your ability to see past how the changes might be affecting you. You may be too guilty about the whole thing to deal with the impact of working plus parenting. By two months in, you are too tired to do anything about it and battle on.  At about the four month stage you realise you can’t really keep the charade up. By six months, something has to or likely already has changed. Oh and socialising with colleagues outside of work, no chance of that. It clashes, with everything.   On returning to work after having a child/children, you spend a fair amount of time desperately trying to establish new routines, finding strategies to prevent you from losing your marbles entirely...

I’m currently sitting at a table in my local Sainsbury’s café typing this blog post, while eating soup and keeping an eye on my son who is asleep next to me in his pram. This is pretty representative of how this particular mummy has been managing to maintain her own career around a baby-toddler since the start of term. I think he is a toddler now, if we go by the terms laid out in this guide . [In one of my other lives, I’ve been trying to convey to employability course students that using examples of competencies in your personal life makes it easier to find examples in work/academic reflective practice so I am trying it out in this blog post myself >>> Teaching by example ] PhD year 1 semester 1 ends on Friday and unlike many PhD researchers, I’m about to spend a month working as much as I can, rather than resting up over the festive season and reading interesting books. I suppose the perk is that I get to eat mince pies as I go. My husband is about to start four we...

In early November 2014, I attempted to visit the library of a Scottish university with my 11 month old son. I was told by a security guard at the gate that due to the library’s rules on children I couldn’t access any area other than the ground floor, where there were only student access PCs and some study desks. There was no mention that during staffed hours a member of staff could retrieve materials for me to use on the ground floor (which in the process of collecting information for this extended blog post I discovered may be the case). So for starters, there was possibly an internal communications issue, but I want to put that aside for the moment and unpick the entire matter of library access for student-parents. This issue was highlighted in the Nuffield Foundation’s research (2012) into student-parent support within in English higher education institutions which concluded: …students with children are not getting the support they need to succeed in higher education. Whil...