Sue Campbell - The Parental Leave Playbook

I will give you tools and resources to handle the practical and emotional sides of the touchpoints in this phase, as well as each of the touchpoints in the next chapters.

During Phase 2, you will be at home and able to naturally shift focus to your role as a parent while taking time to bond with your new child and whole family. This is a wondrous time—but it is not a vacation (and anyone who has been through it understands that; ignore childless people who think this is somehow the equivalent of three months in the Bahamas and read this spot-on comic: https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/06/04/holidays/). In transition theory, this phase is known as the neutral zone —the time in between where you have been (which is known) and where you are going (the unknown). However, neutral does not adequately describe how this phase feels. I think of it as the “messy middle” because it can feel disorienting and even overwhelming as you scramble to orient yourself, adjust, and learn the new tasks and skills that are required of you overnight.

Touchpoint 5, the first touchpoint of Phase 2, is to appropriately keep in touchwith work. You will have developed a communication plan during the action planning touchpoint of the previous phase, and now is the time to put that plan into practice and make sure it's honored by your colleagues—or adjusted as you find yourself wanting something different than what you thought you would need.

Touchpoint 6 helps you advocatefor yourself and your child(ren). During your transition any number of things may arise that require you to stick up for yourself or your family's needs. You may be healing or dealing with health issues for yourself, your partner (if you have one), or your child. You may be navigating tricky extended family dynamics. Enhancing your self-advocacy skills will serve you well now and for the rest of your career and life.

Touchpoint 7 happens toward the end of your leave as you make arrangements to return . This chapter walks you through the many things you will need to modify and arrange before you head back to work. This includes home basics like childcare, feeding plans for your child, dealing with separation anxiety, as well as work considerations such as how to best reconnect with your manager and team to ensure a smooth reentry to work. Again, having a plan—and a backup plan—is invaluable during this stage.

In this final transition phase, you will focus on integrating your dual roles of worker and parent into a new, singular working parent role (even if this is not your first child, this applies because you've never done it this way before). You will be heading back to work and slowly establishing your new normal through a series of experiments and adjustments. It's important to keep in mind that although you will appear, to your coworkers and boss, to be the same old you who went on leave, this may not match how you feel. You've undergone a significant internal transition (possibly accompanied by physical changes) that has brought you new insight and knowledge (again, even if this isn't your first child).

Touchpoint 8 is similar to Touchpoint 4, when you made the emotional space to reflect on the impact of your transition to parenthood. This touchpoint outlines how taking time to acknowledge the transition to working parentis equally important. Some can't wait for the day to come; others dread it. Either way, this is emotional and intellectual labor, the fruits of which you can bring back into your workplace as you continue building your career.

Touchpoint 9 is all about adjustment. Finding a new normal takes time and you will need to be creative and flexible in your thinking and actions to integrate your new dual identity as a working parent. Learning how to be gentle with yourself and others will be an important skill to practice in order to manage future transitions as your child grows and demands on your time and skills evolve.

Touchpoint 10—the final touchpoint of this framework—is about keeping accessto ongoing career development front and center on your return. After an extended leave, especially one of this bedrock-shifting magnitude, a new parent can lose confidence in their abilities or question their commitment to their work. It is not uncommon to feel like hard-fought career aspirations are at risk. This section walks you through putting a plan in place to ensure your career is not derailed and that you can capitalize on all you have learned personally and professionally during this time. All of the work you have put into your development during your transition helps take you to the next right place in your career path.

Thoughtfully approaching each of these touchpoints, as shown in the figure, allows you to take charge of your leave experience and skillfully create your new normal in a supported way that helps you continue building your career.

The 10-touchpoint framework will help you integrate the massive role change of moving from simply being a grown-up with a career to becoming a parent, then a working parent. Roles and role identity are important; you have played countless roles in your life (good student, strong athlete, best friend, etc.) and you play a number of roles throughout each day. They are the various hats you don in different spheres of your life. Sometimes they feel like a part you play, but often they become a key piece of how you think about yourself. When this happens, that role has become an identity.

Throughout this book I will ask you to pay particular attention to how you transition between the various roles in your life and how an identity can begin to form out of these roles. I will also ask you to give some thought to the roles others have played in your life, what it means to be career-identified and/or family-identified, and how a parental leave transition can lead to role and identity confusion and, at times, even conflict between those two spheres of your life.

One client, Kenny, grew up in a traditional home in a rural part of the country. His dad worked a lot and was the family breadwinner. Even though his mom also worked full time, when I asked who raised him, he didn't hesitate to say it was her. He explained that she was the one who saw to his basic needs, made sure he had his favorite foods to eat, understood that some clothes just weren't cool enough to wear, and helped advocate for him at school when he was struggling. I watched his contagious smile spread when he described her as his go-to person if he was upset or heartbroken. He said he hoped his wife would have a chance to be that person to their new baby.

Yet Kenny found himself about to be a first-time dad in a city away from family support, with a wife whose job was more demanding (and lucrative) than his. Circumstances meant that it was more likely that he would need to be the go-to for his new child, but even though he was open to the idea, he believed he had no good role models for how to do that. His supervisor had some experience managing other dads through parental leave and had seen indications that Kenny might struggle to overcome some outdated notions of what a dad's role should be and rise to the challenge of what would be required of him at home. I was called in to work with Kenny because his manager was concerned that if Kenny was unable to find ways to be a successful caregiver at home, he would encounter difficulty, even strife, and that struggle would spill over into how he would be able to show up at work. With the authentic support from his manager and the focused time we had together, Kenny was able to recognize that he did have a strong working parent role model: his mother. He tapped into the skills she had taught him and was able to beautifully manage his dual roles.