I never imagined that my journey into motherhood and my Ph.D. would begin at the same time. But parenthood does not wait for qualifying exams, dissertation milestones, or academic calendars.
Higher education, however, often seems to expect it to.
I gave birth to my daughter in the summer of 2023 while attending a major public research university. Like many graduate assistants at U.S. universities, my employment was tied to a nine-month academic-year appointment. Although my assistantship was renewed for the following academic year, the gap between contracts left me without access to maternity leave benefits or financial support during one of the most vulnerable periods of my graduate education.
Six weeks after giving birth, I returned to work. That meant that while I was recovering from childbirth, caring for a colicky newborn, managing an autoimmune disorder flare-up, and struggling with postpartum depression, I was also teaching a graduate-level course, completing doctoral coursework, and fulfilling my graduate assistant responsibilities.
I was exhausted, anxious, isolated, and caring for an infant who would not sleep through the night for nearly eighteen months. And I had no idea where to go for help.
That remains one of the most troubling parts of my experience. I was pursuing my doctorate in a School of Education, surrounded by scholars who study student development, equity, well-being, and institutional support. Yet I struggled to figure out how to navigate those systems myself.
It struck me that if I, a doctoral student in a field dedicated to understanding students and institutions, could not figure out where to turn, many other graduate student parents must also be facing the same barriers.
The data bear this out. A recent study showed that only 26% of higher education institutions had a maternity or parental leave policy, and just 10% offered paid maternity leave.
Other research on graduate student parents has documented the tension between doctoral education and caregiving, including time constraints, financial pressure, stress, isolation, and institutional policies that often assume students are unencumbered by family responsibilities. Moreover, research on supporting parents in academia has focused primarily on faculty mothers, with comparatively less attention given to student parents.
Yet even though student-parents are not rare, graduate education is still largely organized around a model of the scholar who has unlimited time, geographic mobility, and financial flexibility.
However, that scholar has never been an accurate representation of academic life.
Graduate students are workers, researchers, instructors, caregivers, partners, parents, and members of communities. Yet doctoral education often treats caregiving as an interruption to academic work rather than as one of the realities of the people doing that work.
For student parents, the consequences can be substantial.
Many navigate graduate education without reliable paid parental leave, affordable childcare, continuity of health insurance, adequate lactation accommodations, accessible mental health services, or compensation sufficient to support a family. These challenges are compounded for students who are first-generation, working-class, international, disabled, or otherwise navigating multiple forms of institutional constraint.
Those challenges are exacerbated for graduate student mothers, who face unequal access to the resources that can make or break a graduate career, from mentoring and publishing opportunities to teaching preparation and access to fellowships. Collectively, these opportunities shape who builds professional networks, whose scholarship becomes visible, and who ultimately remains in academia.
Graduate education also exists within a broader academic culture that rewards uninterrupted productivity. Sociologist Joan Acker described the “ideal worker” as someone whose work is treated as their primary, and often seemingly unlimited, commitment. Higher education has reproduced versions of this expectation in academic careers and graduate education alike, even in spaces that claim to care for inclusion and equity. For academic mothers in particular, research has found that motherhood is treated as something to manage quietly rather than a legitimate part of students’ lives that universities should accommodate.
But those expectations are unrealistic when that student has a newborn or a sick child. Nor do they recognize the human realities of parenting, such as when childcare suddenly falls through, or the demands of a family that depends on them.
Even conferences devoted to equity, education, and student development can overlook caregivers’ practical needs by failing to provide affordable on-site childcare, lactation spaces, or caregiver travel support. This matters because conferences are not simply professional gatherings. They are places where scholars build relationships, develop collaborations, find mentors, and become visible within their fields.
The good news is that universities can solve these problems.
First, universities must prioritize graduate students’ mental health, which research shows can be troubled by anxiety, depression, psychological distress, and burnout. For student parents, these pressures can be intensified by postpartum recovery, sleep deprivation, caregiving responsibilities, financial insecurity, and social isolation.
Universities should ensure that graduate students have access to mental health professionals who understand the realities of graduate education, reproductive transitions, and postpartum mental health. Just as importantly, institutions should make these resources visible before students reach a crisis point.
Institutions should also guarantee paid parental leave with stipends and health insurance protected during the leave period and across academic contract cycles. While some institutions have begun to recognize and expand parental leave protections for faculty, graduate students deserve the same consideration. It is time to extend these protections to the students whose labor is essential to the functioning of our universities.
Childcare must also be treated as an educational infrastructure issue, not simply a private family expense. To that end, universities should provide subsidized childcare, emergency childcare grants, backup care, and travel funding so that caregivers can accompany a student-parent to a conference.
These policies should also be flexible. Because licensed childcare may be unavailable or unaffordable, many student parents rely on grandparents, relatives, neighbors, or friends to watch their children. Policies that only reimburse traditional childcare arrangements can unintentionally exclude the very students they are intended to support.
Another way for universities to support student-parents is to train professors to work with them. That’s critical, because faculty mentoring plays a significant role in doctoral persistence and student development. Yet many faculty members receive little or no formal preparation for advising students through pregnancy, childbirth, caregiving, or other family-related circumstances.
This lack of preparation can also make faculty hesitant to engage in such conversations, particularly when they are unsure about what they can legally ask or how to navigate students’ privacy and accommodation rights. Rather than expecting faculty to become experts in students’ medical circumstances, universities should provide clear guidance on how to discuss academic needs without requiring unnecessary disclosure of private medical information. Faculty should also be given training about where on campus to direct students for formal accommodations and leave.
Preparing faculty in this way would help ensure that support for student-parents does not depend on whether an individual advisor happens to know how to navigate these issues.
Finally, graduate programs and their administrators should rethink what ‘timely progress’ means. A child's hospitalization, postpartum recovery, pregnancy, or family crisis should not jeopardize a doctoral student's funding, academic standing, or professional trajectory.
To that end, universities should establish automatic, clearly communicated extensions for significant caregiving and family-related interruptions rather than requiring students to repeatedly disclose deeply personal circumstances or negotiate accommodations one administrator at a time. The goal should not be to lower academic standards, but to separate academic rigor from unnecessary rigidity.
When universities fail student parents, they do not simply create an unpleasant experience. They risk losing scholars. Student parents bring knowledge shaped by caregiving and family life that can deepen classrooms, research agendas, and institutional communities — the diversity of ideas that higher education claims to value.
As for me, motherhood did not make me less committed to scholarship, and caregiving did not make me less capable of intellectual work. The institution simply asked me to navigate two demanding worlds without building a bridge between them.
That bridge is possible.
And universities can build it.
Yasmin Elgoharry, a powered by coffee- sleep deprived mother who happens to also be a full-time PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut, and a scholar-practitioner committed to advancing access, equity, and student support in higher education and beyond.
