By Cindy Afoakwa-Acheampong
My son Ethan was born while I was finishing my last semester of coursework, right at the point in a PhD program where you are supposed to shift gears and start preparing for your qualifying exams and, eventually, your dissertation.
Six weeks after he arrived, I was building my qualifying exam reading list with him asleep on my chest, because the timeline for candidacy did not care that I had barely slept in over a month. Nobody warns you that becoming a mother and becoming a scholar at the same time means being fully present in two places that were never really built to fit together. I found that out the way most Black academic mothers do: by living it, one impossible week at a time.
Here is the thing nobody tells you either. I am a graduate research assistant and teaching assistant at a university that has a written parental leave policy, and I want to be clear that I was treated well. My program did not fight me on anything. But even with good people around me, the policy itself is vague in a way that leaves a lot of the real work to whoever happens to be in the room when you need it.
It tells you leave exists. It does not tell you what happens to your data collection timeline, your teaching assignment, or your standing with your committee while you take it. Whether that turns out fine depends almost entirely on who your advisor is and how your department happens to operate, and that should not be left to chance.
It is not just my story, either. Black women in the United States die of pregnancy-related causes at a rate of 44.8 per 100,000 live births, compared with 14.2 for white women, and that gap holds up across income and education levels. I was fortunate. My own pregnancy and delivery were smooth, and I do not say that to minimize what other Black mothers go through, but to make a different point: even when the medical side goes well, the support side still is not guaranteed, and a doctoral degree does not fix either problem on its own.
If we are talking about what Black mothers need, we cannot only talk about the emergency room. We also have to talk about who shows up for you afterward, at home and at work.
Academia’s own numbers on parental leave tell a similar story of good intentions that do not always reach the people who need them. Roughly 60 percent of universities offer some form of paid parental leave, averaging about fourteen weeks for women and under twelve for men, but an average tells you almost nothing about whether a specific graduate student, on a specific visa, funded by a specific grant, actually feels safe using it.
My own dissertation research looks at exactly this: how the formal language of a leave policy and the informal, often unspoken conversations around it shape whether academic parents feel supported or just quietly tolerated. The written policy and the lived culture around it are two different documents. Only one of them is legally binding, and it is usually not the one that determines how your semester actually goes.
What really got me through was not the policy. It was my husband, Daniel, rearranging his own schedule without a single complaint. It was Beatrice and Gladys, two colleagues who took turns watching Ethan so I could walk into the classroom and teach the section I was a TA for, without missing a class.
It was my advisor, who did not just tolerate my pregnancy; she celebrated it, throwing me a baby shower during my last semester of coursework that other colleagues, faculty, and staff in the department actually showed up for. My church ministry prayed over Ethan before he even had a name on a hospital form. None of that was in any handbook. All of it is why I made it through that stretch in one piece, and I think it deserves to be said out loud instead of quietly appreciated in private.
I know some readers will push back here. Someone will say having a baby in graduate school is a choice, and choices come with consequences you should have planned for. Someone else will say every parent everywhere struggles to balance work and family, so why make this about race at all? Both are fair questions, and I would rather answer them than dodge them.
Choosing motherhood does not erase a maternal health gap that exists in this country before a single deadline is ever missed. And yes, every parent juggles work and family, but not every parent is doing it while carrying the added weight of statistics that follow Black women into rooms we have every right to be in. This is not a request for pity. It is a request that the people and systems around us stop treating support as a personal favor and start treating it as something we can actually plan for.
So here is what I am asking for, plainly. Universities should check whether graduate students actually understand their parental leave policies and feel safe using them, not just whether the policy exists on a webpage somewhere. Departments should put real support for new parents in writing, before a student needs it, not after.
And if you are reading this as a colleague, a mentor, or a friend to a Black woman juggling a dissertation and a diaper bag, do not wait for her to ask. Offer to cover a class, bring a meal, or just check in before she has to find the words to ask for it herself. I got lucky with the people around me. Every Black mother in a PhD program deserves that same luck to be the norm, not the exception.
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