Value of Child in the Field During Survey - Nature Conservancy Report

The Nature Conservancy co-organized an “Expert BioBlitz”, similar to the public BioBlitzs, but using professional biologists, to explore a 26-mile stretch of the Amargosa River, located in the Mojave Desert.  One of the researchers brought their child.  The organizers of the event found the child to be such a valuable addition to the effort, that they included the following paragraph in the official report.

Section VII. e. Inclusion of Children "BioBlitz events are sometimes organized to involve children and families, with the goal of increasing science literacy and public engagement. In contrast, the Amargosa River BioBlitz included primarily adult experts, and the invitation list was restricted to small group of well-trusted individuals. However, one of the participants during the Amargosa River BioBlitz was a seven-year old child. While our event was not geared towards children, we discovered that judicious inclusion of this one, very well- behaved and field-ready child allowed for survey work to occur unimpeded while providing a set of eyes closer to the ground. This facilitated discoveries that otherwise would not have been made."

https://www.scienceforconservation.org/products/amargosa-bioblitz-2017

Geography Fieldwork With Family

"Fieldwork...With Family", published by The Geographical Review in 2001, is a lovely and poetic look at the ways doing fieldwork with a family can influence your experience.   The authors include Paul F. Starrs (Distinguished Professor geography), Lynn Huntsinger (Professor of Rangeland Ecology and Management), and their two daughters (Carlin and Genoa) - all contributing their own perspective to this tale.  This includes a detailed discussion of the logistics of extended international travel with a family, as well as having older children as field assistants.  

Some of my favorite quotes include:

"Let me also be honest and say that, at least for my family and others I know, working in the field together is excitement, a spice to life, the best form of wild ride." "Research was not as I had known it-not worse, but different." "Some of the Indiana Jonesish aspects of fieldwork do get shoved on the shelf when you are accompanied; but for those you can always go back alone, or break off for a stretch."

Professor Starrs was kind enough to share an update about his daughters, they are now 27 and nearly 29.  They're still stalwart fieldworkers, one in Kauai, Hawaii, and the other currently staff at UC Berkeley.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1931-0846.2001.tb00460.x

Multiple Situations, Multiple Solutions - Nature article

This article, work–life balance: Kid-friendly digs, by Kendall Powell was published in Nature in 2014.  It shares the stories of multiple researchers, in many different science fields, and how they all manage different types of fieldwork and travel with families.  

https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v513/n7519/full/nj7519-575a.html

Diving for Data - Children nearby with Caregiver, Hawaii

Dive for Science is written by an accomplished oceanographer husband-wife team, Lauren and Simon, who have two children.  This blog has many fantastic posts about doing fieldwork with children, traveling with children, backpacking with children, and about being a woman and a mother in this field.   She includes gear and logistics recommendations.

The following series of posts is a lovely narrative about thier family traveling to Hawaii for data collection.  They brought the grandparents along for childcare, and the kids got to experience living in Hawaii while the parents did data collection.   She also includes many good suggestions for doing fieldwork with children successfully.

https://diveforscience.wordpress.com/2016/11/17/family-fieldwork-v1-0-north-carolina-edition/
https://diveforscience.wordpress.com/2017/01/17/family-fieldwork-v2-hawaii/
https://diveforscience.wordpress.com/tag/happy-baby-happy-life/

International, Tropical, Treetop, Single Parenting

Meg Lowman is an american-born international biologist and ecologist, with expertise in tropical rainforest canopy ecology, canopy plant-insect relationships, and constructing canopy walkways.  She is also an educator, author, editor, adventurer, public speaker, AND single mother of two boys who she brought with her in the field.  Those two boys have since both graduated from Princeton in the sciences.

This is a great article, talking about her accomplishments and how she managed this - http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2006/09/case-study-mom-scientist-canopy-meg

Here is an excerpt from the article "...Lowman's most important innovation was this: she turned longer field expeditions into family trips, taking her two sons to remote regions of four continents. "We have shared adventures in the Amazon, dangling from trees together, walking on canopy bridges, learning medicinal plants from a shaman, eating insects, spotting scarlet macaws, and just getting muddy," she writes in It’s a Jungle Up There. "Experiencing the world through three pairs of eyes has enriched my life far beyond relying on my own view alone."  The article itself talks about more of the logistics.

I have had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Lowman speak twice, and read her first book, "Life in the Treetops".  I found the stories shared very inspirational, and I often reflect on them as I am trying to navigate research and parenthood myself.  I highly recommend the book, and It's a Jungle Up There, written in collaboration with her sons, is next on my list.

Dr. Lowman is currently the Director of Global Initiatives, Lindsay Chair of Botany, & Senior Scientist in Plant Conservation at the California Academy of Sciences.  In 2014, she joined this organization as the Chief of Science and Sustainability, and was responsible for the programs of scientific research and exploration.  She was previously a Professor at North Carolina State University and the founding director of North Carolina’s Nature Research Center at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.  Her list of nicknames is almost as impressive as the list of honors, including “Mother of Canopy Research”, “Canopy Meg”, “real-life Lorax”, and the “Einstein of the treetops”.  

Anthropology fieldwork with children, sometimes kids get sick

An article by Dr. Reetta Toivanen, an Adjunct Professor for Social and Cultural Anthropology and a Finnish Academy Research Fellow at the Erik Castren Institute of International Law and Human Rights at the University of Helsinki. 

She discusses how her children help her make contact with everyday people while traveling.  She also shares a journal entry from a particularly harrowing travel time when her child fell ill. 

http://allegralaboratory.net/fieldwork-with-children/

Anthropology Fieldwork with Kids in China - Book

There is an entire book about doing anthropology fieldwork in China with children, aptly titled "Doing Fieldwork in China…with Kids!", by Candice Cornet and Tami Blumenfield, which chronicles the experiences of 7 researchers.    

Emily Chao PhD at Pitzer College provides an in-depth summary of the book here.  The brief description of the book provided through Amazon.com is below.

"While many anthropologists and other scholars relocate with their families in some way or another during fieldwork periods, this detail is often missing from their writings even though undoubtedly children can have had a major impact on their work. Recognizing that researcher-parents have many choices regarding their children's presence during fieldwork, this volume explores the many issues of conducting fieldwork with children, generally, and with children in China, specifically. Contributors include well-established scholars who have undertaken fieldwork in China for decades as well as more junior researchers. The book presents the voices of mothers and of fathers, with two particularly innovative pieces that are written by parent - child pairs. The collection as a whole offers a wide range of experiences that question and reflect on methodological issues related to fieldwork, including objectivity, cultural relativism, relationships in the field and positionality. The chapters also recount how accompanied fieldwork can offer unexpected ethnographic insights.An appendix alerts future fieldworking parents to particular pitfalls of accompanied fieldwork and suggests ways to avoid these."