Imagine that you are in your final year of studies and you are interning at a big corporation. Everyone in the company has well defined roles and performs their jobs well. It is a well oiled machine. You are given some small tasks to help out and at the end of the internship you go away thinking, wow, I could do this job next time.

Then, after you graduate, you work for a boss who is very experienced in his or her field and seems to know everything. After one month, the boss says: ok! You have learned everything I need to teach you. Now, you take over the business.

The first example as an intern is similar to the first few days in the hospital after your child is born. There is an army of healthcare professionals helping to take care of your baby. You get to sleep (if you want - you should) almost normal hours.

The second example is similar to the confinement nanny coming over and settling the baby for you. You still may not be getting as much sleep as you need, and you may even find it much tougher than the "internship" phase.

But after the nanny leaves, you are pretty much on your own. Drawing the analogy to a job again, you are now tasked with running a company with close to zero useable experience.

There are ways to mitigate this, but I will get to that later.

People often say that parenting is a full-time job. It is more accurate to say it is a job (1) that requires one Full Time Equivalent (FTE) of manpower and (2) that is 24/7 in nature. It also requires you to be (3) an amateur Generalist in a job market dominated by professional specialists. Will go into each of these points.

I am not saying that it is like a normal job, of course. The is used as a planning parameter and for logistics purposes. This is solely what this post is about.

One FTE equivalent

There are two important and related aspects to this.

First, the amount of man-effort and labour is roughly equivalent to taking on at least one additional full-time job (some might say more). So, as a thought experiment, if you were to handle all parenting tasks yourself, ask yourself: do I have the capacity to take on one additional full-time job on top of my existing commitments?

Second, a parent does not have to personally take on all parenting tasks. That's why I said the job requires one FTE equivalent - the amount of work from this full time job would fully occupy one person, but it can be divided among a few people. This is a good thing because it means you don't have to burn yourself out doing everything. However, the support that parents receive (if they are lucky enough to receive it) from grandparents, helpers, etc. may obscure the first point made earlier - that it is actually a job requiring at least 1 x FTE. If you see a working parent who seems to be doing very well at work, the chances are there is a lot of unseen (and possibly unpaid) labour taking care of the child while the parent is at work. That's not to say that child-minding always needs to be outsourced, because everyone has to find their own balance on what they can personally handle or not. The point is that there are always going to be compromises. Barack Obama has said before that his wife had to pick up the slack on taking care of his kids, because his work commitments were too heavy. On the other hand, this meant that the caregiver has to forego career opportunities. Why not get a helper then, the choice of many parents and best of both worlds since it allows both parents to do other things? That comes with a downside too because the kids' time spent with the helper (who is essentially, an employee of yours) is time that you could have spent with your kids.

There are no easy answers, but that's not really the focus of this point I'm trying to make, which is to recognize that the amount of workload involved, that child-minding support behind every working parent may not be as visible as you may think but yet is crucial and should be planned for in the same way that a company needing to fill a key man position should do.

24/7 job

Another distinguishing factor of the parenting job is that it is a 24/7 job. This means that while your child is still young, he/she must constantly be accompanied by an adult for all waking and non-waking hours of the day.

One implication of this, is that (if you have not outsourced your child minding), if you are a working parent, you do not have much free time either before and after work.

To put it in perspective, before having children, I never felt that I had a lot of free time on my hands, because there is a saying that "tasks expand to fill the time available for completion". To take a normal work day for example, I would wake up, wash up, eat breakfast and then go to work. After work, I would come home, and if M cooked, we would eat dinner, do the dishes, and perhaps have an hour just relaxing, using the phone or watching a show. On a normal day I didn't particularly feel that I had a lot of time or that I was doing anything at a leisurely pace.

However, AFTER having kids, a lot of these things become luxuries. To simply wake up, wash up and have breakfast in an unhurried pace becomes unthinkable because you have to get the kids ready for school, which entails diaper changing (if applicable), brushing their teeth, getting them changed etc. So what you initially took an hour to do before kids, you now have to compress to about 10 minutes or so. And for things that you can't compress, you just give up what would have been your free time to do it.

And when you have kids, the day doesn't end when you or they go to bed, because they may wake up in the middle of the night for any number of reasons including wetting (or even better, pooing) the bed, hunger, illness and so on. So you are constantly on call to attend to them during the night time - again, assuming you have not outsourced these duties.

It is possible to maintain your pre-child lifestyle if you outsource a lot of child duties but like I said there are downsides to that too.

An amateur Generalist

Lastly, one defining characteristic of a parent is that you have to know a whole bunch of things which basically revolve around keeping your child alive, such as sleeping patterns, nutrition, screen time, illness, medications, and so on. But because you started with almost zero experience, there are so-called professionals who can offer advice or help you with it.

Part of a parent's job is to be a huge information filter because there is too much information out there and too much expertise (even if we include only the legitimate experts) out there that it is impossible to absorb and be good at everything.

The good news, I find, is that a parent only needs some broad strokes of knowledge - the rest is detail. And in this era of information overload, it's easy to feel overwhelmed or feel that other parents have a lot more expertise than you do.

Going back to the job analogy, I'm going to say something unintuitive here: although it is the most important job you can have, you do not need to excel in it. In fact, the job-like aspects of parenting (the tough bits) can be treated with the same level of enthusiasm as a mundane job. You don't have to excel at knowing which foods to give your kids all the time, playing with them, knowing how to develop their IQ and so on. It is a plus if you have read up on some of these areas but if you recall, anything you do in this FTE job is actually ON TOP of what you used to do without kids. There will be no lack of people to give you advice on important areas.

To conclude, it is important as a planning parameter to treat child minding as a FTE, 24/7 job. Once you have that mindset, you will have a better appreciation of which parts, if at all, of that job you want to share with your spouse or outsource.