Running for Office as a Parent

At the beginning of this campaign, I wrote that I thought my biggest challenge would be trying to be a candidate while also being a parent.

I was right.

There are other challenges, of course. Being a first-time candidate means that I’ve also had to build connections while the other two have had a decade to network. The strategy and messaging is always uncertain. But operationally, the hardest part of this campaign has unquestionably been the need to balance being out on the trail with being at home taking care of my son.

Campaigns, especially local campaigns, run on candidate time. Volunteers are enormously important - I could not do this without them - but there are limits to what you can delegate.

I have to be the one knocking on doors. I have to show up at events. I have to make the calls. There’s a principle involved, too: I will never ask a volunteer to work harder for my campaign than I am willing to work myself.

And I’m not going to ask voters to trust that I’ll work hard for them in government if I’m not willing to do the work of getting there.

Can it be done?

So how do you do that when you’re also a parent?

In my case, the answer is: basically everyone I know has chipped in.

My wife has taken on more than her share. My parents have watched my son. Friends have helped. We now have a babysitter who comes over every week. I take Sunday mornings, and one night a week I make campaign calls while he watches a movie.

Mostly, though, I just eliminated free time. And even with all that help, there are parts of campaigning I simply cannot do.

Last night, for example, I had intended to go to an event where I could have gotten a photograph with the mayor and a city councilor. Would that picture have won me the election? Of course not. But those appearances and photographs are part of campaigning. But then child care reared its head again and I had to skip it.

Someone who had served on a select board once told me that when he ran, he would get Dunkin’ every morning and spend an hour standing at an intersection holding his sign. It was a great way to build name recognition.

I can’t do that. It’s during daycare drop off.

Another candidate told me that when he ran for city council, he would spend Friday and Saturday nights standing outside bars and clubs in Cambridge with his sign and a clipboard.

I can’t do that either. I’m doing bedtime.

None of these things individually is a huge sacrifice. But they add up.

That’s the reality of running for office as a parent: there are only so many hours in a day, and taking care of a child consumes a lot of them. You can organize and prioritize and ask for help, but eventually you hit the hard limit of time.

How it can be done

If you’re a parent thinking about running for office someday, my message isn’t that you shouldn’t. But don’t let anyone pretend it isn’t a harder path, especially if your kids are young.

However, there’s another side to it, because the thing that makes campaigning harder is also a big part of why I’m campaigning.

When I talk about childcare, I have personal experience with it. When I talk about public education, I’m talking about the school he’ll start the day after the election.

That doesn’t mean you have to be a parent to care about schools or childcare, any more than you have to ride the bus every day to care about public transportation. Everyone comes to public service with their own experiences and motivations.

But parenthood has also given me the training I need. No matter how tired I am, I’m not more tired than I was when he woke every hour in the night during a sleep regression. There are plenty of moments in parenting when something needs to get done, you’re exhausted, your preferred plan has completely collapsed, and nevertheless you figure out another way to do it.

Campaigning has felt surprisingly familiar.

So, yes: being a parent has made running for office harder. But it’s also a reminder every morning of why I’m doing this.

If you’re a parent thinking about running someday, I’m happy to compare notes after September 1 about what worked, what didn’t, and what I would do differently.

For now, my advice is simple: know that it will make running harder.

And know that it might also be exactly why you should run.