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What programming taught me about being a parent

18 Feb 2023

I was pleasantly surprised in the early weeks of becoming a mother to realise the lessons I’d learned as a programmer helped me as a parent. Here are a few of them.

Attitude to problem solving

So much of what I do every day with my child is problem solve. I’d say it’s one of the core elements in parenting. This is brilliant since I love problem-solving!

To me problems are endlessly fascinating, both in programming and childcare.

As a developer I brought a sense of curiosity, openness, joy, and patience to code issues. Not all the time mind you, I’m not a saint; it took me a long time to feel calm solving any gpg issue.

But in general I found treating coding problems as opportunities for learning really helped my ability to solve them.

I’ve found this attitude also helpful in parenting. It makes my daughter’s signals a lot less stressful because I see them as opportunities to learn something about her as well as myself.

Pair programming

Realising caring for a baby with another person is a bit like pair programming was a revelation.

Early on I saw elements of the driver/navigator relationship in parenting.

Things like knowing there is no one way to solve a problem, being curious about how someone else sees a problem or a solution, knowing when to step back and allow your partner to gain experience and also when to step in, working together to create safe spaces to fail and learn.

It also makes the conversation about caring a lot smoother because we use the language of pair programming: “would you like me to drive?” or “I’m a bit lost right now, do you mind driving/navigating?”.

Bringing the lessons on how to over-communicate and continually check-in in pair programming to parenting with my husband has been incredible¹.

Finally, a baby is a bit like a keyboard: it feels rude when someone just grabs them from you to try to solve the issue.

Incidents

I never thought incidents would prepare me for parenting, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover how easy it was to snap awake at 3AM and be present to solve a problem.

I also discovered I’d developed the ability to compartmentalise my sense of urgency, frustration, or helplessness in order to resolve an issue (in this case a baby signalling a need).

There’s an uncanny crossover between how babies pick up on a parent’s energy and how a team picks up on incident lead’s energy: projecting calmness can create a calm atmosphere.

Using data to help make decisions

It’s hard to have a conversation about what to do with a crying baby if there’s no information or data to inform that conversation and decision. Are they tired or hungry? Or both? When did they last eat, sleep, or have a nappy change?

Sleep was the big one for us.

Before we started tracking our child’s sleep we would have tense conversations around whether she was tired or not –– often while holding a crying infant, not something conducive to cultivating compassionate communication.

Using a tracker (aka monitoring) made conversations about our baby’s needs a lot calmer and more informed.

Also, once we started tracking some of our child’s core needs (sleep, feeding, nappy changes) we began to see a pattern in her day and then could better develop a response, centre her needs (or plan around them), and help her other caretakers know her schedule.

As she’s gotten older and developed hunger and tired cues we understand, we don’t track as much (baby sign language for the win).

I miss it a bit to be honest, mainly because I had this daydream of creating a Grafana dashboard for some of her metrics (my husband encouraged me to de-scope this idea, we already had a lot on our plate as new parents).

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