Instead of a negative and complaining post on conferences and parenting, I want to highlight the proactive approach the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) is taking to support caregivers as well as ECRs in general at their 2017 meeting in New Orleans. I look forward to attending this conference and will co-chair a session on Conceptualising the Child: Identity and health in bioarchaeology with Mary Lewis and Rebecca Gowland.

I was dismayed last year at both the SAAs (Society for American Archaeology) and the AAPA meetings at the lack of childcare and facilities available to carers attending the conference, or information in general about external childcare arrangements. After contacting numerous people in the associations over several weeks about childcare arrangements, I gave up hired private nannys. This was very difficult for my just turn two-year-old who had really bad separation anxiety and made it very expensive with transport costs to and from the venue to attend to my children.

This time around AAPA has been proactive and provided members with a survey for childcare requirements for the 2017 meeting, as I understand has also happened at some of these conferences in the past. I am optimistic this may mean that there are some on-site childcare facilities available.

Last year AAPA also provided the 2016 Family Care Award for Early Career Women scholars, a Committee on Diversity Women’s Initiative (COD-WIN) initiative to assist those who are caring for dependent family member/s at home. There is no sign of the award this year (yet) but we can only remain optimistic.

AAPA also supports student attendance at the annual meeting through various means, e.g. the Pollitzer Student Travel Award and professional development mentoring opportunities

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For those of you interested in our session at the AAPA, here is our abstract:

Conceptualising the Child: Identity and health in bioarchaeology

A child’s skeleton provides a rich repository of information relating to their physical and social worlds. This evidence, when properly contextualised, may be successfully harnessed by bioarchaeologists to explore such diverse aspects of childhood, including care and cultural constructions of the life course, the fluidity of gender and status identity with age, local disease ecologies, activities such as play and occupation, and even cases of physical abuse. Children have emerged as important social actors in the past, as individuals who exercise considerable agency, and whose presence and societal contributions are vital to properly consider when interpreting the archaeological record. Bioarchaeologists are increasingly aware of the importance of younger members of society to our understanding of past cultures and lifeways. Children, particularly perinates and infants, are now regarded as crucial to assessing maternal health, adult morbidity patterns and longevity. Exposure to malnutrition or infectious diseases during the early stages of our development are recognised to have a detrimental effect on health during adulthood, and for our offspring. As vulnerable members of a society, wholly dependent on the care of others, understanding the survival of infants has the potential to provide an accurate measure of a population’s ability to adapt to their particular environmental circumstances. Our questions are becoming ever more sophisticated as we broaden our focus away from issues of representation of children and mortality rates to questioning specific issues that surround a child’s identity, from infancy to adolescence, and the unique circumstances that influence their health and survival.

At the 2016 AAPA meeting with her new France Casting hoodie, my name tags, and the flesh-eating bacteria (necrotizing fasciitis) soft toy I was given from one of our PPA session organisers 🙂