Agile Parenting

Running a household is a lot like running a business. And when you have kids in the picture, that business can often feel a lot like the messy, chaos mode reality of startup life. 

My husband and I both have unpredictable jobs—no two days ever look the same. As an audio engineer in live theater and broadcast TV, his schedule varies wildly. Some weeks, he’s working around the clock in town; other weeks, he’s doing the same but out of town. And then there are the in-between weeks, when he’s between jobs and generally around.

The karmic laws of our family work in weird ways. So what typically happens is, the moment he’s out of town, something weird and wildly inconvenient happens—like discovering toxic black mold that forces an evacuation, our ceiling leaking buckets in the middle of the night, or our cat jumping off the roof (and miraculously surviving).

After the immediacy of triage mode has passed, we tend to sit down and map out some contingency plans to hedge against future problematic behaviors. Here are some of the modular, optional things we have added to our “family stack” over the years:

This so-called “agile parenting” approach is good for two reasons.

1. It really helps to know you have a contingency plan for just about anything

2. It really helps to know that you and your partner have a process for debriefing (and iterating) on things that go wrong.

You’d think–given all of this–that we’d be equipped to handle everything. And yet. 

The Best Laid Plans…

This week our family got hit by the norovirus. Kid #1 was knocked down on Sunday night. Kid #2 got hit on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Jason left town for a few days, just as our nanny got knocked out with the virus.

Which meant that on Thursday, I needed an emergency pickup babysitter so I could make it to a work event until 6 p.m.

I was feeling pretty proud of our emergency triage mode. Jason locked in the sitter through an agency we’ve worked with before who put out the bat signal on our behalf. I prepped her on logistics. He coordinated with daycare. We got a text confirming that neither kid panicked at pickup, that they navigated the bus ride home, and that they arrived at our building.

But then. She couldn’t get into the apartment.

The key worked, but the door refused to budge.

As the self-appointed building president, I summoned our WhatsApp thread for reinforcements. A dad on the first floor sent his son to troubleshoot. Still nothing.

So, we had to call it. The sitter took the kids to a coffee shop while I made a mad dash home to solve the mystery of the unbudgeable door.

Turns out, our regular housekeeper was out of town, and her sister had locked every possible lock on her way out. And of course our spare keys didn’t include that one.

Foiled. By a deadbolt. Ah well.

Navigating Chaos Mode with Grace

Startups and children are both dynamic, ever-changing beings that require almost entirely new frameworks in a matter of months (if not weeks). When I first started working in tech, I used to tell potential new recruits that if you can’t handle your job and company transforming every six months, they needed to find a new industry. When I worked in web3, I shortened that period to one month. Now, in AI, it feels like the rate of change is just a single week.

Parenting is quite similar. The needs of you, your partner, and your kid change so frequently that it can be hard to know how to catch a breath. Even when (especially when) something feels like a sure thing (your kids are really in a groove, you’ve got a great nanny on lock, you’re zoned for a school you love, or in an apartment that just works), it’s only a matter of time until the needs shift again.

We’ve found that contingency plans can help a lot. So do regular check-ins with your partner. People laugh when I tell them that my husband and I set aside several days for annual planning and also operate against a two-week sprint schedule. But without these regular habits, every day and every week would feel like a total catastrophe, and it would feel impossible to build familial resiliency.

Of course, things will still go wrong. But if your biggest crisis is that your backup housekeeper locked the wrong lock, derailing your backup babysitter, then honestly—let’s be honest, you’re doing just fine.