Sample: Business/Mindset/Fresh Idea

19 qualifications of the full-time parent for management roles.

“I looked on child-rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it.” Rose Kennedy

After graduate school I had a brief stint in a Master’s of Management program.  I didn’t stay long as, within a semester, it was steadily revealed to me that the curriculum entailed the study of modalities, including the jargon that signified those modalities, all of which I had already practiced instinctually in the act of raising my family. Therefore what I would be attaining, had I stayed, was not new methods for management, but an ability to speak of those methods. Having engaged in the practice, what good was the theory?

Why isn’t full time parenting an entry on the resume/ CV? In light of that question, consider the following:

1. Strategic with Project Management

   Consider the strategies of a single parent with multiple children — the mountain of documentation, the complex series of steps, the different phases of development, and the vital human component that necessitates an organic timeline for simultaneous execution within those phases.

   Consider the institutional prowess, for public and private entities, required to meet requirements and deadlines for multiple constantly evolving individuals, — schedules, nutrition, academic achievement, medical and dental care, social circles at different levels of oversight, academic success, extra-curricular activities, safety issues, social media exposure and threats, transportation requirements, productivity training, emotional support, work-life balance training, first teeth, first steps, first heartbreaks, college applications, tax forms, first jobs, homework schedules, summer camp and other activity deadlines, school events, proms, college exploration visits, the financial and time management of all of it, the meetings, communications, and the level of responsibility?

2. Time Management Mastery, Including Deadlines

   Stay at home parents have always been implementing time management systems to organiza schedules, appointments and deadlines across multiple platforms.

3. Constantly Evolving Projects are a Natural Specialty

   The stay at home parent attends to, oversees, guides, and executes the human development of individuals who are constantly changing and increasingly engaging with the world. This individual is the hub of attention and execution for the evolution of those works in progress.

4. Organized Overall and with Systems and Document Processing

   What must be executed must also be planned and tracked. There are many categories to be organized through the innovation and implementation of effective systems. What matters more, the content of the categories or the skill to coordinate them?

5. Accustomed to Being Mentally Engaged With Their Enterprise

   Keeping vital projects thriving has meant keeping them top of mind, being always in question mode, always researching, always arriving at solutions.

6. Follow Through

   When the project is the management of development of a living being, time waits for no one. Follow through becomes inherent in the process as next tasks, next steps, next lessons, next milestones, and next stages are always pending. As setting work aside has been impossible, this individual is adept at the steady management of both predictable and unpredictable conditions.

7. Emotional Maturity

   From the two year old’s tantrums to the uprisings of teenagers, this high-level manager is practiced being securely grounded in their steady center. This is a fierce testing ground for human relations capabilities.

8. Naturally Enterprising

   Managing anything from its infancy to its actualization is an enterprising act.

9. Experienced Working where a lot is “At Stake”

   Statistically speaking, there is no enterprise in which human individuals are more invested. This individual has practiced devotion to big picture, long term goals.

10. Soft Skills Galore

    To name just a few — maturity, reliability, ingenuity, cooperation, teamsmanship, innovation, proactivity, accountability.

11. Social Media, Computer and Technologically Savvy

    Whether to manage the enterprise, keep up with threats of social media to the well-being of development, get the hottest thing under the holiday tree, or remain in sync and in communication, this individual has had a front row seat to hot topics in technology and is likely to be experienced as an avid researcher.

12. Financial Management Skills

    Complex planning and tracking of financial resources is the norm for this individual, not just for the household, but for activities, and for the years leading up to college prep, as well as for higher education, which requires planing and strategy.

13. Communication Experience Across Multiple Forums

    This individual is accustomed to tailoring their communication to multiple age levels and their social circles, and to all of the institutional levels of awareness amidst the persons associated in schools, as well as employers, activity institutions and coaches.

14. Work Life Balance

    The high demands and multiple categories of this role require that work life balance be practiced, exemplified and taught.

15. They Have Tested Multiple Management Modalities as a Matter of Course

    In a consistent effort to make the increasingly complex workable, many different management and execution systems have been tried by this individual, and likely, a unique and innovative system and workflow tailored and sustained.

16. Adept at Self Care, for Optimal Performance

    Inevitably, having a reached a point of recognition regarding the importance of their function, this individual succeeded a turning point whereby they learned to prioritize their own self-care for the purposes of optimal performance in their complex role.

17. Growth Mindset

    As the project of managing the development of evolving individuals is, in every new day, one for which the individual had no former training, this individual has embraced growth in order to remain optimally qualified.

18. Attuned to the Zeitgeist

    If young people have been crossing their path on a daily basis, this individual is consistently exposed to new trends, new ideas and other hot topics routinely. This condition affords their mindset a certain vitality.

19. (Bonus) Often managing other complex projects in addition to human development projects.

    In addition to all of the above, there have probably been other large projects that this individual has managed — wearing the hat of a general contractor for home renovation projects or in a sales and outreach role for fundraising efforts, to cite a few examples.