If you’re the travelling partner, avoid playing the part of the fun parent.
How can you stay close when one of you travels a lot for work? The moment your partner walks through the door it is chaos. Your children are overjoyed, but you feel a strange blend of love and relief, mixed with resentment.
Because caring for your kids while your partner is travelling is nothing like single parenting. You aren’t raising your children on your own, with all of the emotional and financial consequences. You still have someone to talk to when you’re feeling down, and you share the bills and a home.
But being on your own a lot can be disorienting because when one of you is often away, the other can drift into becoming the primary caretaker. And nobody ever really talks about the consequences of that. So what strategies can you adopt that will help you manage the emotional and logistical complexities of parenting when one of you travels a lot?
The key is for you to agree that the one who remains home is not the sole parent. The traveling parent needs to stay engaged and to find practical ways to help from a distance. Including regular check-ins and explicitly arranging household duties with the other.
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Perhaps the traveling parent can order goods or services online from a shared to-do list, or help organise the children’s extracurricular activities. For example making sure the soccer schedule is up-to-date on the family calendar, or coordinating the car pools.
Every homecoming needs some clear planning ahead of the actual return, perhaps over the phone or in an email. Have the children’s routines changed? Are there any new rules in place? Will the home-comer need some time to decompress? Or can they immediately become the primary caregiver for a few days so that the stay-at-home parent can relax?
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Have another re-entry check-in within the first 24 hours that focuses on what tasks each of you wants to handle because the first few days can feel chaotic as your personal and family routines readjust. Having the returning parent focus on the regular daily tasks is a good way to reduce some of that initial confusion. That means doing the housework! Washing the dishes, making the bed, shopping for groceries and cooking meals. The tasks that are always there.
It’s important that the homecoming parent takes full ownership of their tasks as a relief to the mental load carried by the parent who stayed behind. So if you’re taking the trash out, don’t just empty the bin. Clean it and replace the liner.
If you’re the traveling partner, avoid playing the part of the fun parent because diving into the more tedious parts of caregiving is in your best interests.
You’re tired and want to rest, but do it because it’s an investment in your mutual happiness, so instead of flopping onto the couch with the kids, try coming home via the supermarket with an armful of groceries. And heading for the kitchen!
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