by Alicia Slansky

Created on: January 27, 2009   Last Updated: April 18, 2012

There are many reasons these days that parent may have to travel away from home. Each reason for travel has it's own set of circumstances that bring with it unique problems to handle and ways to best address them. The good news is, that with solid communication, some serious planning, a lot of love and an understanding of everyone's needs, there can be a stable, happy household. A traveling parent need not be torn between leaving the family at home and the necessity to provide for their family.

Types Of Travel

The schedule of a traveling parent is the first thing to consider when setting up your home plan. Some parents are sporadically out of town for a few days at a time; a business traveler, those in the airline industry. Some are on a contract "commute" for specific length of time; construction jobs where they come home on weekends but the work week is spent out of town. Transport professions (trucking industry) take parents away on specific assignments with varying lengths of gone time and home time. Our military personnel are often times away on long term overseas deployment. And community protection patrol such as fire fighters and emergency medical technicians usually work in shifts that require them to be at the station for 24 hours and then home for 48 hours.

Daily Life Interruptions

While a traveling parent is away, the aren't on the home front is usually busy preparing life as a single parent. They take on all responsibilities of getting the children up, fed, ready for school, to and from school, activities, back home to get homework done and checked, planning and cooking the meals, making sure hygiene is kept up and getting them to bed on time. Schedules are important to children. They thrive on structure and when a parent is traveling, the structure is ultimately offset when they come back home.

Depending upon the reasons for being out of the home and the type of travel the parents is doing, the interruptions to the daily home schedule may be more or less severe. Weekend parents who work out of town during the week and home on the weekends tend to walk into a fully functioning household and often times feel that they are in the way. It can interrupt parenting from the home front parent because now that the other is home, the children tend to get over excited. Homework, dinner time and getting ready for bed may end up totally off kilter for the two days that Dad comes home. There are measures that can be taken to limit the disturbance at home when

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