I travel for work somewhere between four and six months a year, which is both a privilege and, depending on the day, a knife to the heart. I bring my son when I can, but not every assignment is built with a 4-year-old in mind. A recent 17-day Smithsonian Journeys group tour through Central Asia focused on history and archaeology, for example, was not the moment to test his limits. So I went without him.
This was hardly my first work trip since becoming a parent, but it was the first where Julian was old enough to really notice my absence: There were teary FaceTime calls, often in the middle of the night for me because of the time difference. “Mommy, I miss you when you travel,” Julian told me. Another day, he tried a different argument: “You can’t go on a trip because I love you.”
There is no easy fix for that specific type of heartbreak, no airport plushie that makes your kid’s pain go away—or makes you not feel like the Worst Parent Alive for leaving. But tiny rituals can help: a note dashed off from a hotel room or a strategically planted kiss before departure.
These gestures do not erase the guilt of work travel. They give kids something to hold onto—and parents a way to stay connected when they can’t be huggable in the same room. I asked parents who travel often for work to share the small practices that help their children negotiate pre-departure dread, make check-ins from the road feel more special, and turn ordinary work trips into something that sticks long after everyone is home.
Make the goodbye tangible
The anxiety around a work trip often starts before the suitcase is zipped, which is why some parents make the leaving itself more concrete. Angela Cowley, a Sydney-based managing director and mother of four, travels frequently interstate and internationally. Before each trip, her eldest, Georgia, helps her pack, choosing one thing for Cowley to wear each day she’s away: a bracelet, a watch, earrings. The tradition began before a 10-day trip to Singapore; now, Cowley says, it helps Georgia feel like she’s part of the experience.
Monika Sundem, the Montana-based CEO of experiential travel company Adventure Life and another mother of four, created a more structured ritual before an Antarctica trip, when she knew ordinary check-ins would not be possible. She placed numbered envelopes in shoeboxes on their desks, one for each day she’d be gone. Some held a note; others included a small treat, toy, funny drawing, or an instruction like “Tell Dad this is good for ice cream after school today.” Sundem says the simple ritual helped ease the separation anxiety, especially for her youngest daughter.