Family Travel

How to Be a Traveling, Working Mom (According to Traveling, Working Moms)

It comes down to tears, sweat, and a lot of pre-planning.
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Traveling for work is a serious perk: you get to visit cities you may not have otherwise, rack up airline miles to use on your next personal trip, and get out of the office, even just for a bit. But when you’re a working mom, managing your company’s expectations and your nine-to-five (who are we kidding, your nine-to-seven) alongside your parental responsibilities, a business trip can throw a wrench into your carefully crafted balancing act. Throw the kids’, spouses’, and backup help like friends’ or nannies’ schedules into the mix—plus pumping equipment and schedules and milk shipments, if you’re breastfeeding—and everything becomes infinitely more complicated.

It doesn’t have to be stressful from start to finish, though. We talked to moms who travel often for their work to see what tools and tricks they use to keep themselves functioning, maneuver work trips around their family’s needs, and bring their kids into the business travel fold. Here’s what they had to say.

It all comes down to the prep

The key is to set expectations—at work and at home—early. “Moms are some of the most efficient employees on the planet," says jewelry designer Jenny Bird, mom to a 5 year old and a 5 month old. "So, if you've got a good relationship with your employer, set expectations up front, before you go even go on maternity leave, for what you'll be able to do when you come back so you can control a little bit more.”

Most of the working moms we talked to have cut down what would have been a week-long trip before kids to a day or two of back-to-back meetings. Katherine Ryder, founder and CEO at Maven Clinic and mother to a 1 year old and a 3 year old, has consolidated her trips to two to three days, max. “My time is so much more precious than it ever was before kids and that same kind of philosophy carries over to being at the office as well,” she says.

“I've gotten very good at picking the things that really, really matter to the company, to my role, and to me. And I only do those things,” says Liz Meyerdirk, Uber Eats’s global head of business development and mother of three. “As soon as I know what my work travel is I put out on the family Google calendar. My husband has a pretty demanding job and travels a lot, too. So we have this rule: If it's on the calendar, the other person has to work around it.”

If you have the flexibility, adjusting when you fly can also make a big impact,” Bird says. “If possible, I take a flight that's after my son has gone to school so I can have breakfast with him—or take a flight home that lands whenever possible before he goes to bed so we can spend time together."

When you’re breastfeeding, that means overpacking

“The struggle is real when you’re nursing and traveling,” says Ryder. Lauren Fong, founder and CEO at Cinc branded content studio and mom to a 4 year old and a 14 month old, agrees. On her packing list when she’s nursing and traveling without her infant? A wireless pump, ice packs, freezer bags, a travel-sized baby bottle rack, and dish soap to wash bottles in the hotel room, just to name a few. Also a must in Fong’s book: a hotel room with a freezer.

And if you're flying, be sure to read up on specific airlines' and countries' rules. “The last thing you want is to be going through airport security, bringing back your frozen breast milk stash and then having them say you can't bring what you’ve worked so hard to create with you,” Fong says. Ryder recommends Maven's overnight breastmilk shipping service as another option—even better, of course, if you can expense it, like the employees at Goldman Sachs and Bloomberg.

Embrace Facetime

Nearly every business traveler we talked to had a Facetime plan. For jewelry designer Jenny Bird, it’s motivating her oldest to call her when he misses her most on his iPad. For Rachelle Hruska MacPherson, co-founder and CEO of Lingua Franca and mother to two sons, 5 and 7 years old, it means making work plans around the time they’re video chatting. “When we were in India and we were so far away from them, I really planned our days around a 5 p.m. Facetime because it was the only time I knew they were going to be together at home,” she says. “It allowed me to really be present during the day because I knew we had this plan to talk.”

Involve your children in the travel, even if they can’t come along

Rachel Holt, Uber’s vice president for new mobility, finds books to read about her destinations in order to connect with her daughter. “Now, every time I go to San Francisco, she’s like, ‘did you ride the cable car,’ because it’s something we read about every time I travel there,” Holt says. (She, like most business travelers to San Francisco, has yet to actually ride the cable car.)

One of Bird’s other tricks is to talk about one thing in the city she’s visiting—say, a taxi in New York or the Eiffel Tower in Paris—before she leaves, and then film a little video on her trip when she’s near it.

A little present goes a long way.

We do mean little: “When my son was a little younger, he thought I was flying around the country to get him a lollipop,” says Ryder. It doesn’t even have to be bought on the trip: “Usually when I leave, I cut out hearts from paper and I'll write little notes on them. I leave them everywhere so [my daughter] can find them, be excited, and call me when she does,” says Fong.

The first trip is going to be hard—but work trips can be a blessing

“My first work trip away from my kids, I cried the entire plane ride," says Hruska MacPherson. "You're worried about what you're missing out on.”

But nearly every single mom said that the time they have away from their families—and even from their fellow coworkers, in hotel rooms at night—is more of a vacation than their real ones. “Of course I’m missing my kids," says Meyerdirk. "But you’ve got to focus on the positive. I don't have little kids touching me at all times. I can use the bathroom without a child busting in."

“The plane has become such a sanctuary for me, even though I have flight anxiety," says Hruska MacPherson. "Planes with kids are not relaxing. They’re just not. I never read a book on a plane when I was single—and on a trip last week I thought to myself, 'wow, I just read a whole book on one flight'.”

“Every time I come back, it’s like a reset,” she says. “They've missed me, but they've grown, they’ve become more independent. It’s totally healthy to take that time apart.”