Parenting at a Distance

When life pulls you away from your kids — cling even harder. Tips for parenting from afar.

Long Distance Parenting. It’s been around for a very long time, but today, with global separation and isolation it is perhaps more of an issue to more people than ever before.

If you live in one place and your children live in another, you’re a long distance parent.

For eight years, I worked for a large global mining company, based out of their head office in Perth, Western Australia. A major part of my work involved visiting several mine and port sites around WA, and working with employees at all levels of the organisation, from trainees to general managers, from engineers to electricians and everyone in between.

There was so many conversations, during breaks, during interminable bus rides through the outback, at airports while waiting for yet another delayed flight to arrive and take us home. Many of the workers I met, both men and women, though predominantly men, belonged to a family. They had a partner and children back home and they were away from them, sometimes for weeks at a time. When they returned to the family home, these workers sometimes struggled to find their place in the family habits and schedule. They often felt disconnected or as if they were in the way. They struggled to relate to their children and their partner often treated them more as a nuisance than otherwise.

One story in particular always comes to my mind. We were waiting hours and hours for a plane that had been delayed, first due to the flight crew reaching their work-hours limits (this happened a lot in that regional part of the world. A plane would be grounded until a fresh flight crew could be flown in on another plane. Then the first plane could finally take off and go and collect us poor little mites waiting hundreds of miles from the nearest sign of civilization), and then thanks to one of the spectacular storms in that region.

I got to talking with a man who worked in a different mining company. We shared stories about our families. This man had a wife who was a district nurse, working in remote communities down south. He himself worked a 3 week on, 1 week off shift up north. And they had a son, aged fourteen, who attended boarding school in Perth.

Between the three schedules, the family did not meet all in the same place at the same time more than once a year, and even then only for a few days at a time.

This really spoke to me. Was this the future for modern families? I couldn’t believe so. It was an extreme example of a common phenomenon in certain industries, that was all.

• Think of the truck drivers who drive for days and nights, racking up the dollars and losing out on family time.
• Think of the military personnel who are deployed all over the world, sometimes with no end date.
• Think of the executive who is offered a once in a lifetime post overseas for six months, but who isn’t willing to uproot the kids from their schools. They head off on their own, leaving their family behind.
• Think of the oil rig workers, fishermen, cruise ship staff.
• Think of all the parents in our prisons.
• Then there are people who have separated from their partners, and don’t have full time custody of their kids.

The man I spoke to made me wonder: how could a family like his really call themselves a family? Simply being related by blood is not enough, in my opinion. A family is built on shared experiences, a shared story, if you like. This family had very few opportunities to tell that story as a whole, and just as few chances to retell and reminisce. I feared that the three individuals would find themselves in a few years’ time with little in common and little reason to remain together.

As a child, I lived through long distance parenting

My own father and mother were separated from me and my older brother during our early secondary school years. I did not see my father for two years apart from a few weeks each year and I missed him terribly. I wrote letters to him regularly and he wrote back, but back in the eighties there really were no other options. Even phone calls were prohibitively expensive. The first Christmas, while we were apart from both our parents, we spoke to them on the phone as a special occasion and I for one did not stop crying for the rest of the evening. There certainly were no Skype calls, no emails and no online messaging which could help us maintain that close connection.

When my parents did return to Australia and the family was reunited, it took several years to regain something of the former closeness between me and my parents. Of course, the life of a teenager is fraught no matter how wonderful their circumstances, but I know that the distance had a big effect on my teenage years.

Around 48% of all working adults in Australia have children. The proportion is similar in many other countries. Not every worker in a remote location is single and unattached. These people have families and many of them are desperate to build and maintain good family connections with the ones they are forced to leave behind.

I wrote a book about Parenting at a Distance, which you can take a look at if you like. In the meantime, I’d like to share some of the main ideas and advice from the book here, to help you right now, today.

5 Tips for Parenting at a Distance — To Build Strong, Close, Lasting Relationships with Your Kids

1. Start a Family Website

Family members can post updates, images, stories about their experiences, and other family members can comment. There are heaps of free platforms and YouTube instruction videos — it’s surprisingly easy.

2. Use Skype or Zoom…

…To have daily conversations about every day events. Family dinner time has been shown to have incredible benefits for kids. If you can’t be there at dinner, be there at another time, every single day.

3. Hook into Social Media

This is essential for every parent, in order to monitor, educate and keep your child safe online, but for a long distance parent it gives you a look into your child’s social life, which will help you to understand their feelings and priorities.

4. Engage with Your Child’s Schooling

While you are at home, meet and talk with your child’s teachers, find out what they will be learning and stay in contact via email and phone. You can help your child by researching relevant information online for them (think interesting videos or fact sheets about topics your child is studying, for a start) and by staying in contact with their teachers, you will be prepared for any problems that might arise.

5. Foster Creativity

…By organizing an art or photo competition among your family, or a short story or poetry competition. Submissions can go up on the family website as a shared activity.

I’d love to know if you have found ways to connect with your kids at a distance — sharing tips is a great service to others! Investing the time in your children now, even if you’re tired, busy, and far away, will reap endless rewards later in life, both for you and your child. So, don’t waste these precious months and years. You’ll never get them back and they’re gone, like that.