With the rising demand for nurses as a whole, travel nursing is becoming an increasingly popular profession. It offers flexibility to essentially live and work wherever you want. While it is automatically assumed such a travel-heavy lifestyle wouldn’t be great for the family system, it can actually be beneficial to be a traveling nurse with a family.
It might be difficult to become a travel nurse if you have a family or are thinking of starting one, but here are some tips that can help you make your dream job become your real life.
5 Tips for Travel Nurses with Families
1. Become a packing professional
While nursing is your profession, your side job should be becoming the master of packing. Especially if you have young children with car seats, baggage for kids can really stack up. You might want to consider purchasing a cargo carrier for above your car. Overall, it’s easier to be a travel nurse with children if you can avoid purchasing or renting a trailer because of extra costs such as gas and parking.
2. Plan your days off
If you’re a travel nurse with kids, your days off are obviously important. Don’t make one of your non-working days the time to run errands and do laundry. Instead, use some of your days off as a time to explore a museum or site see in the city you’re in. It offers you some quality family time and it’s an educational opportunity for your kids.
While it is important to take advantage of being in a different place by exploring the city, make sure you have the days where you simply watch movies and relax. You also deserve a break!
3. Give everyone their own space
If you’re in a small apartment with you, your spouse and two children, for example, space is obviously going to be limited. It is important though for everyone to feel like they have their own space, as small as it may be. Giving children a sense of individuality and independence is important for childhood development.
4. Be a teammate
Whether it’s you and your children, or your partner and your children, working as a cohesive team is crucial to happiness if you want to be a travel nurse with your family. When you’re on an assignment, know that your spouse or partner is taking care of the kids and possibly educating them as well, so when you’re finished with work and want to lay down and put your feet up, offering a helping hand and working as a team will be beneficial for everyone.
5. Have a great recruiter
If you’re a travel nurse (with or without a family, but especially with), you should be able to depend on your recruiter for a lot of things. For example, they should be reachable whenever you need something and he/she should be able to provide you with resources for housing and whatever else you need.
Benefits of working as a travel nurse with your family
Although it can present challenges and might not be a good fit for every family, there are benefits to travel nursing with family. Some of them include:
- Seeing new sites – You get the opportunity to see different parts of the country that some people won’t ever see in their lifetime.
- Learning through experience – Your children have the chance to actually see the Grand Canyon while they’re learning about geography, or take pictures at Mount Rushmore while you’re driving across the U.S.
- Adapting to new situations – Many parents are worried when their kids go off to college, but you will have far less worries because you know your children have had to adapt to new situations and living spaces quickly because their mom or dad was a travel nurse.
- Creating priceless memories – The memories you make will be cherished by you and your family for a lifetime. What may seem like a horrible experience at the time (i.e. a flat tire in the middle of a hail storm in the middle of nowhere) will turn into a story that you will laugh at for years to come.
If you own a nurse staffing agency and work with travel nurses, make sure you can keep up with the demand. In order to meet payroll, invoice factoring can give you the cash flow you need to continue growing your agency whenever there an opportunity presents itself.
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