Crush your summer: 3 tips for balancing your career and family fun

Tiffany Sauder:

I am a small town kid, born with a big city spirit. I choose to play a lot of awesome roles in life, mom, wife, entrepreneur, CEO, board member, investor and mentor. 17 years ago, I founded a marketing consultancy. And ever since, my husband JR and I have been building our careers and our family on the exact same timeline. Yep, that means four kids, three businesses, two careers, all building towards one life we love. When I discovered I could purposefully embrace all of these ends in my life, it unlocked my world, and I want that for you too. I'm Tiffany Sauder and this is Scared Confident.

We are in what one of my girlfriends calls Maycember, like somehow May is just as crazy as December, it's just warmer out. I don't know. All of the events, all of the last day of school, all the special little things that everybody has to take, field trips, special lunches. Oh my world, it is crazy. Last day of school. It's been bananas. And so, May is a sign that summer is coming. And an hour or two career home, summer I think is the hardest time to be a working parent, kind of like no matter what age. I used to get really bummed out when summer was coming because I felt left out.

Candidly, there's all this fun stuff going on. Kids are going to the pool and I felt like the nanny or whoever summer help was at our house was getting to experience all these fun things and I was going to an air-conditioned office and doing my normal day. I really would get bummed out at the end of summer that I didn't feel like I got to have a summer. I never put my swimsuit on. I mean, maybe I did like once, but it wasn't part of my summer. And so I want to share some tips that have helped me feel like I can still really experience summer, I can be present for my kids as they're experiencing summer, and hopefully helps you really exit these next 12 weeks of summer feeling like, "Man, that was awesome. We really gave our best to the summer." So I have three tips and then a couple of just hacks that I think are kind of fun.

The first one is the set expectations. I don't know what season of your business that you're in, but I know when I was in the earlier seasons of building the agency, I did not have space for four-day work weeks. I did not have space for July 4th to actually be like a five-day deal. I did not have space for all these family reunions. I did not have space for long Memorial Day weekends. All of these things that are routine to summer, I needed to work. I was building the agency. It required a lot of me. I wanted to do it as fast as I possibly could.

And sometimes there was this tension. I remember specifically going on an extended family reunion kind of trip and I needed to work for a lot of it. I didn't set people's expectations that that's what I needed to do and that's what it was going to look like for me. And so there was this constant tension the entire time. My advice to you is set expectations. If there is, let's say, a big family trip that everybody's going on and you're going to be able to be there anytime there's activities after 5:00 PM or something, or on Saturday, I'll definitely be available and half of Sunday or the other way around, whatever it is, set expectations so that there's not this tension.

I think if I would've gone back and said, "Hey, we're happy to go on this trip," the only way that we can really make it work is if me or my husband and I can be online during work hours and then the evenings we're definitely going to be free to hang out with everybody. It would've changed the dynamic massively because I think you can accidentally ruin it for everybody when you're trying to slip away or trying to sneak in the fact that you have to work. It doesn't serve anybody at all.

And so my tip number one is to set expectations. I'll use our recent spring break as an example. JR had a bunch of travel leading up to it and he's like, "I definitely want to join you in the girls on spring break." He told me very specifically on, "Thursday night and Friday night, I'm going to be available for whatever you want to plan, but other than that, I need you to allow me to be able to be flexible" and responsive to the fact that we were in a different time zone. He was working on a deal. And so there was no tension in that. If I wanted to plan stuff, I totally could and I didn't have to give him the stink eye, "Are you going to come with us? Are you going to stay?" There was no tension. We had totally set expectations.

So if you want to crush your summer and you want it to be really fun, set everybody's expectations at the beginning about, "If we want to make this work, this is the way that we can make it work. Are you open to that?" And if they say no, say then, "Well then the other option is that we just don't go. We'd love to go. This is the way that we can go. This is how much time we can give it. But other than that, we need to be able to stay focused on some of our professional responsibilities." So thing number one, set expectations.

The second is to ask your family, "What is most important to you?" So as a mom, that's the viewpoint that I can speak from, I can try to kill myself doing all the things. So for example, I can try to kill myself being like, "Oh, I want to make sure lunch is made every single day that I'm gone so that that's not hard for the girls to do." I'm going to be sure that they can be wherever they want to even if it's just with a two-hour notice, I'm going to be sure that I can take off on Friday at three o'clock so we can go to the pool. Whatever it is. I oftentimes can overperform in my brain of like, "These are all the things I'm going to do to try to make the summer as perfect as I possibly can for my kids." And I have learned sometimes I'm doing all that stuff and they don't actually care about half of it. And so I have learned to ask them, "What is most important to you?"

As we think about the next three months, we ask our girls two things, "What are your goals for the summer?" And that allows me to know what they want to get out of the summer so that I can help us program our time accordingly. If they want to get faster in swimming, then let's look at camps that are associated with swimming instead of everything not being swimming related. "If you want to learn how to skateboard, super cool. How are we going to make time for that? What does that look like? Where do we go?" I can't be a facilitator of the things that they want to get done if I don't know what they want to do. That allows me to focus their time too. If they look at me and they're like, "Mom, I don't know what to do with my time," I can say, "Oh, let's take a look at your goals. How do we do that?"

I know my older two girls really want to make money this summer. That's really helpful information to me. I have a lot of things that need to be done. And so I can say, "Hey girls, here's a list of jobs. I'll pay you for those. Those are aligned with your objectives to make money this summer. What is most important to you?" So the girls can be a customer of our schedule, my planning, all that kind of stuff.

An example for this, this is not summer example, is I thought the girls really loved it when I was there in the morning to put them on the bus. Come to find out, they don't really care actually. They're like, "No, we pretty much get ourselves on the bus. That's like three minutes of seeing you, mom. We would rather you be home after school. We don't really care if you leave early." Really interesting. Really helpful for me. That's not what I would've guessed. And so asking your kids, "What is most important to you?" is really, really important because then I can align my time.

A summer example would be, "Hey, you need to go to summer camp. Would you rather me drive you to and from summer camp or jump in a carpool? Or would you rather me take time off to go to the pool with you on Friday for half a day? These are the two options. Take you to camp, which I'd love to do. Or take you to the pool, which I'd love to do, but help us make the decision so that I'm taking the right time off of work because I can't do both of them." Total example of letting your kids inform the way that you spend your time and the way that you serve them and the way that you show up for them.

Another thing I might ask the girls is to say, "Hey, if you guys can pick up more slack around the house, like unloading the dishwasher in the morning, making your beds in the morning, blowing off the back patio every single day, that gives me capacity so that we can be done with dinner faster and go to the park or go grab ice cream or have a chance to be spontaneous. What is most important to you?" That question has really changed my dynamic with my kids and I think helped us be a lot more aligned in the way that time is being spent, et cetera. So with my older girls, I use the question of, "What are your goals?" to help me know what their priorities are and then I ask them things like, "Hey, we've got a trade off to make here. Let's make it together." If I can do both of them, I want their preference to inform what I'm deciding to do.

The last one is we are also a customer of summer. We as people, as parents, as working people who are trying to do all the things, we need to also be a customer of summer. And so now mid-May, right now, decide what you want from your summer. For me, I want to be able to go to our community pool at least four times in the summer. It's not that nice. It's not actually that fun. I don't even know if I like it. But I love the idea of schlepping all my stuff there, being with the kids, being in my swimsuit, feeling the warm vacationy feel of the sunshine on my skin, getting a bad hotdog at the concession stand, that whole thing, seeing people from the community, I like that. It makes me feel like this is me doing summer. It's something outside of my normal routine and it makes me feel the air, the environment, the season in a little different way. That is a non-routine thing for me to do. So I want to do that at least four times.

So right now I am looking at my summer schedule, deciding when am I going to block, when I'm going to leave the office by noon or maybe 11:30, get everybody fed lunch and then go to the pool for the afternoon and then do something fun, spontaneous in the evening. Get pizza at the park or have our whole dinner over a fire in the backyard or do something that's just outside of our routine. But I also want to feel like I'm doing summer. In a season of running lots of kids, of my middle schoolers want to have friends over all the time, don't forget that you are also a customer of this season of summer.

The other thing around scheduling, if your family is like ours, you also have to schedule nothing, which is to say you put a block of time on your calendar on an evening or a weekend that says what we have intentionally planned is nothing. Because if it's free, something will fill that time. Somebody else's priorities for your family will fill that time. And so determining, "What are the times of the summer where we are going to literally do nothing? We are going to be together. We are not going to go to friend's houses. We are not going to have a party," which is me talking to me. "We are not going to be at a volleyball tournament. We are not going to be at a swim meet. We are going to be together as a family in our home."

And our nothing weekends, our nothing evenings, our nothing days are important anchoring experiences for us as a family because we go in a million different directions and if we are not intentional about being together, we will not be together. And that's not what I want for my family. That's not what I want for our memory. So scheduling nothing is sometimes part of making sure that you are doing summer well.

I'll do a quick recap. The first one is set expectations for your family and the people around you about what you can and cannot reach in the summer. The second one is asking your kids what is most important to you so that their priorities are informing your decisions. And the third one is making sure that you've scheduled time for you to do summer, which may include some time off, a trip to the pool, scheduling nothing so that your family can be together. Those are my tips to helping get the absolute most out of this beautiful but very short season of summertime.

So a couple hacks that I have on summer stuff that may or may not be helpful. Pool toys. Whenever I spend money on pool toys, I get annoyed because we take it to the pool one time and then it somehow gets absorbed into the atmosphere. I don't know where pool toys go, but there's clearly a place somewhere like in the ocean or in heaven or something about with every pool toy I've ever purchased. So I have started going to Goodwill and buying our "pool toys" in quotation marks there. Like baby dolls that are 100% plastic, amazing pool toys. You can almost always find a Baby Alive. Buckets, little blocks. Go to Goodwill and buy your pool toys there because they will 100% not be yours at the end of the trip to the pool and you will not be annoyed when another kid takes them or whatever. So I highly recommend go to Goodwill, look in the toy section and find things that could be fun at the pool that you end up just not so accidentally leaving behind.

Second summer idea, these are for smaller kids, is get a paint roller in a bucket of water and let your kids paint the driveway, paint the sidewalk, paint the side of your house, in quotation marks, "paint." They're painting with water. It makes the surface darker. They think that they're doing something so amazing and it keeps them busy forever. Literally forever, keeps them busy. And it's so easy. You can take a bucket to the park, to a friend's house. I put it on my driveway. It's like such a hack. So easy, so inexpensive, and takes lots and lots of time, which is always a challenge to keep our kids busy in the summertime.

The third idea I have, I just saw this on Instagram, I haven't actually tried it but I think it's amazing, is whenever you're going to the pool or to the beach, is to take a palette of watercolors, like watercolor paint because obviously you're going to be by water, and have seashells. I even thought about using styrofoam, something like that or paper and letting them actually paint. If you're by the pool, sometimes they get tired of being in the water and you have them underneath the umbrella. Don't give them an iPad. Let's keep them engaged creatively. How can we do that? I love this idea of getting a watercolor palette and having paper or shells or something like that for them to paint on. It still allows them to engage in water without them having to be in the water. I thought that was such a really cool hack and something you can do with them. Bring lots of paintbrushes because every kid on your side of the pool is going to want to join you.

So I hope this inspires you to be intentional about having a summer that you enjoyed, that you are proud of, that brought you closer as a family in your relationships. There are lots of things competing for our attention, but let's not forget that our first goal is to make sure the home team is having shared experiences and really enjoying this amazing gift called life. Thanks for listening.

Thank you for joining me on another episode of Scared Confident. Until next time, keep telling fear, "You will not decide what happens in my life. I will." If you want to get the inside scoop, sign up for my newsletter. We decided to make content for you instead of social media algorithms. The link is waiting for you in show notes. Or you can head over to tiffanysauder.com. Thanks for listening.

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