How Parents Can Still Relax on Weekends

This is one of the most exhausting truths of parenting: If you’ve got little kids, weekends are not automatically relaxing.

It doesn’t matter how hard you worked all week (whether that’s paid work or taking care of your kids). On Saturday and Sunday, your toddler will still require constant supervision. No doubt he or she will do many adorable things amid throwing Cheerios on the floor and trying to leap down the stairs. But if you were hoping to lazily roll out of bed and spend hours lounging around with a book, well, that’s going to be hard to pull off.

But not impossible. There is one way that parents of young kids can relax, at least for a while. The key for those in two-parent families is to create a formal schedule of when each parent is fully in charge. Draw up this schedule, and you can enjoy real downtime. Maybe not a full day, but at least a few hours. If you are truly exhausted, this can feel like a life-changing gift.

I learned this scheduling strategy from my friend Molly Beck, founder of the messy.fm podcasting company, and a recent guest on one of my podcasts, Best of Both Worlds. Molly and her husband have two young boys.

They organize their weekends so that each parent is officially “on” for a certain number of hours. So, for instance, Molly might be in charge of the kids from…