Last Updated on August 18, 2026 by Bethany Wilinski
I recently spoke with an academic who is in the middle of her sabbatical, and she described a scenario that might sound familiar: her young child is at home most of the day being cared for by her spouse while she’s working from home. Most days, she feels torn between work and spending time with her daughter. She’s having a hard time figuring out the boundaries between work, play, and family. She’d also like to go to a yoga class occasionally, but it feels hard when her kiddo is right there, wanting to spend time with her.
Caregiving and work can collide in new ways during a sabbatical. In a normal semester, you may leave a child at home with a spouse, nanny, or grandparent and go to your office to work. But what happens when home is your office and going to work means moving to a different room (and you can still hear everything your child is doing in the next room). Your kids may be home more during your sabbatical because you cut back on childcare (daycare, after school care) to spend more time with them or to save money if your pay is reduced during sabbatical. Perhaps you have other caregiving responsibilities (a sibling, spouse, or aging parent, for example) that are pulling on you.
Does sabbatical really create more time for caregiving?
Before sabbatical starts, the equation seems simple: Subtracting teaching and service from your workload equals more time for caregiving. If you have a commute and plan to work from home during sabbatical, you give yourself that time back too. You might imagine being there to get your elementary school-aged kids off the bus in the afternoon or being home to put your toddler down for a midday nap.
Perhaps this works for some academics on sabbatical. I remember a time when it worked for me: When I had my second child, I able to take 6 months completely off (she was born in April, so I took 6 weeks of my official leave at the end of the spring semester and the remaining 6 weeks at the beginning of the fall, with summer as a bridge). I didn’t work and I was able to feel very relaxed about unpredictable sleep schedules, massive loads of laundry, and all the doctor’s appointments a newborn requires. This was one of the few times in my career post-kids that I didn’t feel pulled in multiple directions. I could truly enjoy being home with my daughter (though my son, who was 4, was still in daycare full-time).
A sabbatical is different from parental leave, though (and I know that parental leave without any work is not necessarily the norm, even though it should be). Most institutions expect at least some work will be done during sabbatical, which means your time isn’t entirely your own. Even if you’re planning to do a minimal amount of work, you may also have personal goals for your sabbatical (and I sincerely hope you do!). You may be going into sabbatical feeling burned out and need to rest and recover during sabbatical. Or, like many of my clients, you may want to use your sabbatical to focus on improving your physical and/or mental health. The time required to achieve personal and professional goals during sabbatical can be greater than you anticipate, and if your caregiving responsibilities are amplified, you may feel pulled in multiple directions during your sabbatical.
If this resonates, you’re not alone, and I can assure you that this is a very common challenge. The feeling of being torn doesn’t mean all is lost when it comes to your sabbatical. It’s a sign that you may need to think differently about your time and boundaries.
The Challenge of Caregiving During Sabbatical
Here are two scenarios that show why the sabbatical equation (Regular work minus teaching and service = lots more time for caregiving) often breaks down:
Scenario 1: You’re working from home, and your young child is also home for most or all of the day. Even though there’s someone else in charge/responsible, you can hear it all: the laughter, the meltdowns, the joyful babbling. It can be hard to focus on writing a grant or analyzing data when you feel like you want or need to be with your child. It may even lead you to question how you should spend your time during sabbatical. You may be wondering, “Does this grant really matter? Should I just go play with my child?” If you’re anything like me, there’s probably some guilt layered in too (“Am I a bad mom for paying someone to care for my child when I’m technically ‘off’?).
Scenario 2: You cut back on childcare during your sabbatical. It wasn’t really a financial decision; you did it because that’s what “good” parents do—they spend more time with their kids when they’re not working. This means you have 6 hours per day (minus no school days, days the kids are home sick, and days you’re running around to all the appointments) to accomplish ALL your sabbatical goals. You feel like you’re working constantly during those hours, still not getting it all done, and not feeling the sense of relaxation and rejuvenation that you had hoped for.
The challenge with these scenarios (and trust me, there are many other iterations and examples of how sabbatical and care-giving collide!) is that traditional productivity advice—”just set boundaries” or “communicate your schedule”—misses the mark. An academic sabbatical is a unique time because it frees you up from regular work routines and allows an opportunity to rest and reset, but a sabbatical is also not the same as a vacation. You’re not completely “off,” even though non-academics in your world may perceive that you are. This creates a tension—you may genuinely want to or feel like you should spend more time in your caregiving role, but the more time you spend care-giving, the less time you have for work, personal pursuits, and rest.
This can lead to a lot of self-doubt, guilt, and feeling like you’re not making the most of your sabbatical and also not being the caregiver you envision yourself to be. You may feel like you’re being selfish if you want to work and you don’t want to do more care-giving during your sabbatical. None of these options feel good, and if you’re feeling one of these now (or anticipate this being a challenge during your sabbatical), I’d like to suggest a few strategies that might help.
First, though, in case no one else has told you this lately (or at all): Your sabbatical is a HUGE accomplishment. You EARNED this time, and you deserve to spend it in a way that meets your needs. You may choose to spend most of your sabbatical time caregiving, and that’s great. But it’s equally valid to spend your sabbatical on a professional goal or just taking care of yourself. The tricky thing about your sabbatical is that it’s for YOU, but it also affects your people—whoever is in your ecosystem. This makes planning a sabbatical difficult; you’re focused on your needs and desires while also accounting for how changes to your work routines affect others in your ecosystem.
What to do if you’re feeling torn between work and caregiving on sabbatical
If you’re on sabbatical and feeling torn between work/personal goals and caregiving responsibilities, or if you’re planning a sabbatical and anticipating this tension, here are some strategies that might help.
Create a set weekly or daily routine: If you’re feeling torn between caregiving and work, it will probably help to have clear boundaries between work and caregiving. For example:
Set a start and end time for your day and communicating this to the primary caregiver (and child, depending on their age). Not every day has to be the same, but you should have a pretty clear idea of which days you’re working and when you start/end your day. And remember, your work hours don’t need to be used only for work! Go to the yoga class, take a nap, read a book. Your sabbatical is for YOU.
If you work from home and your kids are around, clear a physical sign that you’re at work (closed door, sign on the door) and be sure the kids know who to go to during that time if they need something.
Create a short ritual to start and end your work time, which can signal to your brain and body that you’re in work mode or home mode. This can be as simple as making a cup of coffee to start the day or listening to a particular song to start your work time. To signify the end of your work day, you could spend a few minutes creating a to-do list for the next day, change clothes, or step outside for a few minutes.
The key here is to make your work time finite and defined, which makes it easier to be fully present during family time.
Talk to your partner about your sabbatical: At the beginning of my sabbatical, I was operating under the assumption that because I was on sabbatical, I would take on more caregiving responsibilities than usual. I assumed I’d do most of the school drop offs and pick ups, be the one to stay home with the kids when they were sick or on no school days and handle all the kids’ doctor and dentist appointments. I assumed this without asking my husband, and it turns out he wasn’t thinking that we’d change the division of responsibility at all during my sabbatical.
I’m not sure why I assumed I’d take back work that I don’t do during a normal semester (well, I have an idea, but I’m not going to write about it in this post!), but I’m glad I ended up having a conversation with my husband and realizing that he didn’t expect me to do more caregiving just because of my sabbatical.
If you’re assuming more care-giving will fall to you just because you’re on sabbatical, I encourage you (as I have encouraged many clients) to have a conversation with your partner, spouse, or co-parent about it—you might be surprised what you find out!
Part of this conversation may need to be discussing how you’re thinking about what your sabbatical is for, and for this, you’ll need to first be pretty clear with yourself about the purpose of your sabbatical. You may need to explain to your partner or other close family members that your sabbatical is not a vacation (unless it is for you, which is amazing!) and help them understand what you’re prioritizing during this time. You’ll probably also have to set some boundaries, which can be hard, but is 100% worth doing.
Ask yourself what you really want from your sabbatical: If you’re feeling caught between family and work during sabbatical, there’s also a possibility that the boundary you need to set is around work. If you, like the academic mom I spoke to a few days ago, would really rather go play outside with your kid than work on a manuscript, it’s fair to ask yourself what’s holding you back. Here are a few questions you could ask yourself:
What have I already accomplished during my sabbatical? What else do I need to accomplish for my sabbatical to feel like a success?
Make a list of what you’ve already done or start to write your sabbatical report. Evaluate what, if anything, you really must do before the end of your sabbatical. If you’ve done everything you wanted to do and you really want to spend the rest of your sabbatical hanging out with your kids, why not do that?
What do I want to do for the rest of my sabbatical?
There’s a tendency to head into sabbatical on autopilot. You might plan to do the next logical thing for your career, without stopping to think about what you really need from the sabbatical. Your sabbatical goals may be misaligned with your actual needs. If you need to recover from burnout but you planned to submit 3 articles, your goals are not in alignment with your needs. If you want to spend more time with your toddler because you had an abbreviated maternity leave, but you’re working from 9am-5pm without even a lunch break, then your time is not aligned with your priorities.
If what you really want to do is spend more time with your kids, your aging parents, or your extended family who live far away because academia requires we uproot our lives and move to places we’d never pick for ourselves, what’s stopping you? What would it look like to radically reorganize your time around those priorities? This might not mean that you don’t work at all, but perhaps you shift the balance and schedule more days off each week, limit your work time, and/or focus to only the minimum viable product for your sabbatical.
Concluding thoughts
As you work through these strategies, there are two things that are worth keeping in mind: First, your current sabbatical is just one sabbatical. Hopefully you’ll have more! You are in a particular season of life, which has its own affordances and limitations. One way to take the pressure off your sabbatical is to remind yourself that you only get this exact sabbatical once. So, if your child is 4 and this is your only sabbatical without a kid in school full time, then maybe you embrace an early end to the work day so you can play at the park. Or if your kids are in school and you’ve always wanted to volunteer in their schools more, then absolutely do that!
Second, everyone has their own unique goals and desires for their sabbatical. Your sabbatical doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. You might have read the paragraph above thinking, “But I don’t really want to hang out with my kids all the time during my sabbatical!” Not spending extra time caregiving or parenting is also a completely valid choice for sabbatical. My point is that it’s a decision you need to make, so that you don’t go through your whole sabbatical feeling guilty about what you are or are not doing.
One of the best pieces of advice I got from a friend just as my sabbatical was starting was a reminder that I didn’t have to do more parenting or become super mom just because I was on sabbatical. That was a helpful reminder because I am inclined to feel mom guilt and talk myself into things that typically end up backfiring, like not signing the kids up for spring break camp even though I have to work because I want to be a mom whose kids don’t always have to go to spring break camp.
Personally, I didn’t end up doing more caregiving than usual during my sabbatical, although we did make a lot of great memories traveling together. The kids still went to after school care, because I didn’t want to have to rush to pick them up at 3pm every day. I didn’t feel guilty using the time my kids were in school for things I wanted to do, whether or not that was work. You may feel differently. You may be looking for ways to spend more time with your kids during your sabbatical but feel guilty for not working enough.
Whatever you need from your sabbatical, I’m here cheering you on and encouraging you to put the boundaries and systems in place so that you can make it happen.