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I've got a spouse and three kids, and I think all four of them are awesome. Working from home can either help or hurt this balance. Traveling absolutely makes it worse.
I like to be around during "the crossroads". When my kids leave to school, get home from school, go to piano/karate/soccer/dance whatever. I'll regularly take my kids to their activities like piano, and then kick back in the back of our minivan with my laptop and get work done while they're busy w/ the activity. When they're done, its fresh on their mind and we can chat about it as we drive home. The thing with kids is they don't put effort into remembering anything when you ask "how was piano?" or "how was school?", but if you ask when its fresh, during "the crossroads", you actually get to have a conversation. So I do whatever I can to be around for that.
Also, think about how much unproductive time most of us spend around co-workers during the day (lunch, wandering the company kitchen looking for cookies, smash bros). I get to spend that time w/ my family. Just this morning I helped my son get to the shrine in the northern Labyrinth in Zelda BotW.
Traveling is the really crappy part of this though. We do all of our workshops at the end of the week, Thu-Fri or Wed-Fri. That way we can coordinate less and bank on dad being around Sat, Sun, Mon, Tues, and sometimes Wed.
My wife is also awesome and gets babysitters most weekends, so we get to keep being friends even when life gets busy.
Finally, we take a lot of vacation to make up for all the travel. Michael and I take off the entire month of July! We're lucky to have really flexible jobs so we can be to all the things our kids do, like school presentations, birthdays, etc.
The hardest thing though is when you've got code in your head and it needs to get out. I go into this terrible mode where I can't pay attention to anything around me no matter how hard I try. My family is pretty good at letting me do my thing and working 24/7 until its done, as long as I take enough time off afterward to help get the house back in order!