Hey there, fellow travelers! Today, we’re talking about traveling with the kids. We obviously travel a ton with our two boys, and we love seeing our favorite places through their eyes. As you know, here at Wolters World, we like to prepare travelers with the good, and the bad, about different aspects of travel. So these are the five things you’ll love, and the five things you’ll hate about travel with kids.
Love #1: Seeing Everything Through Their Eyes
You never forget the first time you saw the Eiffel Tower or the Acropolis. When you travel with your kids, you get to see everything again for the first time, through their eyes. It’s one of the most magical experiences you can have as a parent or a traveler. It also brings back those memories you had the first time you saw those places.
Hate #1: No Romantic Moments
When you’re traveling with toddlers especially, you miss out on what are typically romantic moments of travel. You don’t get to linger and spend one-on-one time with your partner, and dancing until dawn is out of the question. (Unless you bring the grandparents along to watch the kids!). Mark & I always try to find some way to have some romance when we travel with the kids. It may be having a bottle of wine together in the hotel, letting the kids play in the park while we sit at a café and chat over a couple glasses of wine. There are ways to have a bit of romance, but it is not the same.
Love #2: Creating a Family Bond
The memories and bonds that you create by traveling as a family are indescribable. You will have incredible, once-in-a-lifetime experiences, which makes you a really tight-knit family. We have so many travel memories to look back on and reminisce over when we’re not traveling. It helps make dinner conversation years later more fun as you reminisce over your previous family travel adventures!
Hate #2: Small Worries Become Big Problems
The small worries you have at home are magnified when you are traveling. Instead of having your local doctor on speed-dial, you probably have no idea where the nearest hospital is, and whether they even speak English. One of our sons tripped on a cobblestone street and we ended up in the emergency room while abroad. After a few stiches and throwing out three blood soaked shirts everything turned out ok, but it just adds a bit of stress to have issues come up in a foreign country. Oh, and then there was the time in China when Liam smashed his hand in a metal door and we ended up in three hospitals and ended up joining a hospital program on the spot to get him into a doctor that didn’t want to put him under to take an X-ray.
Love #3: A Different Kind of Education
Traveling with your kids helps bring history and culture alive, and gives them a whole new perspective on learning. Our son was so excited when they learned about Van Gogh in school because he’d already seen his work in Amsterdam. It really helps pull together parts of their education that could otherwise be kind of boring. And when they kids are back home in class they really do add a lot to the classroom. Everyone of the boys teachers over the years have made it a point to mention how they both bring their experiences abroad into the classroom to help explain topics. Though Liam has a way of pointing out that the teacher may be saying a city name wrong or not knowing the right food that goes with the right town, but we are teaching him how to be a bit more couth with his teachers.
Hate #3: Using Public Toilets
This can really happen anywhere and anytime, but when you are traveling, you are forced to use more public toilets. Whether it’s finding a place to change diapers, or just helping your kids go potty in a tiny stall, it is definitely one of my pet peeves when traveling with toddlers or infants. I carry a lot of seat covers and anti-bacterial wipes, and we always make sure that everyone goes before we head out sightseeing for the day, even if they say they already went we point them back to the toilet.
Love #4: The Grandmothers
When you are traveling with kids, the grandmothers of the world will come out of the woodwork. Especially in Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, we’ve had so many grandmas help us with our kids and play surrogate grandma while we’re traveling. When your kids spill something, there’s a grandma there cleaning up after them and giving them cookies and candy. Even if you don’t speak each other’s language, grandma’s are universal. And what is wonderful the kids get to see an insight into the local cultures that way too.
Hate #4: Getting Around with a Stroller
If you have a smaller child who still uses a stroller, getting around in a different country can be challenging. Europe is notoriously not adapted to mobility challenges. Many hotels still don’t have elevators, and even the cobblestone streets and sidewalks pose a challenge for strollers. We usually just grabed a cheap $20 umbrella stroller when the kids were younger as they were thin and worked on cobble stones and small sidewalks. The big ones got to be quite tough to get around when we had to carry it up multiple flights of stairs.
Love #5: Travel Possibilities
By traveling with our kids, they are assimilating into our life. We don’t have to cater to kids and spend every vacation at Disney World. They are used to traveling off the beaten path, riding chicken buses through South America, and experience some level of discomfort while traveling. This opens up so many possibilities for traveling as a family, and we rarely have to worry about whether our kids will enjoy a destination or not. They have learned to have fun no matter where we are. It won’t be long before we travel with teens, which will even further open up the travel possibilities for our family!
Hate #5: People Hate You
From the minute you board your first flight, people are waiting for your kid to throw a tantrum or be loud and nobody wants to sit by you. Restaurants are the same; we used to get a lot of looks and eye-rolls when eating out with two young kids. Some countries are more kid-friendly than others, but the more you travel with kids, the more adaptable they become. Our boys are better behaved than some of the adults we’ve seen lately on planes. It is not always fun dealing with people like that, but with all the traveling you do with your kids you are making them wonderful ambassadors to the world.
Five Ways to Deal with Screaming Children on a Plane
We are strong advocates for traveling with kids as early and as often as possible, and the “hates” are just little things to have a heads up on, rather than a reason not to travel with kids! Want more family travel tips? Check out these blog posts: