Wait Until the Kids Are Bigger to Travel
It's worth the wait.
We recently embarked on a ten-day family road trip with our kids. After days in the car, winding through the Rocky Mountains, eating away-from-home food, sleeping in new places, we were thoroughly exhausted. On the last night of the trip, my weary husband looked at me and said something I’d never heard since we started traveling with little children over a decade ago: “I’m just so sad this vacation is over.”
I couldn’t believe it. We are finally at the phase where traveling with kids is actually fun. Instead of being desperate to go home, we were sorry to see the vacation end. We’d made it.
Like my fellow Pomegranate editor Lauren, I used to be a big advocate for traveling with small children, even though they were too young to remember it.
It didn’t matter to me that toddlers and preschoolers retain so little of their experiences; I felt that the simple fact that they were being exposed to new things was beneficial for their early development.
What an incredible privilege it is to be able to travel with our children, I would repeat to myself over and over again every summer, as traffic jams, flight delays, motion sickness and just plain overstimulation led everyone in our family to tears. Over the years, we took our little kids on road trips, flights, ferries, trains, and stayed in cabins, hotels, B&Bs and with friends. Every year I’d spend hours writing lists, schlepping car seats, strollers, pack n’plays, and all the rest of the baby gear, hoping to make some new memories as a family and help my kids develop into well-rounded individuals. But the truth was none of those trips were worth the effort. Traveling with little kids sucks.